Zen’s Garden

When I started writing this book, I couldn’t have predicted the end . . . or the continuation.

I finished writing and editing a year ago. Then I set the manusript aside to care for my ailing father. A week after his funeral, my daughter was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. A few months later, I recalled an experience I’d had while writing, long before Rachel’s illness.

Solas Murphy is an emergency physician struggling to understand the experiences he has in the ER that science can’t explain. Heartbroken by the unexpected death of his daughter, Zen, he tearfully tells his wife, “God, I loved that child.”

I thought of that line last summer while caring for Rachel. I remembered writing it. I’d felt it so deeply, I’d wept, as if Zen had been my own daughter.

When Rachel passed in November, she sent a series of miracles, often punctuated with rainbows. I’ve never been a rainbow or butterfly guy, but it was hard to ignore the frequency or circumstances surrounding the rainbows.

A few weeks ago, after a crescendo of rainbow experiences, I read the manuscript one last time before publication. I hadn’t read it for a year, not since before Rachel’s diagnosis.

Solas slipped into his daughter’s bedroom for the first time since her funeral. He inhaled the perfume he’d bought her in Paris. He sat cross-legged in the middle of her room and watched as “the midday sun refracted through the beveled glass windows and cast tiny rainbows across the far wall.”

I was stunned. I wept. I’d written my own sign before she was even sick, and she’d honored it.

From the moment I wrote the first page, I’d struggled for a title. I’d thought it was about Solas’s journey, and it had his name in the working title. Just days after Rachel died, she gave me the words, “Zen’s Garden.”

I finally realized it was always about what Zen was cultivating in her father. Rachel has always cultivated the best in me. She continues to do so.

p.s. As I wrote this, I just remembered, I bought Rachel perfume in Paris.

Now available on Amazon or through my website. Please give it a read and share with your friends.