The Perspex Floor

The Perspex Floor is a light-hearted book about a family dealing with grief and an imaginative view of what happens when we reach heaven.

The book starts seconds after Deborah’s mother, Elizabeth has died.  Elizabeth finds herself transported to heaven where she meets back up with her husband and other family members.  It is a warm and welcome home coming and she is very happy to see them all again after a period of illness and pain.

On earth the opposite is happening.  Deborah and her family, husband Leo and teenage children Tom and Gemma, try to deal with their grief as well as coping with busy lives.  Deborah juggles a job, difficult work colleagues, a redundancy threat and family with clearing her mother’s house which she finds distressing.  Tom struggles to express his grief and finds solace in playing football, Gemma looks for something to replace her grandmother and takes a stray dog under her wing.  Leo finds the family’s emotions difficult to handle especially when he has a fright.

In heaven Elizabeth’s husband, Derek shows her the Perspex floor where they can watch over their family and occasionally intervene in their lives.

The funeral unites heaven and earth as the family find it a hard day and Elizabeth finds their grief a hard thing to watch.

The relationships are as normal as possible.  Deborah and Leo bicker and disagree about many things, the children are typical teenagers, moody and charming in equal measures, and the staid Derek remembers that marriage to Elizabeth had been rather more trying than he had remembered.  Nevertheless, like all families when it matters, they are there for each other.

As the bereavement journey moves along the family learn to live their lives in a different way and Elizabeth transforms into a ghost and starts to visit her daughter’s home.

A year or so after her mother’s passing the family are finally in a better place and Deborah’s worries have been alleviated when a serious incident occurs and Elizabeth is left with a life-or-death decision to make.

When my mother died, I wrote her eulogy and despite the sad subject I really enjoyed doing it.   She was talented, hard-working, amusing and, by her own admission, slightly odd and I wanted the piece to reflect that.  I had always wanted to be a journalist but ended up working in finance so the writing was a solace to me.  In my grief- stricken state my head was full of my mother, and all I wanted was for her to have gone to a better place.  This started me thinking about what that better place would look like and in my mind, on long dog walks, I outlined The Perspex Floor.  Once I started writing, drawing on my own family’s experiences I found the story flowed but I was keen to make the surreal experience of heaven seem as realistic as possible.  That is a contradiction in terms, I know, but I wanted it to be believable.

The book received great reviews on Amazon where it was self-published.