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Port Richey Woman's Book Wins State Prize

Cheryl Bentley/SUNCOAST

"I Must Be in Heaven" by Port Richey resident Valerie Anne Faulkner is the story of faith and love when her husband Bill was in a coma from a brain aneurysm. The booked earned her a Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association.

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By Cheryl  Bentley | The Suncoast News

Published: December 3, 2008

Nicotine called.

In 2005, while at the hospital where her husband Bill lay in a coma in the intensive care unit from a ruptured brain aneurysm, Valerie Anne Faulkner finally found a place in the hospital where smoking was allowed.

There, she met a Latino female employee who worked in the linen department. To Faulkner's surprise, the woman already knew about her, although the two had never met.

The woman described the pictures Faulkner had placed on the walls of Bill's intensive care unit. Bill had been given only a 15 percent chance of surviving.

The pictures told the visual story of the couple's years together - of how they had met when she was 12 and he 16 and got married when she was still in high school. They told the tale of their electrical contracting business in Port Richey and of the three children they had raised and the wide network of friends they had made over the years.

The intensity of their love came through, the employee told her. Many other Latino employees had been moved by the pictures and discussed the Faulkners' story in Spanish during their breaks. They were praying for her husband.

Faulkner recalls the hospital employee while sitting on the back porch of her Port Richey home.

Now fully recovered, Bill sits next to her in comfortable silence listening to his wife describe the story of her first book, the self-published "I Must Be in Heaven, a Promise Kept."

She is still celebrating the Royal Palm Literary Award she received Nov. 15 from the Florida Writers Association for taking first place in the published-memoir category.

With warm eyes, Faulkner talks easily, as if sharing stories with a neighbor over coffee.

The back porch became her office, she explains, where she wrote the book. She tried at times writing it in formal, academic prose, Faulkner notes, but it didn't work.

She reverted to the everyday language that neighbors might use over coffee.

"I found out to say it like it is," she recalls. "If I don't know big words, so what?"

Evidently the style has worked, she said, because after reading excerpts from the book, the editor of Christian Fiction Online Magazine, www.christianfictiononlinemagazine.com, invited her to write a regular online column.

The book goes back and forth telling two stories. One is the Faulkner's love story. They were married only days before he was sent to Vietnam. "I hadn't graduated from high school, and I wasn't pregnant," she laughs.

The other tale is his time in the hospital, a time that began with fear. But the woman who was raised as a Presbyterian in Long Island notes her life-long faith allowed her to move beyond fear into a deeper understanding of life's sweetness.

The result became moments of grace, when even the very human moment of needing a cigarette resulted in the time of love and connection that resulted from meeting the Latino woman. She recounts how like the woman, strangers were drawn into Bill's story and began to pray for him.

In turn, she prayed for the loved ones of people she met in the hospital.

Her eyes fill with tears. "It started to click we're all like vines that are intertwined with one another," she says. "If we allow ourselves to interweave with one another, it's a wonderful place to exist in."

The story's title comes from the first words Bill spoke after his illness.

Looking around the hospital room and seeing his wife, he said, "I must be in heaven."

Faulkner expected her target audience to be middle-aged women but has found teenagers and men also respond to the book. "I think everybody wants to believe there are still miracles in today's world," she says.

The book has opened the door to more writing possibilities. Readers have already requested a sequel.

"I'm still a wife, and a mom, and a grandma, even an electrician, but it's nice to know, that God knew I had even more to offer, and in the most extraordinary way brought it to my attention," Faulkner writes in an e-mail.

Faulkner will have a book signing 1 - 4 p.m. tomorrow, Thursday, Dec. 4, at Books-A-Million, 9570 U.S. 19, Port Richey.

For more information go to www.imustbeinheaven.com.

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