Elaine Marie Cooper Author

Historical Fiction That Grabs Your Heart and Feeds Your Soul

brain tumor

Ten Years and One Day Later …

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Ten years and one day ago is a date I will not soon forget. It was the day I received an assignment that changed my life.

I realized this week that my family and I would be commemorating the 14th anniversary of my daughter Bethany’s home-going to heaven—always such a difficult anniversary to bear. Try as I might to be strong, the tears seem to ebb and flow like a turbulent tide during a hurricane.

Then I realized, the date of October 20, 2017, was significant for another reason: It was ten years to the day that I “heard” the call to write my first novel.

I wrote about this event in the memoir of my daughter’s battle with brain cancer, Bethany’s Calendar:

 

The story of my daughter's journey with cancer.
The story of my daughter’s journey with cancer.

On the fourth anniversary of Bethany’s death, I lay in bed without any intentions of getting up. I wanted to cover my head and hide from the world. I hated these dates of remembrance.

But God had other plans for me that day. With an inaudible voice speaking to my heart, I “heard” a very strange assignment. I was to write a novel about my ancestors during the American Revolution. The message was so clear to me yet so strange that I was embarrassed to tell Steve.

After all, although I had previously been a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines, I was now a fulltime nurse. Besides, the only time I had tried to write after Bethany’s death, I had melted into a pool of tears. I never wanted to write again.

And now I was being directed to write a historical novel. Okay, so I love history and family genealogy. But this made no sense.

Since our ways are not God’s ways, I decided to go to the used bookstore and start looking for books about American history. And the rest became part of my history as one novel turned into two, then two turned into three.

 

I wrote Bethany’s Calendar in 2014. Since then I’ve written three more historical novels and I am researching my next one.

Did I say that our ways are not God’s ways? See Isaiah 55:8-9. I cannot fathom His ways nor his purposes in all the plans he has for me. Yet I know that, if I am obedient to His Word and His sometimes bewildering beckonings, then I will find His purpose for my life. However strange His requests may sometimes seem.

Have you ever felt the Holy Spirit prompting you to do something unexpected? I’d love to hear your story.

The Book I Balked At Writing

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I’ll never forget the day a friend stopped me at church. She knew I’d written a book but, instead of the one she expected, I’d written a historical fiction. “I thought you’d write a book about your daughter,” she said to me.

I looked at her in shock. “Are you kidding me? Relive the nightmare of her brain tumor? No way.”

I wouldn’t even entertain the idea of such a project. It would be too difficult to relive her journey through cancer and eventual passing.

How could someone even mention that, I thought? [Read more…] about The Book I Balked At Writing

Remembering Bethany

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Today, October 20th, 2013, marks the tenth anniversary of our daughter Bethany’s Homecoming. Not a college homecoming event, mind you. It was her final homecoming to heaven.

The discovery of her brain tumor shortly after her 23rd Birthday was a shock, to say the least. Months of treatment followed. Our lives were flung into a pit of despair, exhaustion, and grief, while our desperate faith clung to the hem of God’s garment as He said to us, “Trust me.” And we did. And we still do.

God never promised that our lives would be without sorrow or challenges that would feel much worse than a blow with a two by four. But He did promise He would never leave us or forsake us.

While many of my friends and even distant relatives only know Bethany as “my daughter who died from a brain tumor,” she was so much more.

 

Bethany and I, a year before we knew about the cancer
Bethany and I, a year before we knew about the cancer

She was the short one in the family, nearly a foot shorter than her older brother, Ben. But Bethany had what I always described as a “tall personality,” with more spunk and determination than all the rest of us put together.

When she was only two-years-old, her Daddy taught her the Shel Silverstein poem about a Polar Bear in the Frigidaire. The words still play in my mind as I can envision her rise to her full, midget-like stature and say the entire poem to amazed listeners. She delighted in the performance!

When her little brother, Nate, was born, she wanted to mother him to the point where I had to intervene. “If you do everything for him, he’ll never learn to do it himself,” I would gently say to her. She backed off—just a bit! The two of them were close their entire lives.

She admired her older brother, Ben, so much. In her last months she told him that she’d be watching him from heaven as he flew his military jet. I overheard her say to him, “I’ll tell everyone up there, ‘Look, there’s my brother!’” She was so proud of his service to our country.

Rather than just remember her as a cancer patient, I love to remember Bethany’s delightful legacy. She was a defender of the weak, a friend to the friendless, a comforter to the elderly in nursing homes, a brilliant student, a hilarious jokester, a believer in Jesus Christ, and as genuine a person as they come.

Daisies: Bethany's Favorite Flower
Daisies: Bethany’s Favorite Flower

Her writing awed and amazed me. She dreamed of being a writer but those dreams were not in God’s plans.

I never dreamed that I would carry on her hoped-for legacy by becoming an author. I wish that she could have become the writer instead. But our ways are not God’s ways.

Bethany’s favorite Bible verse was Jeremiah 29:11: “’For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”

Reading that verse on her tombstone, her brother Ben said, “In a way, God did take care of her future by bringing her home to Him in heaven.”

Indeed. And someday we can all be united again in the heavenly realm. That is our ultimate hope—our ultimate joy as we remember my daughter, Bethany, on this day of her Homecoming Anniversary.