Jenna Chamberland never wanted anything more than to be a wife
and mother. That is, until she realized that her life was ending after a
three-year battle against breast cancer. Now, all she really wants is more
time.
With 4,320 hours left to live, Jenna worries for her loved ones
and what she knows awaits them on the other side: Gabe will have to make the
slip from husband to widower, left alone to raise their seven-year-old
daughter; Mia will be forced to cope with life without her mother by her side.
In a moment of reflection, Jenna decides to record a set of audiocassettes —
The Milestone Tapes – leaving her voice behind as a legacy for her daughter.
Nine years later, Mia is a precocious sixteen-year-old and her
life is changing all around, all she wants is her mother. Through the tapes,
Jenna’s voice returns to teach Mia the magic of life, her words showing her
daughter how to spread her wings and embrace the coming challenges with humor,
grace and hope.
THE MILESTONE TAPES is the journey of love between a parent and
child, and of the bonds that hold them when life no longer can.
Heal Yourself
With Your Words
“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the
realization that he can come upon the right word” - Catherine Drinker Bowen
The truth: Life
is not without pain. And in that pain,
we learn lessons. Some are about strength,
others about weakness. But, we learn ...
we grow ... and we change.
When I was
thirteen, in the late fall of nineteen-ninety-seven, my mother sat me down at
the kitchen table to level a blow that would change for my whole world, define
my coming years, alter the way I thought about things like life and the
stability of home. Her words would
essentially dash the bubble of innocence I’d, until that point, survived in.
She -- my
loving, funny, overly involved, endlessly supportive mother, had cancer. Breast cancer, infiltrating ductal
carcinoma. Her chances of survival, less
that sixty precent -- she was stage three.
The lump, was the size of a baseball, nestled in the pocket of her left
breast, hovering over her heart. She
would begin treatment at the start of the year.
Twelve rounds of chemotherapy, thirty-three radiation treatments --
laser focused on pin-prick tattoos, chemically induced anorexia, all to save
her life. And then, a radical mastectomy
which would not only steal her breast, but her lymph nodes leaving her with
lymphedema for the rest of her life -- that is would wait for her on the other
side of this disease.
I was a child
when I sat down with her at the table that night ... and when I stood up and
walked away, I was suddenly an adult. Thrust into a grown-up world where I
would be told to face the mortality of my mother. To understand that life is no more than a
temporary gift and that what is given can also be taken away.
The following
year was one of collecting and gathering for my mother and me. We spent hours discussing the nuances of
relationships -- the one I’d have with myself and the sort I’d share with other
people. She told me stories of her
childhood; the wild, reckless things she’d done, the men she dated, the way she
felt about marriage and how much she loved my father, her hopes and her dreams
for her daughters.
The irony ...
there was good in that period of sadness.
I was able to the understand who my mother was as a human being and not
just love the woman who raised me ...but even with that, there was an ebbing
undercurrent of pain.
I watched my
sister, eight years old and scared to death, go through the motions of a new
life that she couldn’t understand. In
our new reality was a place where nothing made sense to her, where things like
‘cancer’ and “chemo’ became everyday considerations, where coughs were met with
watchful eyes, where good days were few and greatly out numbered by the
bad. And when I look back on it now,
whatever I felt -- be it all the anger
or frustration or fear -- it was never for me, or even my mom, it was for my
sister.
Who would she
grow up to be? What memories would she
have? How would she move on not knowing
what she could have known, had things been different. At thirteen, those kept me up at night.
Pain like that,
when it’s pain bred from fear, you don’t outgrow. You don’t wake up one day with clarity, you
never find a way to make sense of the senseless. You learn to live with it because what else
can you do.
Well, as I’ve
learned, you can write. Get it down on
paper, give up the dark to the light, give your worries away with words and
punctuation.
In the spring
of two-thousand-and-eleven I sat down to write the story that would become THE
MILESTONE TAPES. I called upon my thirteenth year, and I wrote every fear I had
into the lives of my characters. I wrote
from a place that had haunted me for fifteen years until suddenly, I wasn’t
haunted any longer. And that peace, it came from knowing how the story ended. I’d always feared we’d broken people, defined
by loss and cheated out of happiness.
But with each line of my story, I came to understand, what could have
been wasn’t the dark, hopeless place I’d feared. There was, in face of loss, a place hope and
healing.
Each word that
flowed from the tips of my fingers answered unasked questions. With each new chapter I moved a little bit
further on. Until, after
one-hundred-thousand-words, I was whole and my novel was finished.
Telling the
story of the Chamberland’s through my own personal journey, blurring the lines
of real and fiction under the guise of being literary, was the greatest gift I
could have ever given myself.
In the summer
of nineteen-ninety-eight, my mother went into remission. Her hair grew back in
curls -- twisted strands of red and grey.
She looked different and we were all different for having made it
through. And this story, it’s ours. But, we’re not alone.
Writing it
down, letting your thoughts move the cursor, can be the greatest sort of
therapy. You can give yourself
unfettered permission to acknowledge your fears and address the pain, and in
time you’ll notice, as you give the words away to the paper, you’re giving your
hurt away as well.
About the author:
Ashley
Mackler-Paternostro lives on the outskirts of Chicago with her husband and
their three dogs. The Milestone Tapes is
Ashley’s first novel.
3 comments:
Brave and sad and well worth reading.
Thank you Carole for your kind words.
I enjoyed this book.
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