Shortly after my father passed away from cancer in August of 2011, I turned to rigorous exercise as a stop-gap to stem the torrent of grief, which threatened to consume me. The shock that he was no longer of this world replayed itself in my mind on a daily basis. It felt intolerable that I would never see him again. Often I had moments where I forgot he was gone and would reach for my phone, only to pick it up, startled at the sudden recollection that he would not be answering.

“The best way I knew how to work through my sorrow was to throw myself into exercise. As a child living in the Synanon commune, regular daily exercise was a requirement for everyone.”

We children participated in a rigorous P.E. program, which involved twenty minutes of calisthenics, a run that was one and a half miles to sometimes several miles long, and afterward an hour of sports. P.E. happened regardless of the weather. I recall running in rain storms while pummeled by hail the size of small stones and during summer months jogging in unforgiving heat. Over the course of years, a psychological and emotional impression took shape in my young mind during all those sit-ups, pull-ups, step-ups and runs.  I would forever come to regard regimented exercise as a personal requirement, like rebar in a well-constructed building, it is what keeps me from crumbling during life’s upheavals.  Exercise became my meditation, providing a sense of order and control over worrisome, fearful and despairing thoughts. In the last years of my marriage, deeply unhappy, I took up marathon running and entered a fitness competition.

And so after my father’s passing, I discovered Herbalife, a multi-level marketing company. What attracted me? The group workouts, of course, led by a health coach named Style. We would meet on Monday mornings at a place called the Culver City stairs, a steep, forbidding climb of over two hundred concrete steps carved in a non-uniform fashion into the hillside. We’d walk to the top, which overlooked the greater Los Angeles area and perform a series of exercises, walk down a small portion of the steps and run one of the trails close to the bottom before slogging our way back up again. On our second trip to the top, we stretched and sat in a circle to talk about our dreams and goals. In these chats, refreshed and clear thinking from the rigor of activity, I always stated the same objective, “I want to write and publish a book.” So began the seed of intention to become an author.

After several months of Herbalife, I realized that I did not want to drink protein shakes every day or sell the variety of vitamin enhanced products that the company made, and the sharpest edges of my sorrow had receded to something more manageable. My time at the health company had been positive on the whole, and I even got to know and become friends with a man who would later become my significant other, but I was ready to move on.

One day, almost a year after my Herbalife stint, I was rummaging through my closet and came across a black notebook. It contained sixty pages of a vampire story I had written during my last year living on Maui. Giving it a read, I became pleasantly absorbed and decided that this would be my book. Immediately following this thought, my father came to mind; My dad had been one of my closest friends. Commonly we’d sit for hours and chat about any number of subjects or debate each other over movies and actors; who had been in what and when. He was a big movie buff. We also shared a similar sense of humor and spent time telling each other funny stories and cracking up. If something hilarious happened to me, my first thought was, I’ve got to call my dad.

When my youngest daughter and I moved to Los Angeles, we lived with my father, his wife and my brother for eighteen months. At that time I worked tirelessly to build my business as a massage therapist. I had been in the trade for nine years working at The Grand Wailea resort on Maui. While I created a website and made a business plan, my dad would mention my writings from to time. “You know, I think you have something there,” he’d say. I’d nod politely but was too busy trying to make ends meet to place any importance on an old girlhood passion.