How I Lost 265,000 Words in Two Years

By Margaret Mandell

No before and after pictures needed here.

But I did have to write 300,000 words to get to my 35,000-word memoir. Those words were the stuff of my life, my heart, my rage, and my grief after the death of my husband of 45 years. I wrote to Herb every day for four years and the writing saved me. I told myself I had written a memoir. But it was not. It was a bloated tome.

I needed help. It would take two coaches and two more years.

My first coach understood that within my letters dwelled a powerful love story. She taught me to show, not tell, my story through tightly written scene.

Take your 1,000-word chapter and give me 400 words, she’d say.

I had written a long rambling, clinical account of the night my husband died, chronicling details about IVs and intubation, sleep-deprived residents, respiratory therapists and ICU nurses, palliative care and advanced directives, Pulse-Ox monitors and EKGs, antibiotics, and morphine. All I really needed to say was how it felt to walk out of the hospital after his last breath, his ear still warm against my lips as I whispered good-bye.

You died on a Tuesday.

I went home and crawled into your side of the bed.

Friday, at your synagogue funeral, I clung to our children and stared at the floor.

Friday night, a blizzard dumped twenty-two inches of snow on Philadelphia.

Saturday, we shoveled the front walk without you.

I was learning how to say less and more at the same time.  

My second coach taught me the difference between narrative and epistolary form. She said many of my letters were not letters at all—that I had been using my dead husband as a pretext to write a diary, a sermon, a rant.

Write your back flap copy to discover the beating heart of your story, she said. Three, four sentences max.

In And Always One More Time, Margaret Mandell, newly widowed, cannot conjure a future without her husband of forty-five years. Filled with longing, chased by memory, Mandell begins to write letters to the man she loved, retracing their history together. But when a tenderhearted college professor steps quietly into her life, when he listens, attentively, as Mandell reads her accumulating stack of letters out loud, she is forced to recalibrate her vision of life—what is still possible, what is still necessary, how much love one heart can hold.

There it was, so much clearer than it had been before: my memoir wouldn’t just be about what had happened in my life. It would be about what I had learned, and was learning still, about how one woman can love two men—one gone, and one recently emerged. Everything that did not somehow support the story—my childhood struggles with food, my difficulties with my father, long asides about yoga—would now go.

Sometimes, my coach said I was rushing to summarize the story’s big events—telling what happened without letting the reader inside. I’d written, for example, a quick report on my daughter’s wedding, which takes place when I am a new widow.

I just paid the balance due for Lydia’s wedding…She wants me to pick up box lunches for the bridesmaids and deliver them to the hotel…The ceremony will be at 5 pm.  

I now relived the event in memory so that I could capture it on the page—not just the facts but the feelings.

My girl has just slipped away. Into the arms of a gentle soul with great tattoos. Once cherished by her dad, she belongs to Jake now. We were never the same, child of my body, bone of my bone. But I’ve done my job and I watch from the sidelines, where I belong, as they dance into the night.

I kept losing words. Finding new ones, fewer words that said more. My words moved around the page. Disappeared and reappeared somewhere else, looking completely different. My story kept enlarging as the number of pages decreased. But it was more than that. My life changed, too. That tenderhearted college professor became a larger part of the story—off the page and on it. Now I thought I was writing a love letter to him.

I love sleeping next to your body, vibrating imperceptibly. I love cooking for you. Clean, pure, nutritious, delicious, beautiful food. I love watching you devour my meals with gusto.

Nope, you’re just writing about yourself, my second coach said. When what was really needed, she suggested, was writing that illuminated the man himself:

You who are never bored. You who have no forethought of grief. You who refuse to die with the music still inside you. You who have loved me back to life.

Page by page, 265,000 of my shedded words wound up on the cutting room floor. I visit them from time to time. I can see ones that might be resurrected for a new story down the road. I blow them a kiss and thank them for their service. I’ll be back, I say.

I return to my 35,000-word memoir. I realize that as the writing changed, so did I. Less bloat, more revelation, above all to myself. In my epilogue I write a final letter to Herb four days after marrying John: “I think you would like the person I’ve become.”

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Darwin once wrote survival of the fittest means survival of the most adaptable. Margaret Mandell’s life story is one of adaptation to changing circumstances. She has been a college teacher and doctoral candidate, an entrepreneur, an independent school admissions director, a triathlete, and a certified yoga instructor. When her husband of many years passed away, she became a widow, a woman still in the midst of becoming. Her debut memoir, And Always One More Time, tells the story of her next act and new, sustaining love. Excerpts have appeared in The Metaworker Literary Magazine.