Terrance McKnight

About Undying

This book began as a fascination with emotion and death. Since one of the most intense emotions for a human being is to experience the loss of a loved one, this seemed to be the perfect expression of portraying that concept. While the loss of a child must be the most grueling of all the pains we can feel, I felt more drawn to create a love story to espouse this theme to its fullest. I can also understand how driven a survivor may be to avenge or despair over the loss of a particularly passionate lover. However, it is conceivable that everyone may not have that empathy, especially if they haven't--fortunately--experienced the trauma of such a tragedy. Some may look at the brighter side of life, seeing a reason to keep living. Those are the ones who haven't been unaffected by death as yet or stand on the outside, looking in, offering polite condolences to those who have. I want to reach those people, but the question was how. It took figuring out what made someone rationalize the point of moving on when the most important person in another person's life had died, why they might renege on their promise to die should the other perish before them. It was obvious that those people had come to the conclusion that there was nothing else they could do. There was only moving forward, not back--or, in Max Harris's case--beyond. I gave Max a reason to make it impossible to forget his lost beloved. I made her still accessible to him even after death, where it was more than the memory of her that kept him grieving for her loss. In that endeavor, I opened up all avenues and questions pertaining to death and life everlasting.