The Meaning Behind the Title Find a Place for Me

When we are in the early throes of grief, our lost loved one dominates our every thought. We find ourselves angry that other people are going about their days doing ordinary things like getting gas or groceries, going to work, or kissing a partner, because we feel that our own lives have stopped. How can the world be going on when our loved one is no longer in it? How can anyone be thriving when our world feels ended? If we grieve wholly our world has truly stopped. But this feeling does slowly begin to pass. Soon we not only have to but can get up from our place of grieving and emotionally begin to place one foot in front of the other. We can begin moving towards a future where we are still alive while without the one we miss so terribly. When someone we love dies, we hold them in our hearts and minds forever, but we can eventually thrive despite the grief we will now forever carry.

My husband Bob and I experienced two great losses together five years before he was diagnosed at the young age of forty-three with the terminal illness amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Five years before, my father and brother had died two weeks apart, both suddenly, and we had been those people in shock and stunned into a world without them, wandering through it in a fog wondering how we would ever be able to look fully forward again. For Bob and me, it took nearly a year and a pregnancy with our second child before we began to comprehend that we and our son, and now soon daughter, had a future without my dad and brother where we needed to be very much present. We needed to not only embrace this future but learn to thrive in it for our children and for those who had left us behind. After all, our loved ones would not want anything less for us. They would want the best, and the best would mean a life of full-throttle living.

When Bob was diagnosed, we were both devastated, but ever the philosopher—Bob had a doctorate in philosophy and was a university professor—the day after his diagnosis, Bob told me he wanted me to love again. He said he had come to terms with his death in his twenties and he was also well aware how much his love blessing would mean to me and the children. Bob knew we would not thrive if we always remained in that early place of mourning. He knew he didn’t want me to be alone. He also wanted the children to have another person invested in their lives to guide them. Bob could do nothing to stop his illness from taking his life but he could help us continue in ours.

When Bob first told me to love again, I wasn’t at all ready. I could not go there. I was one foot in the grave with him and I didn’t want to get out of it. It was going to be a lot of work and I was going to not only be grieving the love of my life, but managing our children’s grief, and the full lives that we had once managed together. I was going to be a single mom doing all the work of a household, continuing to be a university professor myself, and somehow getting myself out of bed in the morning when I would want to do anything but.

As time went on, I began to realize Bob was right about love. The way to thrive was going to be to open my heart to the future just as we both had after losing my dad and brother, or I had earlier in life when decades before I lost my eldest brother and mother. “You have done it before and you can do it again,” Bob would tell me when I wanted to give up and said I could not go on after losing him. He believed in me. He believed in love and in my ability to love. After all, the measure of our grief is the measure of our love. If we love deeply, we grieve deeply. If we love deeply, we can also love again.

When Bob was sick, he made videos for the kids and me. At the end of mine, Bob says, “You are going to need to find a place for me,” and knowing Bob so completely, I knew exactly what he meant. In his absence, I needed to find a place for him that would not dominate all of my feelings or thoughts. If there was going to be room for me to go on, love again, and thrive in the face of the devastation of losing him, I was going to need a different place for Bob.

When I first started writing Find a Place for Me, I titled the book after Bob’s book of poetry, written during his illness and self-published a month before he died: After Thunder. My manuscript was therefore titled, After Lightning. During the publishing process, however, I realized that that title, while meaningful to me, didn’t say much to readers about the book itself

Find a Place for Me: Embracing Love and Life in the Face of Death is very much about Bob teaching me and others how to not only live well but die well. It is about our love for each other and how it transcends. Bob’s parting gift to me was to generously help me find a place for him that was forever and wholly his but also made room. I have found a place for him in this memoir and in my life. I hope upon reading it, readers will find a place for him too

Deirdre Fagan, D.A., is a widow, wife, mother of two, and associate professor and coordinator of creative writing at Ferris State University. Dr. Fagan, also a divorcee and the sole survivor of her birth family, is the author of the memoir Find a Place for Me. For more information visit deirdrefagan.com

Larry Atlas on the Inspiration for South Eight

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. 

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Larry Atlas, author of South Eight, the story of a young doctor’s collision with the demands and contradictions of modern acute care medicine, both its power and failings, and the moral questions it ultimately provokes.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

My background as a writer was entirely in plays and screenplays, exactly zero in prose fiction. So when, quite by accident (honest, it’s true!) I found myself working in a hospital first as a nurse, and then within a few years as a nurse practitioner hospitalist, my initial thought was to write something for the stage. In fact, I tried that twice, and within pages knew that it wasn’t going to work. What I wanted to write, the internal experience of treating hospital patients, could only work as a novel. That was a starting point, a hospitalist physician, in the heart of that world, his experience of it, and of the patients and co-workers.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I set out thinking of South Eight as “literary fiction,” but built a plot around events and a patient from the central character’s past, how they intersect with the main character’s present position, the power the current position.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Well, this is my first novel, but as with plays and screenplays, I was surprised by how the story did actually, in important ways, assume a life of its own. I remember reading somewhere, about playwriting, that the characters will tell you how the story should unfold. I think that was true here. Also, I love mysteries and thrillers, so perhaps it was natural that I’d incorporate those elements as I wrote.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

Often. On any given day there’re a dozen possibilities in the news, or someone will tell me a story they’ve heard that has interesting twists, possibilities. The question always is, will it hold up, will it hold one’s interest the next day, a week later, a month. And if it does, will it have enough “room” for expansion into a complete work, whatever the form.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

Well, in my case I’m still working in medicine — can I say active sideline in medicine? — which takes a lot of time and energy. So, the question is, do I have a story, a single story, that is so compelling that I simply have to find the time and energy, to write it. One can have a lot of ideas percolating, as you say, but having that one that comes to a boil in a sense, chooses itself.

I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

I have a four-year-old black Labrador who comes into my writing space and lies on the blue couch there. Once in a while she’ll bring me her ball to remind me it’s time to take a break.

Larry Atlas is a former Drill Sergeant who served in the Army. After his service, he attended Bennington College, earning both bachelor’s and master’s degrees before declining admission to medical school —and moving to New York to begin a successful career as an actor, playwright, and screenwriter. Among his produced plays are Total Abandon and the award-winning Yield of the Long Bond which premiered at the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles. He worked on multiple studio film projects including Sleepless in Seattle. He conceived and implemented the first nationwide online actors’ casting service, and then later co-invented and patented the first navigable nonlinear video architecture. Larry lives in upstate New York with actor-turned-therapist Ann Matthews, and their dog Ruby.

M. M. Crane on Writing Fake Relationships

I have never been asked by a ridiculously handsome man to pretend to date him or marry him, or act as if I am madly in love with him for the sake of [insert a compelling reason, like our careers or some such thing]. Obviously I view this as a great travesty, but I deal with this enduring disappointment the way I deal with most things: I write about it.

I have thus far written some 30 or so books with a fake relationship element, but I am particularly proud of Reckless Fortune—my new book that approaches this trope by marrying it up with a contemporary Alaskan spin on a mail-order-bride as well. 

In Reckless Fortune, Autumn McCall enters a contest that pairs her up with brooding bush pilot Bowie Fortune and requires them to reenact a version of an old school Alaska frontier-style, mail-order-bride marriage. They both know they’re just pretending, but that doesn’t prevent sparks from flying as the two spend time together. And especially not when disaster strikes and they crash down in the formidable Alaskan wilderness with very little hope of making it to safety…

I loved writing this book, not least because I got to spend a lot of time thinking about the extraordinary courage of the women who decided to take their chances with strange men in far-off locations all throughout history in the hope of a better life. The women who set out on difficult journeys hundreds of years ago, praying that the man waiting for them on the other end wasn’t going to be the more difficult than the wilderness. 

But I also really loved the fact that the mail order marriage in this case is fake. Both Autumn and Bowie know they’re taking part in a contest—a publicity stunt to draw tourists to a remote stretch of the Alaskan Interior. They both know that either one of them could call it off at any point. Instead of being stranded with no recourse in the middle of nowhere with a man she doesn’t know at all, Autumn is choosing to be there. Bowie is choosing to participate in this marriage that isn’t actually a marriage.

Hopefully readers will find that as exciting as I do.

It’s always fun to play with forced proximity in a romance. In real life there are a thousand ways to disengage—even right in front of each other. It’s far too easy to hide from anything intimate behind a screen, or let the bustle of our noisy lives distract us. The beauty of fake dating in a book is that the people involved are forced into acting as if they have a kind of intimacy they haven’t earned, making what happens between them all the more delicious. The beauty of setting a fake dating story in the Alaskan wilderness is that there’s not a whole lot of the noise of the modern world to offer any distractions.

How can they help but fall in love?

Reckless Fortune is out 9/27 and I hope you love it!

M. M. Crane is a pseudonym for a USA Today bestselling and RITA-nominated author. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband.