Heart attacks kill. We should know!

In my novel, In the Midst of a Storm, the heroine, Rita Young, loses her father: He has a heart attack and dies one Sunday afternoon. Three months before my novel was released, my aunt called my husband and I at two-thirty in the morning and told me that my father, whom I loved dearly, had a heart attack and died instantly. My aunt called me because my mother was too upset to speak. As I listened to her crying in the background, the reality begun to set in: my father, like my character’s father, was gone and neither one of us ever had a chance to say, “good-bye.” When I released the E-BOOK on my website, www.nicolecschroeder.com last month, I tried to rewrite that scene. I thought, “at least one of us should have closure,” but I couldn’t get passed the first word change. My eyes started to water and my hands started to shake. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, but it was clear to me that she, like me would not get the closure that we desperately wanted. I say, “wanted,” because if I needed to say, “good-bye” to my dad I truly feel that God would have given me the chance to do so and if Rita Young truly needed closure, I guess I would have written it that way in the beginning.