Post #77 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing Prompt – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Memoir Prompt Discovered at Sea
Waiting for the ship to sail.
As I walked around the food areas to choose lunch, my nose passed pizza sauce and Italian herbs, hamburgers frying on a grill, fries cooking in hot oil, french onion soup, Chinese stir fry. After getting my plate of salad greens with balsamic dressing and a side of baked potato cubes, we found a table near the window so that we could gaze out at the blue ocean. We noticed that the ship seemed to be slowly turning. Odd. But what did we know.
The air was filled with the cacophony of several hundred different conversations over the background song of Girls Just Want to Have Fun. The ship’s captain interrupted the music to make an announcement. First he told us about the distance we had traveled since we embarked from San Diego yesterday, the weather, the ship’s speed, and other small details that amounted to yada yada yada. Then he said that there was a medical emergency on board. Since on boarding we had all received a formal notice about outbreaks of the flu on various cruise ships, my ears perked up.
Instead, the captain said that a passenger had a health emergency that was life threatening. In order to save his life, a helicopter was coming to pick him up. To get the helicopter and the patient together faster, he was turning the ship around until the water-based and the air-based ships could intersect. Even with both vessels speeding toward each other as fast as possible, it would take almost four hours. At that time, the upper deck would be cleared of all passengers in the event that the helicopter pilot had a problem with his landing.
I’m sure I’ll never know the health outcome for the fellow passenger. But I can imagine the sense of panic among his family. We’ve all been through those moments. A sick child that required a middle of the night visit to the emergency room. A parent’s call with a diagnosis of a possibly terminal disease. A neighbor’s news of an impending breast cancer operation. The sudden death of a friend’s daughter.
The ordinary plans for the day are interrupted. Depending on the severity of the interruption, we may think of that time in terms of the days after versus the days before. Even when the emergency events turn out all right — when your child comes home from the hospital and returns to that healthy little kid running around the house — when your parent beats the odds and lives another decade, when your friend’s breast cancer operation is successful and she has no recurrence — you still look back on that moment when you got the news or had to take action. Everything that had been planned for that day was put aside. Your life course was shifted, even if just a little, forever.
MEMOIR WRITING PROMPT:
Write for 10 minutes about an unexpected medical event concerning you, a family member, or a friend. Write about where you were and what you were doing when you got the news. Include your initial emotions and your emotions as the first few hours went by. Did the need to take action mean you could put emotions on hold for a while? How did you feel once the full impact settled over you? Tapping into an emotional time and writing about it helps you realize the importance of describing emotions throughout your memoir. Our life stories are about more than just what happened. Our readers need to know how we felt about what happened. Emotions make our stories come alive.
