I’ve been so bad at writing the past few days, being busy and being lazy are not good combined. I haven’t written a word since Thursday but tonight I’m going to churn a few out. I need to finish baking a cake and then I’ll ride the tail end of the caffeine in the coffee and the Coke I drank this evening. Tomorrow will be a similar day. Baking and then hoping to get some thoughts on paper. Time is running out and I still have 16,000 words to write. Good thing I’m not travelling this weekend and I don’t plan on having any guests.
Push ups and sit ups are still behind, but I’m making strides.
Today’s 30 Day Challenge is to write my own eulogy. This is not the conventional task but I like the idea of it. It makes me think about where I am and where I want to go in the rest of my life. It will be fun to look at years down the line and see where things changed. I’m supposed to pretend that I live to 90 years old. If I do that, I’ll surely impress my parents because I think they’re surprised when I make it to each birthday. Without further ado:
Daniel G. Zawacki was born November 22, 1987 to Joseph and Lauren Zawacki. The Bears had just beaten the Lions at Soldier Field. Eight pounds, seven ounces of child. They brought him home to their house in Chicago where they lived for the first three years of his life. In 1990, they moved to Whitewater, Wisconsin where he was raised for the next fifteen years.
In 2006 he graduated from Whitewater High School and went on to UW-Madison to study English creative writing. Here we met some of his best friends. Throughout college he worked at a number of jobs, mostly involving website programming. It was at the student newspaper that he discovered his love of writing had nothing to do with journalism. It would shape the rest of his life.
In 2010, Danny graduated from Madison with his degree and a paltry GPA of 2.79 but he didn’t let this stop him from going on to greatness. Within four months of graduating he had landed himself a job programming only to quit two days later to join the Peace Corps. In September of that year, he traveled 5,000 miles to Ukraine where he taught English to Ukrainian high school students. He always said he never regretted a moment of his time in Ukraine.
After the Peace Corps, Danny came home with two goals in mind. He wanted to start his career and start his family. As we all know, he took on a publishing internship in New York while he continued to write on the side. The publishing internship turned into an editorial job which turned into promotion after promotion. Within five years he was at the top of the industry and working on morphing it into something completely new. But New York didn’t satisfy him. He took his girlfriend at the time with him back to Chicago, where his life began and would eventually end.
In Chicago, Danny started his own publishing house and focused his free time on turning his girlfriend into his wife. She played hard to get, but Danny was persistent and won her heart in the end. They moved from their downtown apartment to a house in Wrigglyville on the Northside. Here they had two children, Calvin and Hobbes.
At the age of forty, Danny’s life took a turn for the worse. It was this year that his long time companion Marley, and his first love as he called her, passed on. Marley had lived a full cat life of twenty-three years, but her passing came unexpected to Danny. He walled himself off from the world. That year Danny refers to in his memoir as the Dark Age. He neglected his wife and his kids. The publishing house started to flounder. He spent his days locked in his home office, writing furiously and talking to no one. Then, a full year after Marley’s death, Danny emerged from his office acting as though nothing had changed. We later learned that it was here he conceived of and drafted three of his best-selling novels.
Danny returned to the publishing house to keep it from going under. His year in self-imposed isolation gave him new energy and fresh eyes to look at the business. They came out of the nosedive and soared higher than ever.
Danny’s wife and kids eventually forgave him for he neglect, but he never forgave himself for it.
By the time the publishing business was back on its feet, Danny had found a team to take over day-to-day operations so he could focus on his writing again. He worked through draft after draft after draft of his work before he even toyed with the idea of publishing. The time was well spent as each of his books won some sort of award and three topped the best-seller lists.
By sixty-five, Danny decided he had done his time and it was his time to retire. It was also the same year that he finally was eligible for Cubs season tickets. Danny spent his summers watching baseball games with his wife and riding around on one of his motorcycles. Old age served him well.
He spent his winters compiling his memoir. In it he wrote that he never intended for the book to be marketed but he planned to do so anyway. He just wanted the world to have a way of remembering him.
When Danny was eighty-nine his wife passed away. His children, grandchildren and friends credit this for his subsequent decline and eventual death. In his memoir, he mused that he wouldn’t die of old age or some disease but he was certain that he would die of a broken heart. “I love with the fullness of my heart. I give everything I’ve got to those I love. When I lost Marley, I felt that love being torn away from me. It hurt. I didn’t die then because she was, after all, a cat and my wife forced me to share my love. My wife is what saved me from death so many years ago. She’ll be the one to take me to the grave when I outlive her.”
We’ll call that sufficient enough of a eulogy. I had fun writing it but the day is getting late and I need to get to other writing.