One of the many jobs writers have is identifying timelines, looking for openings and closings, beginnings and ends. Whether it’s with sentences, paragraphs, chapters, or the stories themselves, there are places for you to dive in and others where you must fade out. Any story is just an encapsulation of a period of time and no matter how much you’re enjoying it (or not, in some cases), there must be a time to put it to rest. Ending a chapter—both in life and in the craft of writing—can be easy or hard but it must be done because both stories and experiences are finite. They can weave themselves into the fabric of your life, but even the threads in fabric have a beginning and an end.

I puzzled for a few days over this blog post because I wanted to explain why I haven’t written much lately. For most of this past year, I’ve been busy closing chapters, both literally and figuratively. It’s been a long period of tying up loose ends and I’d been fighting contradictory battles while doing so. On one hand, I wanted to be done with it all, to have already moved on, to skip ahead to newer horizons and more interesting things. But on the other, I wanted to hold on to what was tangible and comfortable as long as possible, to have “something to do” so that I could avoid the inevitable—starting those new chapters.

The past few months have been unusually hectic. I’ve been wrapping up three book projects at once, finalizing chapters in Pot Inc. which is finally ready for the printer and its spring release, adding a 15,000-word epitaph to Blood Diamonds for its 10th anniversary edition, and giving The Road to Kosovo a chapter-by-chapter facelift in preparation for its digital release sometime in the next few weeks.

It’s a case of happy symbiosis that all of these titles will be freshly released at roughly the same time (as will Flawless, which is coming out in paperback early next year), and it made sense to spend the time needed to fine-tune them all. I looked at it as a matter of housekeeping, one of those natural moments of closure that us writers are always looking for, a chance to wrap up 15 years of work all at once to make room on the shelf (literally) for whatever is going to come next.

But in the meantime, I’ve been dealing with another sort of chapter ending that I haven’t been so eager to see completed. It’s been seven months since Chris’s death in Libya and my reaction has been to run as hard as I could and as far as possible from whatever I’m supposed to be doing to deal with it. I spent nearly four of those seven months traveling—to France, to Africa, to ten different states—just to keep my mind occupied.

As I should have known, that tactic isn’t sustainable. As each of these publishing projects comes to their natural end, the need to deal with this larger thing looms that much closer. It’s led to procrastination, inertia, and a million different reasons to postpone getting started on something new, even writing blog posts. It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out why. Chris has a direct tie to each of the things I’ve worked on these past years and months; he was involved in each of the books I’ve been working on. Finishing their chapters feels like I’m finishing a chapter of my life with him. Moving forward means leaving him behind, fixed in memory.

Knowing that there’s no other choice hasn’t made it any easier. I’m afraid of forgetting. But I’m also afraid of coming to a standstill. The trick is to find a balance between the two, another skill I’ve been trying to relate to writing. I’m always balancing something—hard info with personal narrative, humor with gravity, illustrative scenes with macroscopic overviews. And that, actually, is the point of having chapters, to organize information and experiences. What’s easy to forget is that ending one chapter and beginning a new one doesn’t erase what’s happened before. Themes carry forward and the past is part of the larger work, working in concert with the whole and serving to enrich it.  It will always be there to revisit.

Still … I’m the sort of writer who likes to linger and tinker over things perhaps a bit too obsessively, never entirely content to close any chapter completely. Have I done my best? Have I paid proper respects to my material? Am I saying the right thing? Is it really time to type the final period and start fresh on a new page?

How will I ever know?