Page 101 - Sorry, We're Not Hiring Any Visionaries Today

CHAPTER 12
those into projects that benefit not only themselves but also other children and even the broader communities.
In 2006, I moved to Canada to join my late husband. We were together for a dozen years before he passed away. I learned to work in various new roles, in- cluding sales support. He was an importer. Over time, I decided to declare my- self a freelance writer and editor in my own right. This is precisely what happened, and I became an editor for other people’s projects and a writer for my projects.
I was with my father during a period when he received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. I was with him off and on for the three years after he received the di- agnosis, and I was with him when he died in 2012. He was very conscious of what he was going through during his dying time. He had been a social worker, and he guided his close family members through the process of dying, helping each of us to say our good-byes. He was incredible, and I had a very unique experience with him.
After he died, it took me a few weeks for the full impact of grief to hit me. I call it the “tsunami of grief”. I decided to keep a diary of this experience. I wrote the story to myself, and I did it bit by bit. I’d write more every few days, then put it away. And before I started to write again, I would read it from the beginning.
Once I had completed this story, I shared parts of it with some of my col- leagues. At the time, I was doing some editing support for a woman who was a nurse educator. She taught people how to accompany the dying and how to speak to them. This was her specialty, and I was editing her work. This hap- pened serendipitously at the time I was accompanying my father. I was getting coaching about how to be with him and deal with this stage of his life. I reached out to her and some other people I’d met through her, and they en- couraged me to publish this little journal.
So, I self-published, and I thought to myself, “Well, what do I do with this now? What use does this little memoir have? It’s already served its purpose with me.” I had integrated the experience, along with my grief. I decided to reach
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