I am tackling some hard questions as I lay out my plans for the three different storylines. I was kept awake last night by the imbalance of the three parts. I have drawn these out has three sets of circles. The working title for the book is TIME CIRCLE TRIO, but that will morph like many other parts.

The characters in the oldest story are long gone. The journals of the main character were burned, rightly so. I have hundreds of photos and artifacts from the life of the first pair, but only one photo and a sad newspaper clipping of the supporting man. This is so not fair and must be dealt with. He was a person, not a prop.

The second story involves two men who have passed on and a woman who has dementia. The catalyst for this tale was some things she said while she was already suffering from dementia, so they may not be true. There is no one alive to correct this. I do have many old letters so I do feel like I can get a good grasp on these characters. But there was no smoking gun, only the ramblings of an old woman struggling with confusion.

The latest story morphs on a regular basis. This is because there are THEN and NOW  factors that must be teased apart. The THEN was over forty years ago and the NOW involves a conversation over five years ago and a revelation about it last spring. This needs clarification.

The THEN was a beast to deal with at the time. Judgement was called into question at a point when many important choices needed to be made. Confidence was shattered and perspective was altered. This result seemed to snowball over the next year and beyond.

When the third NOW occurred there was grief and loss in every direction. The past was being frantically sifted through until it seemed to transform and expand to confuse what was real and of value. The NOW has no chance to be remedied or clarified due to death and memory loss. So this circle keeps getting bigger with no possibility for balance.

The one thread that links all three circles is faith in judgement. Does anyone have a right to make decisions for another adult? In these cases, do the parents have the right to make decisions for their young, adult daughters? And when they do(which they did), what are the extrinsic and intrinsic results? Maybe what looks from the outside to be the wrong choice is really the right choice from a different perspective?

In these three stories I have observed the THEN parts of these three young women and the NOW (results) decades later.  Their over-ruled hopes and dreams were still alive in these three as older women. That’s the gist of it. The prevented  mistakes they were not allowed to make were not mistakes to them.

Ouch!