Omaha mother becomes an author, years after her death

OMAHA, Neb. (KMTV) — One Nebraska man made his mother’s dream of becoming an author come true years after her death.

Patrick Sechser was 16-years-old when his mother, Maureen, passed at 46 after a fight with lupus.

Nearly two decades later, Sechser opened up a bin and began reading the manuscript his mother had written.

“In the way that serendipity works, a week and a half later my father showed up and handed me that purple binder,” Sechser said.

In that binder was a second manuscript.

“It’s like fate happened and I knew, life is telling me what I should do,” he said.

Sechser worked to combine the two manuscripts, completing his mom’s book. He even found a cover letter she had written to a publishing company in 1996.

Finally, 25 years after it was written, his mother’s book “The Piano Lessons” was published in November of 2020.

“We wrote a book together, some 25 years apart, but we did it together,” said Sechser.

The book has a character named Patrick and other nods to his mother’s life growing up in Omaha.

“For me growing up, my mother has been absent from my life just because of what happened, and I’ve had a lot of grief about that. But to be able to finally complete this, I have liberated myself as best as possible from that grief,” he said.

You can find the book at the Bookworm, both online and in-store. Sechser plans to donate money made from book sales to the Lupus Foundation of America.