Written in Water may alter the way you look at love and death. Almost certainly, it will alter the way you look at grieving. And it may even alter your perceptions of ordinary reality. When veteran journalist Carol Flake Chapman loses her husband suddenly in a kayaking accident on a remote Guatemalan river, she is thrust without warning into a time of grief and shock. But in her altered state, she soon realizes that grief has opened the doors to possibilities of consolation that she could never have imagined. Her time of grieving becomes a kind of improvised pilgrimage that takes her around the world in a journey of discovery, as she explores who her peaceful-warrior husband really was and what her place might be in the world without him. Along the way, she encounters what she comes to think of as "necessary angels"-people who appear at the right place at the right time with the right words or acts of comfort. She travels into the "thin places"-the places where the boundaries between heaven and earth, between reality and dream, become permeable. She introduces the concept of "Slow Grief," of a way of grieving that embraces life and that takes comfort in all its small and large miracles. Even technology becomes a means of healing. And in her encounters with the natural world, she finds not only connection and healing, but also a threshold of transformation. As she writes, "the invisible gossamer threads of connection became visible." And always there is music, some of it coming from what she calls the "cosmic playlist"-songs that deliver timely messages of comfort and meaning. She recounts in raw, moving and often riveting detail the small indignities, the bottomless sorrows and transcendent moments that come with death and the pursuit of healing.
About the Author: After a stint in academia, Carol Flake Chapman turned to journalism, working as writer and editor for a number of leading newspapers and magazines. She was a founding editor of Vanity Fair; she was the racing correspondent for The New Yorker; she was the Texas stringer for U.S. News & World Report; and she has been an editor and columnist for the Boston Globe. She has written as well for Harper's, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Vogue, Conde Nast Traveler, Connoisseur, The Nation, Texas Monthly, and The New Republic. She has covered subjects from religion, culture, and politics to travel and the outdoors. She is the author of several nonfiction books, including Redemptorama: Culture, Politics and the New Evangelicalism (Viking/Penguin), Tarnished Crown (Doubleday), Thoroughbred Kingdoms (Bulfinch) and New Orleans (Grove). Each of her books has been regarded as a definitive work on its subject-provocative and ahead of its time. Her new book Written in Water: A Memoir of Love, Death and Mystery, which is compelling in its dramatic story and visionary in its implications, is her most important work yet. Artist Gale Gassiot has sold commissioned work in different media, from fabric, mosaics, and watercolors to acrylics, to private clients and businesses around the country. She paints in a fluid, whimsical style using imagery from nature and dreams to express her spirituality. Her work is influenced by the Latin culture she absorbed not only during her formative years spent as a child in Panama, but also from the sacred village in Mexico where she has her second home. Gale's passion for teaching art and health education continues after thirty years. Gale and her husband divide their time between their Texas Hill Country home and their apple orchard in Mexico's Sierra Madre Mountains.