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Port Richey Couple's Love Story Leads To Connections, 1st Book

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By CHERYL BENTLEY

The Suncoast News

Published: December 27, 2008

PORT RICHEY - 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 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 room. 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, of the three children they had raised, of the network of friends they had made.

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

Faulkner talks about the hospital employee while sitting on the back porch of her Port Richey home. Now recovered, Bill sits next to her, listening to his wife describe the story of her first book, the self-published "I Must Be In Heaven, A Promise Kept."

She still celebrates the Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association, which gave her first place in the published-memoir category.

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 writing in formal, academic prose, but it didn't work. She reverted to the language neighbors use over coffee.

"I found out to say it like it is," she said. "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.christianfictiononline magazine.com, invited her to write an online column.

The book tells two stories. One is the Faulkners' 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 said, laughing.

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 said her lifelong faith allowed her to move beyond fear into a deeper understanding of life's sweetness.

The result became moments of grace, when the need for a cigarette resulted in the connection that came from meeting the woman in the hospital. 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 said. "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-age 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 said.

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 wrote in an e-mail.

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