My favorite graveyard, if a person can have such a thing

I've spent a lot of time in graveyards.  It started young.  My grandmother was obsessed with visiting her little brother's grave -- he died when he was an infant -- and when I was a child my family visited his grave every year.  We visited other graves too: my grandmother's husband and her two sons--her boys also died as children.

When I graduated college I thought I'd left death behind me.  At least for a while.  Then, about ten years ago, my nieces died in a car accident.  They were six and eight years old.  Their dad couldn't handle it and killed himself.  A few years after that their brother killed himself, too.  My favorite aunt died suddenly while hiking.  A friend's sixteen-year-old daughter died of heat-stroke.  Our neighbor's son hung himself.  My grandmother, who was ninety-seven, died in her sleep.

Death is a part of life.  I get that.  But so much of it all at once made me feel the inescapability of it in a way I hadn't felt before.  This was the time I started writing; little paranormal stories about meeting up with ghosts and resolving unresolvable things and finding meaning in the things we can't control.  Then I deviated--I wrote Painted Boots.  It's all about what I found death to be: a thing that strips us to our core, that changes us and that we survive.  Until our time comes, anyway.

The characters of Painted Boots display all the things I saw in grieving friends and relatives and some of the things I experienced myself over the five years of my life that contained so much death.  Sadness.  Meanness.  Martyrdom.  Taking on responsibility for things that aren't our fault or can't control.  Rebounding.  Growth.  Finding happiness again.  Learning how to go on and most importantly, letting go.