I spent this past week cleaning out a closet.

On the surface of it, that doesn't seem like such a big deal, other than the fact that it really did take me four days to do it.  It wasn't because there was so MUCH stuff in the closet--it's what was IN the closet that was the problem.

Our reasons for procrastinating must-do chores are often more complex than we may realize.  We say we don't have time, or maybe we're honest and admit that we just don't wanna do it. 

But sometimes, what may seem to be a simple household chore can really be a wrenching, emotional one.

I once had a friend whose twin girls were both stillborn.  The doctor had known the babies were dead for the better part of a month, but had insisted she carry the infants to term and give birth normally.  While she was still in the hospital, her husband had the funeral, thinking, I'm sure, that he was somehow sparing her the ordeal of facing the nightmare she'd been dealing with for weeks.  I believe he meant well.

Instead, he denied her the proper chance to say good-bye.

But I knew that the worst was yet to come, and one day, I visited her, and I said, "I'll help you box up the room."

She burst into tears.

Of course, she had known that she would no longer be needing the double cribs or the pretty rocker or the white changing table or the adorable prints she'd lovingly hung on the happy yellow walls she'd painted.

The difficult birth had rendered her, in the end, unable to bear more children--yet more heartache--and although they did adopt a son later on, that would be years away from the time the two of us stood in the sweet empty nursery, cardboard boxes in hand.

You see, I'd known that, even though her husband considered the matter dead and buried, so to speak, it would be the bereaved mother who would know that the hardest chore of all still lay ahead of her.  And I knew she would not have the strength to do it alone. 

I also knew that, much as her husband loved her, she needed a woman just then.

So, together, we took down the cribs and packed away the pink baby clothes and stored the sweet wall-hangings.  We talked.  We cried.  We grieved.  And she took the first, brave step in her young life of moving forward, somehow.

Sometimes, a simple household chore can be the hardest thing you've ever had to do.

Most of you know that I used to write suspense thrillers; I had ten published over the years, and one true-crime.   My trademark was serious research, and my work took me all over the country, working with police officers, forensic specialists, sketch artists, attorneys, federal agents, Texas Rangers, gunsmiths, self-defense experts, computer-crime specialists, worldclass computer hackers, fire fighters, arson investigators--you name it, and I probably knew someone in the field who had worked with me researching that subject.

It was such a privilege, being trusted by those professionals.  They took me riding patrol in inner-city crime-ridden areas, walked me through autopsies, took me to the gunrange, taught me how to take fingerprints, allowed me to sit with victims during forensic sketching sessions, permitted me to listen to taped interviews of notorious subjects, invited me to attend a law enforcement seminar on cult crimes, took me on stakeouts, and the fireguys suited me up in turn-out gear and took me through training fires--on the nozzle!

My contacts in law enforcement and arson investigation showed me stuff I probably should not have seen, and spoke to me, at length, about the trials, tribulations, and joys of their work.  They let me traipse around after them on the job and endured my questions and read my manuscripts to check for technical accuracy, no matter how busy they were.

I loved them all.

At one time, I was even invited to attend an advanced homicide seminar attended by experienced detectives and investigators and feds of all stripes.  We worked with cadaver dogs, forensic entymologists, homicide investigators, and forensic anthropologists for that course.  In the evenings, I was permitted to sit in on confidential case exchanges and to sift through criminal files of ongoing investigations.  This is because they knew they could trust me, and they knew that when I did write whichever book I was working on, my representation of law enforcement officers would be fair and accurate.  Some of my biggest fans were cops.

I loved every minute of it.

Breaking into New York publishing was, in some ways, much harder than winning the trust of hard-core cops.  After years of freelancing articles, I wrote three book manuscripts before finally getting a book deal, which also resulted in a movie option, although the story never made it to screen. 

In the end, it was not the quality of my work, or anything I did wrong in any way, that brought down my career.  It was current events over which I had no control. 

For the better part of a year, I'd been researching and writing a story about a group of far-right extremists who plot to bomb a federal building because they consider themselves to be at war with the U.S. government.

I was 400 pages into the manuscript when the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City was bombed by Timothy McVeigh and his loser cronies.

My own publisher of five previous books rejected the manuscript, saying, "We don't want it to look as though we're taking advantage of the bombing."

The publisher who eventually bought ORDEAL paid a high-five figure advance for it and pronounced it, "the perfect suspense thriller."  Foreign rights sold for thousands more.  It was optioned for a movie.  When it was eventually published, every review was a rave.

But the publisher made a tactical error, dragging their feet, and not publishing the book until two years after I'd finished it, which put it smack in the middle of the McVeigh trial.

People were sick of the subject by then, and sales tanked.

Within two weeks of publication, the publisher had renigged on their contractual agreement to bring out my next book, TIGHTROPE as a hardcover; rather, it came out as a paperback original.  And for my final thriller, TORCH, they paid TEN TIMES LESS than what I'd earned for ORDEAL.

Because foreign versions were still coming out during the next few years, and because we were still making random sales like Books on Tape--I didn't realize that it was over, really.

I didn't GET that the publishing industry is not about words.  It's about NUMBERS, and if you don't have the numbers, they won't let you write the words.

I submitted a book proposal to my agent about drug lords buying up ranches on the Texas side of the border and terrorizing owners so they could have an uninterrupted flow of drugs back and forth across the border.

He said, "Nobody cares about the border."

This was, oh, about 1998.  I suppose he was right, at the time.

After that, I fired that agent, hired another one, and then I teamed up with a retired CIA agent and we wrote a Tom Clancy-style thriller about how the governor of Texas goes on to become president, and travels to a border town to dedicate a new medical clinic with the governor.  But terrorists have snuck what my spy friend referred to as a "dirty bomb" across the border and are planning to release it at the ceremony.  The only thing stopping them was a top-secret, elite group of counterterrorism experts taken from all the alphabet agencies and known only to the president and the national security advisor.

This was...oh, about 2000.  And the editors and agents in New York did not find our scenario believable.

And so on.  Year after year, this was my life of intense frustration and near-madness. 

During that time, the publishing industry was undergoing convulsions of its own, and the rejection letters from some of the editors left me completely baffled.  They'd rave for three paragraphs and then nitpick for one or two, but rather than trust me to fix those things in revisions, they'd reject the book outright.

A third book, about the grown son of a Charles Manson character who has hidden his identity all his life and suddenly finds everything he's ever worked for threatened by dear old dad--was rejected in just that way.

Ten years.  It took me that long to get it through my thick skull that I was through writing suspense thrillers.

I mean, you're supposed to have all these qualities to "make it" in the writing business, like persistence and determination and courage and hard work.  Well, it's those same characteristics that make it that much harder to finally give up.

But give up was what I was eventually forced to do.

For me, the death of a dream was very similar to a death in the family; I grieved for the loss of the work I had loved so much, for the sense of accomplishment and pleasure it had given me.  I grieved for the loss of who I was when I was living that life--the travel and the adventure and the fun.  During that time, I was a popular speaker at writer's conferences all over the place, and that was fun in a different way, sharing the podium with some of the bestselling authors of that time, shutting down the hotel bars with fellow wordsmiths.

The laughter.  The competitiveness.  The cool-kids-table feeling of it all.  The friendships.

When my career imploded, most of my writer friends vanished into thin air--it was as if they feared if they got too close to me, that what had happened to me was somehow contagious and it might happen to them, too.  Publishers were cutting their lists by the hundreds, and not just writers were losing work--editors and publishers were also being laid off.

In one year's time, I lost $65,000 in earning capacity, and we went broke before going broke was cool.

The stress ground me down.  The isolation--some of it self-imposed--narrowed my world considerably.

Over the years, most of the law enforcement officers with whom I'd worked so closely retired.

My family worried about me a great deal, because when a writer does not write, a soul-death takes place, and they shrivel.  It is during this time that many of them turn to drink or drugs or promiscuity or all three.  Marriages break up.

My drama was far more internal.  At one point, I spent six months planning my suicide.

Other tragedies struck.  Two of my son's friends died before the age of 20.  My best friend died of cancer at 46, leaving two motherless children behind.  Both my kids went away to college, and I spent hundreds of hours poring over student loan forms, trying desperately to keep them in school even as I missed them with every fiber of my being.

It's as if my mojo vaporized.

At some point, I stumbled into a therapist's office for help.  My insurance policy at the time covered a grand total of ten sessions, so she had to work fast, God bless her, but help me she did.  By the end of our time together, I showed her that I was writing again, and she cried.

Don't know what that means, exactly, when a gal makes her therapist bawl, but what're ya gonna do?

I wrote a final book, a true-crime, with the Houston Police Department's forensic sketch artist, Lois Gibson, and although it was done entirely in her voice, it was some of my finest writing, which helped repair my tattered and shredded confidence to some extent.  Patched it up, anyway.

And then my son, following his college graduation, joined the Marines and went off to fight a war I opposed.  When he came back from that first deployment, he took some of his combat pay and bought me a brand-new computer for Mother's Day.

"Use your gifts," he said.  "Speak out."

So with his full support and blessing, I started blogging, speaking out against the war in Iraq, which I did for several years, until Barack Obama burst on the scene, and then I turned my talents to doing what I could to get him into the White House--it was the best chance I could see for eventually ending the war.

It's been five years, now, that I've been writing, for free, on all sorts of subjects.

But no more suspense thrillers.

The closet beside my desk was filled with excruciatingly well-organized files on every subject imaginable, from criminal profiling, to hand-to-hand combat, to explosives, to terrorism and counterterrorism, to investigative procedures, to the nature of fire and its suppression--honestly, you name it and I had information on it.

I knew I wasn't going to write any more thrillers.

I knew most of my contacts were out of the business, themselves, by now.

I knew most of the information I'd collected through the years was now dated, and that anything I might need to know at some future point, I could find online.

I knew I needed the room, because now I've got all this information on the war, on strategy and tactics of modern warfare, insurgency and counterinsurgency, and on the campaign and opening months of the Obama administration.  I needed a place to put that stuff.

I needed to clean out my closet.

First thing is, you don't expect to cry, but you do.

Every file had a story--usally a cop, or a Texas Ranger, or SOMEBODY who had trusted me with the information.

There were letters.  From fans.  From agents.  From editors.

Contracts.

Cover-flats.

Letters from bestselling authors who had mentored or otherwise befriended me through the years.

E-mail print-outs of encouragement from my kids--my heart, soul, and joy.

Snapshots of another Deanie in another time.

Everything had to be sifted through. 

Most of it I threw away.  About ten percent of it I kept for sentimental reasons or because I might need documentation for something or other someday.  You never know.

But most of it went into bulging Hefty bags.

Files were re-labeled.  My Obama stuff stored neatly away.  I even bought some of those dandy little plastic drawer-storage-thingies.

It took four days because it was hard.

I thought about all the people who have closets to clean out for sad, sad reasons.  People who've lost a loved one and must face the terrible task of going through their things.  People who've gone through divorce and must divide and conquer.  People who've lost their homes and must move into cramped apartments where they have nowhere near the storage room.  Elderly people who must turn away from a lifetime because they are no longer capable of caring for their own things.

Cleaning out a closet can be a very sad thing.

I thought, when I was finished, that I would feel this great sense of relief, a lightness of being, an excitement for the unknown future.

I didn't feel that way.

But I knew that, ultimately, I would not be able to rebuild any sort of new life until I had the guts to box up and store away the old.

It's a letting-go.  A turning-away.  A moving-on.

I decided to tell my story here--long though it may have been--because times are hard right now and there are many, many people having to clean out closets, so to speak, right now.  Most of them, like me, never dreamed they would have to.  Most of them were unprepared, as I was.  Most of them wish that their cluttered closet was like the magical wardrobe of Narnia, where we can walk in, shut the door, and relive every happy moment we once spent in that small space.

In the end, I put up a corkboard in the closet, and on that board, I pinned photos of me taken in my youth by a young writer who did a profile on me for a magazine.  I'd been posing at my desk, fingers on keyboard, or leaning against my book-lined shelves, looking very writerly.

And in the middle, I pinned up an old postcard I'd once bought because I found it funny:  A skeleton, sitting at an old Remington typewriter, covered in cobwebs, but still writing.

Because ultimately, writing is not what I DO, it is WHO I AM. 

I think that, when we clean out those closets, it's a good time for us to think about just who we are, who we mean to be, and who we could be in the years remaining to us on this planet.

My friend who lost two babies so tragically was, after all, a mother.  She did adopt a baby boy and raised him, with her husband, to be a fine young man.  Losing those infants did not take away from her her own mothering abilities; she still had so much love to give.

Losing my career did not take away from me what talents, gifts, and skills I have.  I can still use them as I always did: to inform, educate, entertain, or inspire.

What closet do YOU need to clean out?

And when you are done, who are you, finally?  Can you still be that person, but in another way?

Or is your closet-cleaning a rebirth of sorts, to help you become the person you were always meant to be?

Every day now, I open my closet just to look inside for a few moments.

One thing I did, deliberately, is I left one of the little plastic drawers empty.

It's just about the right size for a book manuscript.

I don't know yet what that might be.  I know what it WON'T be.  And I know what it COULD be.

And for now, that's enough.