In Good Company

When I first thought of the concept for the This Day book series about six years ago, my family was going through a hard time. My dad had suffered a massive stroke only a few weeks earlier, so even as the first This Day book was taking shape, I was spending a lot of time traveling back and forth by train from my home in White River Junction, Vermont to Lancaster, Pennsylvania where my parents lived and my dad was hospitalized.

One week I’d arrive at the hospital and my dad was on a respirator. The next week he was off the respirator. One week he needed a PEG tube. The next week he could swallow. Some days he’d act like the dad I always knew. Some days he was gone. After months of ICUs and false hopes and incremental progress, my dad ended up in a nursing home. He was paralyzed on his left side and diminished both physically and mentally but, as it turned out, he still had some good days, even years, left.

For me, launching the first This Day book during such an emotional time proved to be both an obsession and a blessing. Immersing myself in the daily lives of other women around the country allowed me to get out of my own head. It made it possible to titrate my grief, right at a time when I needed meaningful distraction.

Flash forward six years, two published This Day books, and about two-thousand submitted day diaries later. In May 2007, in the midst of creating the third book in the series, my dad had another massive stroke; this one on the other side of his brain. His chances of survival were slim to none. So, once again, I found myself taking the train from Vermont to Pennsylvania, a stack of day diaries occupying the seat next to me. Once again, I found comfort in the process of immersing myself in other women’s daily lives.

At readings and during interviews, people often ask, “What’s the value of women writing about and sharing a day in their lives? “Perspective,” I typically answer, but that doesn’t quite cover it. You may be twenty-something or a great-grandma; you may be on a career high or looking for work; you may be black or white, single or married, liberal or conservative, or even have different favorites on American Idol, but you will always find, after reading another woman’s day diary, a point of connection, a bit of inspiration, a lesson, a laugh.

During that last train trip to say goodbye to my dad, I traveled alone, but I kept good company. I read a day diary from a woman in her late forties who was worried about her used bookstore going under, and whether her pregnant daughter was taking good care of herself. I enjoyed a day of fresh air with a young marine biologist who was documenting whale behavior from a research vessel off the coast of Cape Cod. I shared the first-person perspective of a busy single mom as she raced from a manager’s meeting to her teenage son’s wrestling match where (once again) she found herself in charge of supplying the team snacks.

Who knows? Maybe I wouldn’t enjoy the company of these women in real life. Maybe we wouldn’t be able to see past our differences, or find a mutually convenient date in our overcrowded day-planners to visit over coffee or a couple glasses of wine. But, for me, that only reinforces the value of reading other women’s day diaries. On that long train ride from Vermont to Pennsylvania, these women hung in there with me, and I hung out with them. By sharing so intimately a day in their lives, I found, if not friendship, then something very much akin to it, on a day in my life when I needed friends most.

Joni