What My Life Is Like Today

March 27, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s something most people don’t understand?
View all responses

Today is the sixteenth anniversary of Jeff’s death. I’m sitting here mindlessly playing a game and scrolling through a few articles, trying to decide if I want to write about this anniversary. I will remember him, of course, and think of him and all he brought to my life, but I’m not sure it’s something I should still be talking about it. After all, his death belonged to him, not me. Still, I suppose I should at least mention the anniversary — for years I wrote about my grief, laid it all on the line (laid it online?), so it’s only fair that I talk about what my life is like today.

Life, that’s what it’s like.

Too many people bury their grief, letting others tell them how long they should grieve, how long it’s acceptable to talk about their feelings, how long they’re allowed to feel whatever it is they feel. But that is a disservice to grievers. I truly believe it’s important to feel all the myriad emotions, physical sensations, and mental fogs so that the body and mind can work its way through the changes to end up . . . renewed. Or if not renewed, then at least able to go through life without holding in the stress of grief like a too-tight girdle.

Despite the importance of that message, I still wavered about doing another grief post until I happened to notice today’s blog prompt: What’s something most people don’t understand? Such a blatant sign shouldn’t be ignored, especially since there is something I know about that most people don’t understand — Grief, especially grief at the death of child, a spouse, a soul mate.

Everyone thinks they understand grief because most people have felt sadness and despair and even shed tears at the loss of an acquaintance or a job or something else important to them. But not all grief is the same. Not all losses are the same.

The reality is, the most stressful event in a person’s life by far is the death of a life mate or a child. The reality is, such a death is so devastating that the survivor’s death rate increases by a minimum of 25% percent. The reality is, such grief brings about brain chemistry changes and lowers the capacity to function. Someone who hasn’t gone through the trauma of dealing with all the losses those deaths bring about — not just the body and mind changes, but the loss of identity, one’s way of life, sometimes income, and a thousand other changes — cannot understand and so has no business telling anyone how long to grieve or how to grieve. Grief belongs to the griever, not to the onlookers to people’s grief. Admittedly, no one likes to see others in pain, but that pain is often made worse by having to hide it to keep from bothering others.

People who are allowed and who allow themselves to go through the process of grief — because, at its most basic, grief is a process, a way of moving a person back into a semblance of life — end up able to simply live.

For years, I felt as if I were living as a reaction to Jeff’s death or in spite of it, felt as if grief bound me to him and to a way of life that had died with him, but now — I feel as if I am simply living. Maybe I’m just used to that deep undercurrent of sadness, but even so, it doesn’t change the fact that after sixteen years, what my life is like today is . . . life.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in grief, life, relationships, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Feeling Like a Poseur

March 26, 2026 — Pat Bertram

For a long time, I’ve felt like a poseur, embarrassed to admit I had written books. I’ve hesitated to even look at any of my published works lest I find out how mediocre they are, and proving that yes, I am a poseur. I don’t know when the embarrassment at calling myself a writer took hold. In a blog post in June of 2018, I wrote that “when it comes to writing, I don’t feel like a fraud” so it started sometime after that.

A lot of people, especially successful women, are beset by “imposter syndrome,” where they feel as if they don’t belong in the position they are in, but that isn’t my case. First, I’m not successful, and second, I’m not in any position — I stopped writing books years ago. For many months, I even stopped blogging. Can one be a writer if one isn’t writing anything, isn’t even selling the books that are already written?

Whatever the answer to that, the non-sales of books all these years whispered to me that perhaps I really was simply posing as an author rather than being one in truth. And somewhere deep down, I figured if I admitted I was a non-successful author, then I’d have to admit that maybe I wasn’t a good enough writer after all.

I don’t know where I got the courage (desperation at not having anything to read?), but I’ve been reading my books lately, something I’ve never done once they were published. I’ve been amazed by how good they are. Well written. Interesting stories. Characters that have to deal with life-changing events. Even though I’ve mostly forgotten the stories except for a brief synopsis, it’s possible that something in me recognizes the books as ones I’ve written and so see something that is not there, but I don’t think so. I tend to think they really are as good as they seem.

Unfortunately, they don’t seem like the types of books that will appeal to many people, which makes sense since I started writing them when I could no longer find the books I liked to read. (You’d think that would be a clue to their salability, wouldn’t you?)

The first two I read, Bob: The Right Hand of God and Light Bringer, are books that take place in familiar earthly circumstances but develop an otherworldly strangeness about them. The last one I read, Unfinished, is very earthly, nothing strange about it except the portrayal of the insanity of new grief. Whenever, as a reader, I’d get annoyed by her tears or frustrated by the disconnect between reality and her perception of it (knowing her husband was dead but still expecting to encounter him alive), the scene and the energy would change to some other facet of her struggle to cope and so keep me interested.

One thing that was well done, I think, was showing how she’d been affected by the horror of her husband’s last year — she’d been left in limbo because he didn’t want anything to do with her and in fact often couldn’t remember who she was and yet, like a child, needed her care. Toward the end of that year, she’d engaged in a cyber affair with a guy who was going through the same thing she was. She thought she was done with grief and was starting over, yet when her husband died, all the feeling she’d been denying descended on her, and there she was, torn between two impossible loves. And finding out her husband had secrets of his own was just topping on that whole unpalatable cake.

I hesitated to read the book, thinking it would be too depressing, but she started to find her way through that emotional mess, and the book ended on a hopeful note.

I really liked the book. Although not a lighthearted story, it was very well written and definitely did what I wanted it to do — show the insanity of new grief.

Luckily, the next book I read will be lighter since one thing I do know is that this was the heaviest of the lot.

It really is an interesting experience reading these books. I know I wrote them, but since I forgot them, I can come at them as if they were written by a stranger. And truly, the author is a stranger; someone I was long ago but no longer am. No wonder I feel like a poseur.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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When Books Were Just Books

March 23, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Once upon a time, books were just books. At least, once upon my time they were. I always knew books were written by people, of course, but the authors were separate from their works. Like literary midwives or hedge doctors, they brought stories out of the everywhere into the here. It didn’t matter who they were. Only the books mattered.

I miss those years of innocence, the years when the back covers had tantalizing blurbs, not a close-up of an author’s face, when the snippets of reviews were from reviewers, not other authors peddling their own books. I miss the mysteriousness of authors, when all that was known was the brief biography hidden in the end matter.

Now, of course, with the onset of the internet, there is no such thing as simply a book. Too much about authors is known. Too much is discussed. Too much is . . . too much.

I’ve stopped reading works by a couple of authors because of their politics. In some cases, I simply cannot abide those they choose to align themselves with, and it completely changed the tone of their books for me. I’ve stopped reading other authors because of remarks they’ve made online. I’ve stopped reading still others when I found out that opinions in the books are their own, not just their characters’ thoughts. In yesterday’s blog, I mentioned that we read ourselves into books, but it’s hard to read yourself into a book when you find the person who wrote it is too much in the book. And even harder when you find them less than admirable.

Perhaps it’s naïve of me to think it was ever possible to separate an author from the books they’ve written, but for most of my life I did. An author was simply a brand. (And often a dead one at that.) If I liked a Frank Slaughter book or a Graham Greene, I’d look for more. Back then, there were no dust jackets on library books, just some sort of generic fabric-covered binder’s board, with only a name and title on the spine, so that’s all I had to go by.

It no longer matters, really, that authors have destroyed their mystique for me because most books published nowadays are not worth my time, but I do wish I still thought that books — and authors — were something special. Something . . . magical, even mystical.

I’m sure it sounds hypocritical of me to think this way since my books came to be published because of the internet, at least in a roundabout way, and those I’ve sold I’ve sold because of the internet. But in a way, it proves my point. I’m too visible (and yet, oddly invisible because so few people find me). There’s nothing magical about how I wrote my books, no sitting in an ivory tower birthing stories, just one word dredged out of my mind at a time. There’s certainly no mystique to my being an author. There’s just . . . me.

I suppose I should be glad there are still human writers, even unadmirable ones, because all too soon, there will be mostly non-human writers wringing stories out of the nowhere.

Makes me wonder: will there still be human readers? Or will there be hundreds of little artificial readers sitting around reading those artificial books?

It’s funny though. Here I am being nostalgic about a time in my life when authors didn’t matter, only their work did, and yet the future when perhaps there will be no authors doesn’t seem all that much more palatable.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in books, fiction, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Reading Ourselves Into Books

March 22, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I read a couple of novels by an author a friend mentioned loving. I didn’t quite know how to tell that friend that I found the books depressing and pointless, so I never revealed that I’d read them. Books we love are such a personal thing. It’s as if any book we read and like is a book about us because we read ourselves into books. Repudiating a book a friend likes is like repudiating that friend. Or maybe like repudiating that friend’s sense of themselves.

In my case, I don’t particularly like or dislike most books I read and very few that I like manage to touch me, so they don’t say anything to me about me. In fact, I barely remember reading most of what I’ve read. But I am sensitive to other people’s love of certain books, and hesitate to hurt their feelings with my cynical comments, so I keep my thoughts to myself.

I’m not sure other people feel this way. Since it doesn’t bother me if people don’t like the same books I like (unless, of course, they’re the books I’ve written, and then all bets are off), maybe the friend wouldn’t care what I thought about the books.

Actually, that’s not true about it not bothering me. I once lent a whole series of books I liked to a long-ago friend who mentioned having a lot of empty time. It did hurt my feelings that they were returned to me unread, but I felt even worse because my poor red-faced friend seemed to be as uneasy about the situation as I was. I’m not sure why I felt hurt. Nor am I sure why I remembered that incident all these years later except that I’m writing about people not liking books that others loved.

As far as I know, I’ve only recommended a couple of books since then — Tanamera by Noel Barber, a novel that took place in Singapore and the Cameron Highlands where one of my current friends is from, and I only mentioned it because of her connection to the place. I think another book I once recommended was Empire by Orson Scott Card because I thought it did a good job of explaining what is going on today and why. (Or maybe not. I don’t remember the book. It’s possible I recommended something else entirely.)

But there were no hurt feelings whether or not the books were read or liked because, since that first lending fiasco, I’ve come to learn how personal books are. As we grow, sometimes books grow with us; just as often we outgrow them. Which also goes to show my premise that we read ourselves into books. What we once were, we many not still be. What once spoke to us about us, sometimes only whispers now, or even remains silent. For example, I stopped liking the series of books I lent that long-ago friend and got rid of them during one of my moves.

All this just to say I read a few novels I didn’t like and didn’t see the point to the stories, but I won’t write about them lest I hurt that friend’s feelings. And I don’t like hurting people’s feelings even if the hurt is simply something I might have erroneously read into the situation.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in books, fiction, life, writing. Tags: , , , , . 2 Comments »

Story Endings

March 21, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I’m sitting here chuckling to myself. I’ve just gone through several novels in a row where I read the first couple of chapters, got bored, then read the ending with no desire to go back and read the bulk of the book I missed. What amuses me is that this is the way I read most books now, reading just the ending, and yet with The Wheel of Time, I skip the ending completely.

Well, maybe it isn’t that funny, but for a minute there, I saw the humor.

I just had the terrible thought that for the rest of my life, I’m going to be rereading those same eleven books because I simply can’t find anything else to keep my attention. In too many novels, the minutia of the character’s lives and their inane conversations seem to serve no purpose except to fill up the page. Oh, things do happen, but those doings aren’t worth suffering through those banal pages. Even the endings seem ho-hum, as if the authors themselves had lost interest.

I used to be able to read anything. Cereal boxes, ingredient lists, one-dimensional books, just . . . anything. I don’t know if the change was a result of all the time I spent reading and studying the multi-layered Wheel of Time, or if the change would have come anyway. Because of age maybe? Loss of patience for inanity?

Maybe I’m looking at the situation wrong. Maybe I should be grateful something keeps my attention, even if it’s a series I’ve read a half-dozen times before.

Or maybe I should settle down and try reading the Kingkiller Chronicle again. I’ve had the first two books in the Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy for some time now, but have never been able to get into it. From what I can tell, it’s another one of those series that people love because of the beautiful writing or hate because it’s poorly executed. Either way, they spend hours discussing the books online. Apparently, one of the major problems with the “trilogy” is that the author never wrote the final book, though some people think the writing is so great that it’s worth reading anyway. It’s a “framework” series, where the “frame” is the present day third-person story of an innkeeper, who tells stories of his past in the first person. I never did like that kind of book, and I really don’t like fantasy, but I have the books, so I might as well try again.

Unfortunately, since there is no ending, I can’t do my usual thing of reading the first part and skipping to the ending.

And if I can’t get into it, well, there’s always The Wheel of Time.

Or hey! I could write my own series about a tired old woman chosen to save the world from evil. Assuming that tired old woman cared — to write the books or to save the world, either one.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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Quandary

March 20, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Many of my posts this year have been prompted by outside sources: a few in answer to official blog prompts, a few in reaction to articles I read, and more than a few in response to my reread of the first eleven Wheel of Time books.

I’ve mostly given up reading online articles. I don’t want to know what is going on in the world, but more than that, I’m trying to live in the offscreen world. I was going to say I’m trying to live in the real world, but the Wheel of Time isn’t the real world, though it often feels like it since it’s a reimagining of our world, myths, legends, cultures. But even so, I’ve been trying to read other books for now.

Which leaves me in something of a quandary since there’s not a whole lot left to blog about. Most of the official blog prompts aren’t that interesting to me, and with the up and down weather as well as the hazy days from out-of-state smoke, I haven’t been doing much outside, which gives me even less to write about. (Though I did find one lone hyacinth in my yard to celebrate the first day of spring!)

Since I never actually decided to blog every day, it won’t be going against any principle if I simply stopped, but I’m on a streak — 79 days and counting — so it seems a shame to give up now.

I should be glad there’s nothing much to say, especially with the anniversary of Jeff’s death coming up. Normally that in itself would have brought an onslaught of words, but our shared life ended sixteen years and a whole-lot-of-living ago. As a memorial, I had considered reading Grief: The Great Yearning, more or less my journal of that first year of grief, but I leafed through it the other day trying to see if there was any significance to a moment of sadness I experienced, and nope. Nope to finding any significance to sadness on that particular day. And nope to rereading the book. Sheesh. Just what I saw was enough misery to sink a tanker. It’s better for me to leave all that emotion between the covers of the book.

So . . . quandary. What to write when there’s nothing to write?

With any luck, I’ll find an answer in time to write tomorrow’s post.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in blogging, books, grief, life, writing. Tags: , , , . 8 Comments »

Blog Prompts

March 19, 2026 — Pat Bertram

When one blogs every day, which apparently I am doing, topics are sometimes hard to find. Usually, I write about what is currently in my head in an effort to clear it out — I do not like thoughts careening around in all that echoey space. Sometimes, though, what is in my head is not something I want to go on record as saying, especially when it touches on current events and policies. There is too much volatility surrounding the vocalization of such thoughts, which would only serve to add more careening thoughts to those already in my head.

WordPress, the platform that hosts my blog, offers a daily prompt that I sometimes make use of, but most are of topics that leave my mind blank. Nothing to say. Move on.

During previous bouts of daily blogging, I kept a list of blog topics, and sometimes I refer to that list to find something I’d like to write about. Oddly, I was able to delete many of those topics because they recently came up on the WordPress daily prompt. In fact, those from the prompt and those on my list showed up in the very same order, so apparently, they replay the same topics.

Mostly, though, I check out the list, and then put it away again, still not having anything to say about any of those items.

I do have a response to: “What Are Your Two Favorite Things to Wear?” Comfortable clothes with the addition of a hat when I go outside. But that’s the total extent of my thoughts on the subject, so it really doesn’t do much good as a prompt.

But I have no response to: “What is the worst thing you have ever done?” Cripes, I sure as heck don’t want to dig around in my memory bank looking for such a thing. If I’ve forgotten it, that’s all to the good since it probably means I’ve made amends or come to terms with my actions or it’s so far in the past that it no longer matters. The worst thing I’ve done today is renege on my intention to stay away from anything that can be construed as news — I did some research for a friend but stopped after I started getting jittery.

Nor do I have a response for: “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?” I suppose the logical answer would be Jeff’s death, but the fact is, it was a heck of a lot worse for him than me since he’s sixteen years gone and I’m still here. I also don’t like the thought of making his death about me, though my grief was all about me and how I tried to get through the days until I found a new way of being. But I’ve written hundreds of posts about that grief and don’t need to rehash any of it. As for the worst thing that happened to me today? Perhaps that jittery feeling at catching a glimpse of what’s going on in the world.

I should have a response to: “What moment are you proudest of in your life?” But I don’t. If I thought about it, I’m sure there would be many things I am proud about, but as for a single moment, such as standing up to a bully or saving the world with a well-placed word, there’s nothing. Except perhaps for keeping my mouth shut over what exactly in the news today gave me the jitters.

The following item on the list is not a question, more of a theme for a blog: “Don’t like doing, like having done.” I touched on that a few weeks ago when I wrote about not doing anything for fun. I do a lot of things, not so much for enjoyment, but simply for the doing, though I like having done the things. Like gardening for example.

Another theme that I think on. A while back, a friend said to me, “I was told once I was dead. Then we laughed.” Although this comment doesn’t prompt me to write anything in a blog post, it would make a good theme for a book, perhaps a horror story, or even a story about someone coming back as an angel.

Which brings me to yet another prompt: “write a novel about someone, perhaps an angel unaware who changes the life of everyone she meets, not in an It’s a Wonderful Life sort of way, but just someone going about life and things change.” It’s been done many times, I’m sure. In fact, I know it has since I hear echoes of those stories in the back of my mind.

Another prompt: Joe Hill said, “Getting Old is No Way to Stop Being Young” Sure it’s true, but a whole blog post on the obvious? I think not.

Then there’s Paul Coelho who wrote, “Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.” I think about this frequently. In fact, I tend to believe it’s true. But by the time I “unbecame” as much as I could, there wasn’t much left but a sentient consciousness. If you spend a lot of time alone, as I do, very little pulls you out of your own head, and if you also live for the moment, nothing stands separately from you that says “hey, I am feeling this” or “hey, I am thinking this.” You just feel. You just think. Of course, things change when you’re visiting with someone. Then you become you, the person that’s different from the person you’re talking to, and it becomes obvious you’re the person who is feeling, saying, thinking, whatever.

Which brings me to the final prompt on my list: “Myths we live by.” Frankly, no matter what we think, we all live by myths. And a lot of those myths tend to become illuminated in political discourse, whether protest or quiet talks. We all see and react to the world based on our own myths of what is right or wrong, what is a hero or villain, what is important or not worth thinking about. I have a hunch this prompt was more for me, to discuss the myths I have created for myself, but it’s been years since I put this on my list of blog prompts, and I have no idea what I intended. Obviously, I didn’t know it back then, either, or I would have written the blog and not put the topic on a list.

Well, that takes care of this blog topic list.

I better start another!

 

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

 

Posted in blogging, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Not a Private Forum

March 18, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I got an email from a woman who had left an emotionally raw comment on one of my grief posts. She had been hurting and wanted understanding as so many grievers do. But then as the rawness passed, she got on with her life. She googled herself to see what prospective employers would see, and she was shocked that the comment she left here on this blog showed up in search results. She said she thought this was a private forum otherwise she would never have responded to my post. She asked me to remove her comment, which I did.

I didn’t know comments on blogs could show up on search results. This blog is a rather small cubbyhole — pinhole, actually — in the vastness of the internet, so it never occurred to me that comments were searchable. (Especially since, come to think of it, few people leave their names, and those who do usually want to be recognized.) That this blog itself is searchable is all to the good — searching for help with grief is the major reason that people find me.

I only mention this to warn you not to put anything in a comment you don’t want strangers to find. Of course, by now, most of us know that there is no privacy online anymore, if, in fact, there ever was. Knowing this, there are a few things I never post here — my birthday, my house address, my email address, and probably a hundred other things I am so used to keeping private that I don’t remember. Other than those personal privacy issues (I’ve had a few blog stalkers over the years, and I certainly didn’t want any of them showing up at my doorstep!), my life is an open book. Actually, my life being an open book is why I’ve been careful about those privacy issues. I don’t want all the dots to be connected by people I don’t want connecting the dots.

Quite frankly, sometimes it makes me nervous about how much of myself is on here, especially all the things I wrote about during my grief years. As someone once told me shortly after I started telling a truth few wanted to admit, “It’s time to take off the mantle of grief,” but I never did.

So far, when I’ve found myself feeling nervous about any previous posts, I’ve managed not to delete them. And I won’t. But that means, your comments are there, too.

Anyway, I hope this doesn’t deter you from leaving comments. I cherish every response I get.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

 

Posted in blogging, grief, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Fool’s Game

March 15, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I spent a lot of time researching the final books of the Wheel of Time saga, trying to figure out what parts Robert Jordan wrote and what parts the substitute wrote. Since there was no one place for the information, I had to comb through hundreds of sites and interviews until I came as close as possible to knowing who wrote what.

It was all suspect, of course, because even the parts that Jordan himself wrote were added to by the substitute. Occasionally, the substitute added just a few words, but those few words sometimes changed the thrust of the scene or at least diluted it. And even when the substitute hadn’t changed parts that were written by Jordan, they would have been subject to change if Jordan been able to write the entire ending himself.

Jordan was both a pantster (one who writes by the seat of his pants, who creates and discovers the story as he is writing) and a plotter (one who outlines, who knows the story before he writes). He knew the major points he wanted to hit as well as the end to aim for, but the journey to get there wasn’t plotted out. Which means that even if he had written a significant scene ahead of time to give himself something to aim for, by the time he got to that scene in the writing, things might have changed. In the books he finished, that was often the case, so it would probably have been the same with the finale.

He had supposedly written the final scene while writing the first book, which is why the end seems somewhat sketchy (both in the meaning of not being fully drawn and of not being totally true). The woman who helped the hero at the end was never named, had never appeared previously in the story, and was someone the hero didn’t know because I think at the time he wrote that, Jordan himself didn’t know. And yet, through several of the last books Jordan did write, he was developing a character who was foretold as someone who would help, so I have a hunch by the time he reached the end, this woman would have replaced the unnamed one. And if not, it would have been a grievously misplaced use of Chekhov’s gun. (Chekhov’s gun is a principle where every element in a story should be necessary. As Chekhov pointed out, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”)

Jordan did seem to delight in turning assumptions on end, and even though he said that not every prophecy needed to have a major resolution, still, to have a character who was fated to help the hero and who was central to other characters’ actions (they thought she would kill him), to end up simply having her place a pile of clothes and money aside for him to use if he happened to survive the last battle is not a big enough payoff for all the drama instigated by that prophecy, especially since the hero could have done that himself.

The point I’m trying to make, at least to myself, is that even the parts Jordan wrote are not canonical.

So, basically, for me, the entirety of the final three books are not worth the paper they’re written on.

I am beginning to see, however, why people revere the substitute so much. Not only do they prefer his style of writing (though why people would slog through millions of words of a saga if they didn’t like Jordan’s style, I don’t know), but otherwise they’d be left with the utter sadness of Jordan never being able to finish his epic. Sad for him, of course, and sad for us. I have a hunch his ending would have been visionary if not spectacular — all the issues readers had with his getting sidetracked had pretty much been resolved, and he was again focused on getting the characters to the last battle. Most readers, I’m sure, are just as glad not to have to contemplate what could have been and are willing to settle for what they were given.

Most. Not all. Not me. I keep thinking I should be able to figure out what the ending would have been because of all the clues Jordan had laced into the saga with foreshadowing and prophecies. The “hero’s journey” concept could be a clue, too, since that was a big part of the origin of the books, but in the end, it’s a fool’s game since there’s no way of knowing what would have come out of Jordan’s subconscious and what he would have discovered as he wrote.

Still, as a person who gets caught up in literary mysteries, I’m sure I’ll continue to do what I can to puzzle out the end, fool’s game or not.

 

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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Using My Time

March 14, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The more I reread The Wheel of Time books, and the more I can retain those millions of words, the more the irony and the subtle humor become apparent.

In one scene, one of the heroes, who is being kept as something of a sex slave for a queen, entered a room where a bunch of women newly come to the palace were milling around. He had a bad feeling about the situation, and he stood there waiting for “one of the Forsaken [what the disciples of the Dark One were called] to leap out of the flames in the marble fireplace, or the earth to swallow the Palace beneath him.” That isn’t amusing, of course, but what is amusing is that although he didn’t know it (nor could anyone who hadn’t previously read the books in their entirety), one of the women in the room really was one of the Forsaken.

In another case, a woman who was sort of a slave caretaker (Robert Jordan created some appalling civilizations), thought that one slave’s new-found acceptance of her situation meant she was going to try to escape, and so doubled up on her conditioning. What I found amusing is that the slave keeper herself ended up being blackmailed into helping the slave escape.

Because of small things like this, which cannot be seen until a reread or two, I’m finding this read through to be more amusing and more touching than I expected. It helps, I think, that I skip the torture scenes. (Those Forsaken do love their torture. Oddly, most of them undergo just as much pain as they give. I suppose that’s what happens when you dedicate yourself to the Dark One. Since he’s also called “The Father of Lies,” you’d think that would be a clue to his nature, right?)

It also helps that I know so much mythology and history, long ago customs and costumes, and all the other bits that make up Jordan’s world, because the knowledge makes the books richer, though I miss a lot. In a passage I just finished reading, someone mentioned the seals on the Dark One’s prison, saying three were hidden away, three were broken, and no one knew where to find the seventh seal. Seeing “the seventh seal” written out like that was a hitting-palm-on-forehead moment for me. I don’t know why I never associated these seals with Revelations and Armageddon, though I should have. I knew the last battle was Armageddon, though in the books it’s called Tarmon Gai’don. I just never got the connection with the seals. Now I’ll have to go through the books and see if I can identify what seals were broken and how they affected the Wheel of Time world. Like the fisher in The Fisher King legend, the Wheel of Time hero is “one with the land,” which is becoming obvious as the hero’s tempestuous moments are reflected by stormy weather. So too must the broken seals have some sort of correlation with what’s happening in that world. As if there’s not already a headful of correlations to find!

I know there’s a lot of correlations between historical battles and those of Jordan’s, such as the off-screen skirmish called “Altaran Noon,” which was based on the “Sicilian Vespers.” Since I don’t know much about battles, I’m sure I miss a lot of what he intended. Or maybe I’m not missing what he intended — it’s possible he didn’t really intend for anyone to see what he was doing; it’s possible he recreated those battles for his own amusement since he was a self-avowed military historian. (Before becoming a full-time writer, he was a nuclear engineer, and before that, he’d served two tours in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner, which contributed to his interest in military history. It’s also what inspired him to give his male characters their unique perspective about not killing women.)

I seem to be writing a lot about these books lately, but there’s a great deal to process, though sometimes I wonder why I want to. Still, I need to be doing something, and studying these books and this world is a good a use of my time as any. And who knows — if I can come to understand his world, maybe I can understand ours.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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