On the 1,253^rd day of living in the fog of my grief, I walked into the Walgreens at Lafayette Square to buy a bag of candy and a Dr. Pepper. My plan was a sugar coma for another shitty Saturday in my devastated life. Inexplicably, however, I did not beeline for my baseline in the candy aisle. Instead, my body began a slow stroll up the first aisle of the store, down the second, and up the third. Too worn down to resist this compulsion to browse each aisle, I mindlessly scanned the shelves for nothing. In the middle of the row of office supplies, I spied a thick journal with a geometric pattern in blue and a bright green strap to hold it closed. Without thinking, I picked it up, the weight and feel of it in my hands felt comfortable and natural. It felt like it was meant to be mine. The next thing I knew, I was at the cash register purchasing the journal and a packet of pens with purple ink. Mack’s color.

The candy and the Dr. Pepper forgotten, I had a new plan. It came to me like a whisper from the cosmos to stop wallowing in my broken old life and start writing a new life. This journal and these pens were my first provisions for a long journey, which would begin at Chava’s Mexican restaurant just a few blocks south in Soulard. I took a seat in the sunny front corner of the restaurant. I nibbled on a few chips. I took note of the late-afternoon light streaming in the windows of the quiet restaurant. I recognized the calming rhythm of my breath as I pressed open the journal. I sipped half of my strawberry margarita and licked most of the salt off the rim of the glass while staring at the first blank page. And then I picked up a pin and started writing. By the time I left the restaurant, the fog was beginning to lift. I could see the hope in the light that was supplanting the fog. I could see a little glimpse of where I was going.

During the next seventeen months I filled the pages of that journal and several others. Reflections and observations. Bad poetry. Eavesdropping. Curses. Checklists. Questions and answers about who I was, where I was, and what I wanted. Pipe dreams and possible plans. Agonizing arguments with myself about what I needed. What steps I must take to regain control of my life, to put myself back together again, to move forward with grace, and to become the human being I needed to be to survive the death of a daughter. I made notes of what I would have to leave behind and let go of in order to go forward. I made predictions. I anticipated mistakes. I had been writing about my grief since Mack’s death, but this new writing was intentional. It was not sorrow spilled out in sobs onto the page. It was determined, mindful writing. It was a sketched out new plot in my story. It became the rewriting of my life, the work of me, in progress. It became a second job of sorts, a sorting out and a reckoning.

That writing of the rewriting of me gave me courage. It gave me license to prioritize the reimagining of my life at just past fifty. It helped me chart and navigate an independent course, to shed my failures and regrets, to choose quiet contentment over the unsustainable, exhausting pursuit of bliss. It helped me through my divorce, my painful departure from the city I loved, and my terrifying replanting in a new place. It led me to the cozy 1919 bungalow, where I have curated peace on my own terms in a sleepy college town I am finally beginning to call my home. Some would say the letting go and the moving, the settlement in a new place, and the determined redirection of a life out of profound grief was the work I did. But for me, the doing was the easy part, the simple implementation of a plan. For me the work was in the writing. The work is always in the writing. It fuels everything that is necessary for every journey I must take in this life. It points me in the right direction. Nothing I have accomplished in the past four years would have been possible without the work I put into my writing.

In my professional work as a historian and in my personal work as a human being, I am a writer. Writing pays my bills and paves my path. It is how I make sense of myself and the world around me. It is the way I best express myself, heal my wounds, and move forward. Like any job worth doing, it is hard and it is frustrating. A blinking cursor on the screen or a blank page in a notebook has the power to make any writer go mad. It is work that requires overtime and underpay, most of the words not making the cut. There are days when you cannot muster a single sentence, and then the next day you yawn and realize you have been writing for hours and are three hours past bedtime. Writing is, it seems to me, exactly like life.

During the past eighteen months, I have done little else but write. I spent more time writing and rewriting and deleting sentences and paragraphs than pulling weeds, preparing meals, or dusting the furniture. It has been a challenging, thrilling, exhausting time, and, perhaps, the most productive months of my entire life. It has been good, bone-tired-at the-of-the-day work. I completed the editing and writing of a 900-page volume of the papers of Jane Addams, a collection of essays about Abraham Lincoln, maintained an irregular personal journal, kept a detailed engagement calendar filled with thoughts and random ideas, and posted a lot of nonsense and a little wisdom on Instagram. I was so mentally and physically depleted after submitting the 340-page manuscript of essays to my publisher in the middle of August, I tried to take a writing break. I did not last one day. Writing is so engrained in the woman I now am that I simply cannot breathe without it.

So if I say I am taking a little break from writing, do not believe me. I am lying. It is a rare day when I do not write at least a little something: a footnote for a Jane Addams document, a sentence in my engagement calendar about something strange I saw on a walk, a short book review posted on Instagram, or the scribble about a fear, entered into the journal by my bed, just before turning out the light. Even if I am staring at that damned blinking cursor on my laptop screen, I am working at writing, and I am grateful and content to be so employed.

Since that day in Walgreens five and a half years ago, the work of writing has sustained me. It gave me hope and led me into the light. It keeps my sorrow in balance with love and with joy, and it makes the darkness less frightening. I have become one of the lucky ones. I know precisely what I need to be doing. I get to do what I love and spend my time writing. Facing this ninth anniversary of Mack’s death (and all of the anniversaries in front of me), I am relieved to know I will always have writing, the nourishing and rewarding work to see me through them. Writing is my remedy as well as my journey. Writing is my life’s work, and from it I will never retire.