What is your life's purpose?

The bigger picture

What is your life’s purpose? Can you verbalize it?

That’s been the burning question in my mind ever since losing my husband this past July. Up until that day, I had a definitive purpose: caring for my husband, who was elderly and whose health was rapidly declining. Savoring every precious moment with him, as I knew what was coming. Doing whatever I could to keep his spirits up.

After he passed, what was my purpose? The only one left in our household was me. Not “we” any longer.

After the worst of the wound began to scab over, I sought guidance. Not being the kind of person to seek advice in person, I went to the library and took out books. I read voraciously. I listened to audiobooks. I surfed Substack and subscribed to as many of “self-help” posts as I could.

The advice in many of these was this: determine what it is you love to do. Although on the surface it may seem selfish, it turns out that doing what you love often provides an underlying benefit to other people as well.

I am a writer. I have published a dozen novels, some of which won some kind of literary award. No, I have not achieved best-seller status. They have not brought me fame or fortune. But writing stories is something that I definitely love to do.

I decided to go back and try to determine the underlying theme to all these books. Turns out, it was the underlying theme of my life up until July 7^th of this year.

Love. True, undying, everlasting love.

Why do most of my books intertwine a ghost story with the romance? Because I believe that love survives not only time, but death as well. Some things are just too strong, too precious to fall victim to a silly little thing like death.

How can I believe this so strongly? Because I believe that the spark of life that animates all of us comes not from a beating heart or a healthy set of lungs. It comes from something intangible, ethereal. It comes from spirit.

And spirit survives the grave.

The theme for my historical novels carries another belief: love is stronger than disability. The heroine in “Dreaming of the Dance” was born with a club foot. As I was. But they knew how to fix this in 1957. In the middle ages, they did not. Similar disabilities plague the characters in books two and three.

But love is stronger than that. Hell, if it’s stronger than death, then a flaw of the physical body is nothing.

How is my “hobby” of writing romance novels beneficial to other people? Entertainment, of course. But my books do more than provide a mental journey into another world for my readers. It is my hope that my stories evoke emotion. Show them the power of love. Share with them this belief of mine that love is the most powerful force in our universe.

For a while after my husband took his last breath, I swore I could not write another love story. It was just too painful to immerse myself in an imaginary world where two people find each other and fall in love.

My own love story is over.

But now, I am seeing this conundrum differently. I am starting to see how sharing my stories will show other people the power and wonder of true love. In today’s world of impersonal technology and virtual dating, it’s more important than ever to remind people of the treasure that lies in real relationships.

Writing these kinds of stories is something I love to do.

I guess I do have a purpose in life after all.