Worst Day Leads to “Best Week”

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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Worst Day Leads

To “Best Week”

What was the best week of your life to date?

It is an impossible question, really, with your answer likely depending on the phase of the moon and your current frame of mind. Was it your wedding day and honeymoon? Maybe summer camp as a child? Or the miraculous first week as a parent?

Traveling to Ireland and sensing the ethereal presence of my great-great-great-grandfather who sailed from those shores, alone at age 14, to America is another contender for me.

Ideally, we do not have a single best week but many. Hence, this is my new best week because my daughter’s debut novel, “The Best Week That Never Happened” from Month9Books, has just been released. It is a childhood dream come true for her, which makes it my dream come true as well.

As you might imagine, a thousand images have flashed across my imagination this week. One memory is of a 6-year-old girl sitting at the kitchen table and typing on my Radio Shack portable word processor. Using one finger, and slowly searching out each key, she wrote her stories.

In second grade, she had a poem – “Peanut Butter Surprise” about a PB&J sandwich made with a jellyfish because the grape jelly ran out – printed in The Star’s “Kids Corner” feature. She never looked back, self-publishing a book in fifth grade that sold 2,000 copies; released two more short-story collections; had a play produced off-Broadway; received the John Steinbeck Creative Writing Fellowship; and now reached No. 1 on Amazon’s list for Young Adult New Releases. Each, and countless more highlights amidst, has been a best week at the time it happened.

And yet “The Best Week That Never Happened” has me thinking of a worst week that did happen. A week of overwhelming grief that began on Jan. 26 five years past. At 5 a.m., my daughter phoned and said in a tear-choked voice: “Daddy, Celine is gone.”

One of her two best friends in the world was in India for a wedding, during one of the best weeks in her 26-year-young life, and the taxi she was riding in was broadsided by a bus.

On its homeward voyage, Apollo 11’s Command Module “Columbia” crossed an invisible Rubicon where the moon’s gravitational attraction yielded imperceptibly to the pull of Earth’s gravity. Mourners experience a similar invisible line where the gravity of grief and loss are overcome by the pull of healing and happiness.

After Celine’s death, my daughter’s Rubicon seemed too distant for a rocket ship to reach. For long stretches, she even stopped writing. Then, out of the blue, came the proverbial lightning bolt of inspiration and she began pouring out her grief through the QWERTY keyboard.

“On some level,” my daughter says now, “I was writing – trying to write – a different ending for Celine than the one she was dealt.”

The result is a YA novel of love, mystery and magic set in Hawaii that is not about Celine at all, yet she is throughout its pages.

The result also is testament to the wisdom of the great poet Robert Frost: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

And the result is, according to bestselling author Jennifer Niven, “A poignant and gripping heart-tug of a page-turner filled with heart and hope. I couldn’t put it down. Magic.”

The most magical result is that the moment my daughter typed out the ending sentence she found herself crying and smiling simultaneously. Her grief was coming and going at once. She had crossed the imperceptible Rubicon.

Another best week in Dallas’s life had arrived.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …