Fleeing the Past . Christopher LaGrone
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thousand words is too long.”
But I offered a suggestion: “We could turn this into a trilogy,” I said. “This would break nicely into three books.”
Chris liked that idea and saw immediately how to divide his story into three parts. Thus began almost two years of rewriting and editing. Chris would send me chapters as he finished drafts. I’d edit them and send them back to him for revisions. He’d return them to me, and I’d add the finished versions to a growing manuscript file.
We had finished Book One this way and were halfway through the same process for Book Two when Chris informed me that he was going to Argentina in August 2018 to improve his already fluent Spanish and learn more about the Hispanic culture. From Argentina he was to travel to Chile and Peru.
Before Chris left Denver, he finished drafts of all of Book Two’s chapters, and we discussed a rough outline for Book Three. His absence allowed me time to focus on a book of my own that I was finishing.
In late October I emailed Chris, asking when he would be returning. “We need to hit it once you are back in town,” I wrote.
“I’m in South America for another few months,” he wrote back. He was looking forward to visiting the Atacama Desert in Chile, where the thirty-three Chilean miners were trapped underground for sixty-nine days before their dramatic rescue in August 2010.
By early December 2018, Chris had made his way to Cusco, Peru (elevation 11,152 feet), via Lima (sea level). He was headed for Machu Picchu, the center of the Inca civilization of the fifteenth century, high in the Andes Mountains.
“Chris suffered from severe asthma his entire childhood,” his mother Sherryl told me later. “It continued into his adult life. Changing altitude quickly when he flew from Lima to Cusco, his body was not able to adapt to the thin air quickly enough.”
I can’t begin to express how stunned I was when I received that startling phone call from Nancy in December 2018. But, somehow I knew right away what I wanted to do.
“This isn’t the time,” I began. “But when you think the time is right, please tell Chris’s mom and sister (Aimee) that, if they’d like to have the trilogy finished as Chris’s legacy, I’ll volunteer to write Book Three. I have a good idea where Chris was going with it.”
By then I had worked with Chris for more than two years. Over countless meetings I had coached him to develop the story as a three-book series. While Book Three wasn’t yet in draft form, Chris and I had discussed it at length. I didn’t know exactly how he planned to conclude, but he’d put all of the building blocks in place. And I’d edited enough of his writing to have a good feel for how he expressed things; I was confident that I could replicate his style.
I’ve never been in the Border Patrol, of course, and know virtually nothing about being an agent. Sustaining Chris’s intimate knowledge of life in the Patrol would have been impossible for me. Luckily, I had a source who agreed to provide me with insights into Border Patrol policies and procedures and many examples of an agent’s adventures. Thus, I knew I’d be able to fill Book Three with the kinds of true-life experiences Chris related so realistically in the first two books.
Just after the start of the new year, Nancy made sure I knew when and where Chris’s memorial service would be held, and said she hoped I would attend. I didn’t want to miss it, and afterwards I was thankful I hadn’t, because, for as well as I had gotten to know Chris, I had no idea how important writing was to him until I listened to speaker after speaker talk about how badly he wanted to become a successful writer. It drove everything Chris did the last several years of his life.
I knew then what to expect, and a week or so after the service I received an email from Sherryl LaGrone that read, in part: “Aimee and I are very much interested in having you finish Chris’s work.” A week later his mother and I talked by phone, and in March I met her face to face for the first time, before a Colorado Rockies Spring Training game in Scottsdale, AZ.
The book I was finishing when Chris died was my tenth as an author, but all are non-fiction. I had tried writing fiction almost forty years earlier but decided that, as a career newspaper journalist trained in reporting facts accurately, I just wasn’t good at making things up. But I’d edited many novels and had been working with Chris for two years. So, I was willing to take another crack at “making things up”—especially since Chris had done most of the hard fictionalizing: creating characters, setting scenes, and establishing the story arc.
My first step was to finish editing Book Two. I decided to end it five chapters earlier than Chris planned, and use those chapters in Book Three. I also had other material from Chris to build on, meaning at least a third of Book Three is his origination.
From there it was just a matter of answering the recurring question every novelist faces, though it was a new one for me: What happens next?
Chris inspired the answers.
I hope I’ve honored my friend Chris with the way I completed the story he created, and that my attempt to capture his storytelling style reads like the rest of this trilogy.
—Denny Dressman
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY SON CHRISTOPHER was a successful high school and college baseball player, and like most athletes, most of his focus was on his sport. After graduating from college with a degree in marketing and working in various jobs, he discovered that his true passion was not athletics or marketing, but writing. After uncovering his passion, it became his goal to become a published author. Chris began pursuing his dream earnestly while serving as a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
His loving father Mark, my husband, was a high school teacher and Chris’s baseball coach at Arvada West High. Mark, too, loved writing but kept it on a personal level. He encouraged Chris to write what became the Delta Tango Trilogy. The two of them would talk daily about their love of words, the challenges of working on the southern border, and the importance of pursuing one’s dreams. Mark was Chris’s rock.
When Mark died of cancer in 2014, the loss was tremendous for Chris, missing his daily visits with his dad. It was then that the LaGrone family’s dear friend, Alan Olds, became Chris’s confidant and mentor—and initial editor when Chris began writing his first Delta Tango manuscript. Retired from a full career as a highly respected and successful high school English teacher in Colorado, Alan guided and instructed Chris, who’d had no formal writing education. Our family is grateful for all the hours Alan spent with Chris, not only on his novel, but also as Chris’s devoted and loving friend.
When expressing thanks, the first person who comes to mind is Denny Dressman, whose role is detailed in the In Memoriam section. Without Denny, there may never have been a Delta Tango Trilogy. For more than two years, he not only edited Chris’s work and helped him develop his novel, ultimately into a trilogy; Denny also became a good friend to him during that time. Since Chris’s unexpected death, Denny has become a good friend of mine, a mentor who has guided and instructed me throughout the process of bringing the trilogy to publication. I am eternally grateful for Denny Dressman, a true professional who is also kind and compassionate.
Thanks, also, to Nancy Hestera, wife of my son-in-law’s brother, who first asked Denny if he would read Chris’s original manuscript. And to Terry Whalin of Morgan James Publishing, and everyone in founder David Hancock’s Morgan James family who helped produce this book and the entire trilogy.
It is with tremendous pride, as well as a heavy heart, that my daughter Aimee and I see Christopher’s dream realized, and his legacy preserved, with publication of the Delta Tango Trilogy. We miss both Chris and his father deeply, but we know that they have been reunited in a better place.
—Sherryl LaGrone
Christopher LaGrone
FLEEING
THE
Past