How the Pandemic Inspired a Love Story

After my grandfather had a heart attack four years ago, I moved in with my grandparents during his recovery. Late in the evenings, as my grandmother slept in her recliner beside him and my poodle sprawled across his feet, he and I would watch movies.

His preference, inevitably and humorously, was Hallmark movies. I worked on the manuscript of Once More unto the Breach during the movies, as there is only so much saccharine sweetness I can handle. But one evening, I glanced over at him from the rocking chair older than I am, and I found him silently weeping. 

  My grandfather was not a wealthy man, but he was a rich one. He was rich in good humor and a boyish grin. His laughter was sly and contagious.

He was rich in an abiding love for the land and a long, hard day of honest work. He was never happier than when he was outside, toiling away at some project, working with his hands.

He was rich in strength. My grandfather was a stalwart figure of a man. When I was a child, I was certain no one was taller or stronger than he. He was a rock, constant and immovable.

He was rich in generosity. He was unsparing in his friendship and magnanimous with his kindness. 

He was rich in tales. He possessed the Scotsman’s abiding love of stories. A conversation with him was peppered with anecdotes about misjudged amounts of dynamite blowing a hole the size of a truck in the roof of his mother’s kitchen, a brother jumping off a bridge to avoid an oncoming train and landing in mud rather than in the river, and his new wedding band almost severing his finger when it got caught in a bolt on an airplane. 

He was rich in love. He told me once that he thought he had been blessed more than any other man with the wonderful family he’d been given. A wife he adored, even with her endless “honey do” lists. Sons he was proud of. A daughter he cherished. Daughters in law he treated like his own. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren who were his joy and delight.

That night, when I moved quickly to his side and knelt beside his chair, I asked, “What’s wrong? Are you in pain?”

He wiped the tears from his face. My grandmother, whittled to bone by age, her mind made brittle by dementia, snored softly in the recliner at his side. 

My grandfather said in a quavering voice, “It’s just so beautiful. Love stories are the most beautiful stories.”

I thought about that when I carried his urn to the niche in the columbarium at the state’s National Cemetery on a clear winter’s day after he lost his battle with Covid-19. In a nook covered by an engraved marble slab, his ashes and my grandmother’s rest side by side on a hill overlooking a wooded ravine with a river sighing softly as it passes. 

This last year has been difficult for everyone, tragic for many. It has been a time of loneliness and isolation, fear and loss. We have an innate pull toward community, and we found ourselves terrifyingly alone and starkly disconnected. 

But even as we experienced the frailty of humanity, we also witnessed the resilience and the indomitable human spirit. We found ways to connect with one another, to forge bonds even in hardship, to show kindness to those who are hurting and to those who have laid their lives on the line for the rest of us.

In the dark night of a pandemic, it is easy to plumb the depths of despair and wade into the bitter moats of sorrow and grief, at our personal losses and at our collective suffering. When I finished my latest work in progress, I started writing a story late one evening a month after I had tucked my grandfather’s urn into the marble niche. I wrote about grief and loneliness and the anxiety of witnessing the fragile impermanence of our species. But somewhere along the way, I realized that, at its heart, this was a love story. A love story about what it means to be human, about the ways we grapple with isolation and loss, about the bonds we forge. 

Because my grandfather was right. Love stories are the most beautiful stories. 

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The Library of Lost Souls

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a robot in possession of a soul must be in want of a life partner. 

Nell, Human-5014 and Second Librarian of the Athenaeum, has clung to that truth for twenty revolutions. The human extinction is in its last phases, and her desperate quest to find the recipient of her husband’s soul has finally paid off. She has one request, one hope for reconnecting with the man she lost so long ago.

PREORDER HERE

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Author Bio​

Meghan Holloway found her first Nancy Drew mystery in a sun-dappled attic at the age of eight and subsequently fell in love with the grip and tautness of a well-told mystery. She flew an airplane before she learned how to drive a car, did her undergrad work in Creative Writing in the sweltering south, and finished a Masters of Library and Information Science in the blustery north.

She spent a summer and fall in Maine picking peaches and apples, traveled the world for a few years, and did a stint fighting crime in the records section of a police department.​​ She now lives in the foothills of the Appalachians with her standard poodle and spends her days as a scientist with the requisite glasses but minus the lab coat. 

Follow her at @AMeghanHolloway on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or visit her website at https://www.meghanholloway.com/.

 

HUNTING GROUND

Fifteen years ago, Hector Lewis’s wife and young daughter vanished without a trace. People have long thought he was responsible, but the man he knows is behind their disappearance still walks free. As a police officer, he is sworn to uphold the law. But he has seen how little justice there is in the world. And when a newcomer’s arrival sparks a harrowing series of crimes, Hector finds himself in a race to catch a man he is convinced is a killer. 

Evelyn Hutto knows what it is to be prey. She moved west to start over. But the remote town of Raven’s Gap, Montana, is not as quiet and picturesque as it appears. The wild borderlands of Yellowstone National Park are home to more than one kind of predator. Women are going missing, and Evelyn’s position at the local museum unearths a collection of Native American art steeped in secrets. As she traces the threads of the past and the present, she finds them tied to one man. 

Hector is a man obsessed with finding answers. Evelyn is a woman with secrets of her own. As winter whittles the land to bone and ice, the body count rises, and both become locked in a deadly game of cat and mouse with a dangerous man. A man who is as cunning as he is charismatic. A man whose new hunting season is only just beginning.

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Category: On Writing