A friend asked me once if I got sad when I finished a novel. An interesting question. I do, in fact, tear up every time I read to the end of one of my novels. Even if I have read it over many times, the ending always gets me.
Perhaps it’s
the completion of a monumental undertaking – years, it takes me to finish a
novel. Or that I have invested so much brain power and emotion in creating and
getting to know the characters. I have seen them through thick and thin and
with the completion of the story, I won’t see them anymore. I won’t spend all
that time stressing and fussing and sorting out their lives and situations. I
will be moving on to new, unformed characters that only I can coax out of their
shells. It’s not easy getting to know someone, especially when you are making
them up.
The idea
for this book came from a story, possibly apocryphal, of a young man who had
fallen onto the subway tracks and the train landed on him. The paramedics
talked to him and told him as soon as they lifted the train off his chest, he
would die instantly. I thought about this and wondered what would happen if a
family were faced with such a situation, prepared for the death of their loved
one and then the person didn’t die.
This became
a short story: For Each a Space Among the Stars: Descant Magazine; 122;
Fall 2003. This gives you some idea of how the germ for a novel stretches
through time. In the short story it is the son who doesn’t die and the father
who is dealing with this outcome. In the novel, I put the father in a
wheelchair and his family have to adapt to his current, passive state, in need
of total care and oblivious to their attention.
There was a program on TVO – Big Ideas that caught my attention one afternoon. Dr. Michael Persinger was discussing his research into the temporal lobe. His experiments elicited a religious experience in the subjects by stimulating the brain with magnetic waves. Dr. Persinger pointed at two sides of the brain and the interconnecting fibers – the corpus callosum. He spoke with great fervor about the presence of God that people described when they emerged from the experiment. It is essentially a sensory deprivation situation upon which magnetic fields are introduced to the temporal lobe. Subjects sit in a darkened room with a helmet on their heads. The helmet has the transmitters glued to it. It became known as the God Helmet.
I have long
been interested in neurophysiology and spent some of my university days
studying this stuff. The connection between ‘God’ and the brain has always flummoxed
me. For me it seems an absolute impossibility to have a god to believe in
without a physiologic brain to do the believing. God is a man-made construct.
Here was someone with something to say on the matter. I read through all the
published papers and the idea for this story grew.
I have tried, in my own words to explain the science and its manifestation in the mind. But, this is ultimately a family story. A story of individual journeys and unavoidable intersections.
The novel is available on Kindle Direct Publishing here:
And on Rakuten Kobo here:
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