Celebrating the Coyote: A Memoir (Hardcover)

But keep in mind that the book's title begins with the word "celebrating." What is being celebrated is LIFE, our greatest gift. CELEBRATING THE COYOTE is mainly a celebration of that volatile spirit which exceeds the grasp of the intellect or rationality. Psychiatrist C.G. Jung called the trickster coyote our "shadow" side: our repressed secret side. The more we recognize and acknowledge it, the more positively powerful it becomes, just as the legendary Trickster has gained stature in myth and fable as mankind has advanced.

Trickster is also a real half-coyote dog who helped me with my husband's transition. They were two of a kind, Trickster and Frank Waters, noted Southwestern author of twenty-six books including THE BOOK OF THE HOPI, for Frank was an honorary member of the Hopi Coyote Clan.

Elie Wiesel wrote, "Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story."

I have added, "Survival is a celebration of mortality or immortality. It is a celebration of the enduring coyote in our beloved Trickster, in Frank, in myself, in all of us."

My main purpose in writing this book was to rescue my late husband's superior life work from the limbo of "regional writing" and to get him known and read east the Mississippi. This has happened all too seldom although he was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. (How about some of you Amazon online reviewers from New York reviewing Frank's books that professional New York reviewers did not deign to look at? Especially his fine briskly-selling memoir, OF TIME AND CHANGE, published posthumously by MacMurray and Beck in October, 1998. For instance, how is it -- perhaps his most "regional" book -- nonregional?)

Frederick Ramey, MacMurray and Beck's executive editor, says my book is about ME. So we'll compromise and say you get five books for the price of one memoir: an autobiography, a biography of sorts, a marriage manual, a positive grieving manual, and a how-to directive on renewing one's depleted energy through absorbing that of the departed as well as absorbing helpful energy gleaned from friends, warm memories, animals, and nature. Some may call this "New Age" thinking. It's really wisdom of the ages preserved by sages like C.G. Jung and Frank Waters.

My personal experience causes the book to be divided under the surface into three parts. The first is jagged, like "Shards," or myself grasping at any straw to survive the intense pain connected with death of a loved one. Things are calmer in the middle section and growing more cohesive as more and more sustaining factors like community and happy memories come into play, pulling me more together. Nature brings eventual tranquillity, smoothness, universality, and acceptance, for I come to realize that "to encounter death is to wake up, to live more inwardly, to live more keenly."

Like a patchwork quilt, and like myself after this close encounter with transition, my writing is seamed and patched together, partially with regained laughter and happiness, forming an integrated whole. I am on my way to achieving the ideal expressed in Frank Waters' great novel THE MAN WHO KILLED THE DEER, and on his simple monument: "We will meet again, as equal parts of one great whole."

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