Hi Everyone!
I am excited to be here today to bring you a guest post from the author of the Just One Life book. Please help me by giving a warm welcome to Pat!
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What
inspired the writing of the book?
I have led
an interesting life, pursuing different career pathways including a long gap to
raise two children. Before the children, I had worked in medical research and
then set up my own recruiting agency for finding suitable candidates for my
client companies in the pharmaceutical industry. My husband was a flight
engineer and for many years we lived overseas as he had flying contracts with
international airlines. One country we lived in for six years was Saudi Arabia
where I hosted a radio chat show for a year of two and wrote columns and
features articles for the Arab English speaking press.
Back in the
UK at the age of fifty I retrained in therapeutic massage, sports massage and
Seated Acupressure Massage. The latter is perfect for taking into offices to
treat staff as a session is only twenty minutes through clothes on the
ultra-comfortable massage chair. I was keen to train other therapists is this
discipline, so I gained a post graduate certificate in education and with my
business partner Davina and we taught courses all over the UK and Ireland for
ten years. I loved it.We also wrote and published the first book on Seated
Acupressure Massage in 2000 which is still available on Amazon. I also worked
with my husband and a team of experienced, retired aviators for three years to
start up a new concept, a long haul low cost airline (Dreamcatcher Airways, my
choice of name). We were leasing a 747 Combo jet to start with which would
carry freight and passengers. The plan was to offer inflight chair massage treatments
and all the rows of seats would be a comfortable distance apart. This was our
USP. It was all very exciting but the night before our launch, when we were
celebrating with champagne, we learned that one of our investors had been
arrested by the FBI for money laundering! The venture collapsed immediately
with devastating consequences for all those involved. A few months later, my
husband had a serious stroke had has never recovered. Our lives changed in a
heartbeat, I had to give up my training school career to care for him full
time. We had burned up all our savings and investments on the airline project
and we struggled to make ends meet on just our pensions.
For eight
years when I looked after him at home, I forgot who I really was and became invisible.
He deteriorated, started having seizures and developed vascular dementia. Two
years ago, he went into a residential dementia care nursing home. I claimed
back some of my freedom and found my voice again. I needed an outlet for the
frustration of the lost years and I quickly wrote a short fictional, but
cathartic story of 10,000 words using my knowledge of medical research and
journalism to craft the outline of the plot. Being a journalist first, the
story was all ‘telling’ and factual, hardly any dialogue. A couple of friends
who read it thought I should use some of my own life’s experiences in other
countries to expand on the story and try to get it published. I wanted the main
premise to be about how a life can change overnight when a family member
suddenly needs full time care. As his wife, I took on the mantle of caring
automatically. People used to say I was ‘doing a marvellous job,’ but as I know
from talking to many other carers, one’s own life is totally sublimated. What
got me through those dark years was the support of my friends, friends to whom
you can confess, ‘I could kill him!’ and not be judged. Friends who could make
you laugh and let you cry when you needed to.
I joined a
creative writing class. It was wonderful to learn the craft of writing from the
tutor and to have the opportunity to read extracts from the story and have it
constructively appraised by my fellow writers. We all encouraged one another
and it helped to keep me going.
I basically
wrote the story for me, but hopefully it will help anyone who reads it and is a
carer themselves, or knows a carer, to remember that they too have a life to
lead and that needs to be supported and acknowledged in any way possible. I
mentioned the importance of friendship earlier and I have been blessed with
some extraordinary friends in my life and this story is a tribute to them too.
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Thanks Pat for coming by the blog today and sharing with us :)
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More details about the book:
Just
One Life
When you realise you have just one life
left to live, how do you make peace with the mistakes of your past? Fran should be looking back on her life
with pride. She’s risen to the top of the job ladder, having left behind a
council housing estate in post-war Glasgow, to forge a colourful, fulfilling
career and enjoy all the trappings of success.
But instead, Fran is consumed by regret. A
shocking revelation has cast her life, and her thirty-year marriage, asunder.
She finds herself the full-time carer for her husband, a man she now accepts,
she has never loved. The sacrifices she has made, the personal freedoms she has
lost, have left Fran crushed. Her free-spirited friend Iona is her one
salvation. Their friendship has survived the storms of conflict and loss since
childhood, their deep affection for one another the only constant remaining in
Fran’s life, a life she no longer recognises as her own.
Her husband’s new brush with death will
give Fran the chance to reflect on what she has left, the choices she has made
and the two men she has loved and lost.
Can Fran find a way through the ruins of
her marriage and find inner peace, to make the most of what remains of her
life's journey?
About the author: Living in Beaconsfield,
Buckinghamshire, Pat Abercromby has enjoyed a varied career - from recruitment
consultant to journalist in Saudi Arabia and massage therapist - eventually setting up a
training school for Seated Acupressure Massage. Today she continues to work
within the field of corporate wellness with her business partner Davina Thomson
with their joint company Wellbeing Direct. She also co-wrote and published
Seated Acupressure Massage with Davina Thomson in 2000. In her spare time, Pat
enjoys being an active member of her local creative writing group, classical
music and the outdoors.
Happy Reading!
