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Popular blog about couple’s loss finds new audience in book

GO & DO

Book Events

Two events this weekend will highlight Matt Mooney’s new book “A Story Unfinished.” 7-9 p.m. today, Riverfront Pavilion, Fort Smith and 5-7 p.m. Friday, Nightbird Books,

Fayetteville

The book is also available through Family Christian Stores, Mardell and through online retailers such as givingtons.com and amazon.com.

Lots of people encouraged Matt Mooney to write a book, even some within the publishing world. He finally agreed, only to have all of the publishers that showed interest turn down the manuscript.

After spending so many hours on the book, it was frustrating and confusing, but Mooney came to terms with that result.

“I decided this (the book) was for me and my family, and that was enough,” said the Fayetteville resident.

Now that the book is finished and published, complete with a new ending, he understands why things happened as they did.

Mooney didn’t have a proper ending to the story when he declared it complete the first time around.

The book still contains many loose ends - it’s called “A Story Unfinished,” after all - but that’s to be expected of any memoir written by a person in his 30s.

The ending he lacked came courtesy of a new addition to the Mooney family, which already contained wife Ginny, daughter Hazel, now 4, and son Anders, now 3. Lena, a Ukrainian orphan, came home with the Mooneys in January 2012 after months of adoption drama.

The adoption showed Mooney what he had to gain, a stark contrast considering what he’d already lost.

“It (bringing Lena home) explored the redemptive qualities of the story,” Mooney said. “We’ve seen God work in amazing ways through our loss.”

The loss Mooney refers to was already well chronicled and makes up much of the new book.

Before any of the Mooneys’ other children came Eliot. Thirty weeks into Ginny’s pregnancy with Eliot, doctors told them the boy had Trisomy 18, a rare but usually fatal genetic condition. According to the Virginia-based Trisomy 18 Foundation, only 10 percent of those diagnosed with the condition make it to their first birthday.

Many more arrive stillborn.

Matt Mooney started a blog - still active and visible at theatypicallife.com - which initially served two purposes. First, it asked for prayers, and second, it provided updates about Eliot’s prognosis and progress in the idea of saving family and friends from making phone calls. The blog blossomed, both in terms of the breadth of Mooney’s writing and its readership.

“I always loved the idea of writing. But I never put any effortinto it before Eliot,” Mooney said. “He was the trigger to start writing. He created an urgency.”

Friends encouraged his writing, too. Josh Bell, a fellow Fort Smith native and a high school friend of Mooney’s, kept hearing how important the work was.

“People would tell us (Matt’s circle of friends), more freely than they would Matt, about how it connected with them and changed their lives,” Bell said.

In addition to the blog, Mooney took thousands of photos and hours of video during the 99 days of Eliot’s life. Following his passing, the Mooneys commissioned a video that has now been viewed nearly 4 million times on the online video sharing service YouTube.

The six-minute film drew attention to the Mooneys’ story, and they were guests on both the “Today” show and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

It created a firestorm of activity from which the Mooneys eventually backed away.

“Once we went on ‘Oprah,’ there were so many opportunities,” Mooney said, pausing at the last of those words. “But we didn’t need to walk through doors just because they were open.”

Instead, Mooney started to write.

“I wanted to write more deeply about what most people knew six minutes about,” he said, referring tothe length of the video.

The book shares personal essays about Eliot and his life. It also examines family and friends and contains a frank discussion on grief and loss.

“They are very careful not to wrap up something that was really tough, and still is tough, with a pretty bow,” Bell says.

Nancy Guthrie, an author of a dozen Christian books, says that the work is a place where “questions are allowed to simmer without easy answers, and beauty begins to blossom in the dark.”

After the initial rejections, Mooney turned his focus elsewhere, including working full time with 99 Balloons, the Fayetteville-based nonprofit organization he and Ginny started in the wake of Eliot’s death. The organization works with disabled children both in the UnitedStates and abroad. Soon to follow was the complicated adoption process that brought Lena, herself a special needs child, to Arkansas.

With that part of the process completed, the book’s ending was falling into place, too. While the Mooneys were in Ukraine to pick up their new daughter, another publisher asked Mooney if he thought Eliot’s story could be turned into a book, unaware one already existed in draft form.

Mooney resumed work on the project, incorporating stories about Lena and the couple’s work overseas.

That adds a richness to a book that was already more complex than a story about loss. Others are drawn to its elements about coping with a dire medical diagnosis, disability and also love.

“I think there are so many different things for people to take away,” said Bell.

“And there is a bigger piece to our unfinished story than we’re able to see.”

Mooney has no grand expectations for the book, but it’s already being distributed to several retailers and is available at local options such as Nightbird Books, where he’ll have a book discussion on Friday.

He continues to blog, and he expects to continue writing memoir-style works. And, just as importantly, he’ll continue to be a dad to Lena, Anders, Hazel - and Eliot.

“This (writing and speaking) is my dad role.

This is how I live out those lessons,” he said.

Our Town, Pages 27 on 06/27/2013

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