Whatcom County resident Andre Segura’s debut novel, “The Last Protocol,” is a science-fiction/fantasy filled with autobiographical elements of a love lost but still cherished.
The written word has been a calling for Andre Segura since he was 10 years old.
The Bellingham resident struggled with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as a child, he said, and the idea of reading an entire book — much less writing one — was an enormous struggle.
But after his mother read him C. S. Lewis’s “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,” Segura fell in love with fantasy stories and became a voracious reader. Writing his own stories followed as a teenager and adult, but he rarely finished projects given his attention span and the never-ceasing flow of real life.
“Writing is kind of misanthropic,” said the now-47-year-old. “You’re gonna sit down alone in a room, you’re not going to interact with anyone, and that’s hard to do when you have a partner and a job and all those other things. And you’re trying to divide your time up, and you’re not good at time management as it is, because you have (ADHD).”
But in 2024, Segura—a Whatcom Transportation Authority bus driver—realized his goal of becoming a published author with the release of “The Last Protocol.” The novel, a science-fiction and fantasy adventure, chronicles the story of Marcus and Sam, two longtime partners seeking a cure for Sam’s aggressive cancer through an alternate reality.
For Segura, the book isn’t just a work of fiction. It’s also a meditation on love and grief resulting from the real-life struggle he and his partner, Jessica Lough, endured several years ago.
Making a connection
Segura was born in south-central Louisiana and grew up there until age 12, when his father — a research scientist — landed a job in Richland.
Shortly after graduating from Hanford High School, Segura went over to a friend’s house one day and hit it off with his friend’s sister. The two liked each other but were initially nervous about expressing it.
“We would just kind of stare at each other from across the room,” he said, “but we had kind of an immediate connection.”
The two hung out frequently through their mutual friend group, until Segura finally called her brother to ensure it was OK to officially ask her out. The rest, as they say, is history.
“She just was my best friend from that point on,” Segura said. “We were inseparable.”
Segura briefly returned to his home state to obtain a history degree from the University of Louisiana, then moved back to Eastern Washington. After several years in Walla Walla with Lough, the two debated a move to Bellingham.
A handful of their friends had attended Western Washington University, and Segura had once taken a trip to see the campus with a friend. Culturally and environmentally, the west side was alluring. Lough was still on the fence about it, given their rental home and jobs, but their lease was almost up and Segura had already applied to a Bellingham job.
To settle the matter, they played a round of the tabletop game Magic: The Gathering. The winner had final say about the move.
Segura won.
Dark night of the soul
Lough and Segura settled into their lives in Bellingham. They had no children but acquired a variety of different pets. For a time, they even ran Safe Hands, a small animal rescue that rehoused rabbits, rats, ferrets, chinchillas and cats.
When Lough was diagnosed with a benign tumor in one of her breasts, she opted not to have it removed after advice from her doctors, given a low risk of malignancy. But by 2019, that tumor was discovered to have metastasized into an extremely rare and aggressive soft tissue cancer. By the time of diagnosis, it was stage 4.
For the next two-and-half-years, Segura and Lough’s providers did everything they could. Her last chemotherapy session came in March 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. As her condition worsened into 2021, Segura became her full-time caregiver. Eventually, Lough was put on home hospice care.
“Even though she was dying, I couldn’t face that she was dying,” he said. “She was in hospice, but my emotional brain just could not accept that that was still the outcome, even though, rationally, I knew it was.”
One day in June 2021, as Lough’s mother sat with her in the couple’s bedroom, Jessica Lough died. She was 39 years old.
Segura was plunged into depressive grief, robbed of the love of his life and the future the couple had assumed they would have together.
“I hadn’t lived as an adult without her,” he said. “From the time I graduated high school to the day she died, she was a part of my life. We grew together, so being an adult, alone, had never happened to me.”
In the first year after her passing, Segura was emotionally numb. He accompanied his parents on a trip to Spain at their insistence, but the journey had little resonance for him. He also attended therapy for several months.
By the fall of 2022, Segura said he knew he had a choice to make in moving forward with his life: either continue down a depressive path to oblivion, or try to be the person Lough had always believed he could be.
“It was a true mid-life crisis,” he said. “I wasn’t buying a sports car, I was trying to figure out, ‘how do I live?’”
Channeling his grief into the ambition of writing a novel gave Segura the impetus he needed to sit down each day and work on something, he said, and the autobiographical elements of the story—Marcus and Sam are based on himself and Lough—enabled the project to move quickly.
“I wrote it in a month,” he said. “It just poured out of me.”
The writing of his first novel provided a way, Segura added, for him to express his darkest grief in a more indirect and honest way than he otherwise would have been able to, especially to those closest to him.
“You don’t want to scare people or hurt their feelings or make them worry,” he said. But in the book, I could just let it out. There’s nothing in there that I’m holding back. The fictionality of it simply puts it in a scenario with a story that people can enjoy, find intriguing. This allowed me to dress it up in a more fantastical experience that eases you into the grief, eases into the feelings, eases you into the stakes that are at-hand.”
After writing the book, Segura shopped it to publishers for about nine months.
He received positive feedback, he said, but also uncertainty toward marketing a debut author with a stand-alone book about death, cancer and grief.
Eventually, Segura went the route of self-publishing, founding MANE Publishing. The manuscript was edited over the course of a year, with Segura’s mother—an English teacher—serving as a copyeditor who did not spare his feelings, he said.
Finding fulfillment
When Segura isn’t writing or reading, he can be found shuttling passengers across Whatcom County aboard WTA buses.
The job allows him to interact with and help community members, he said, and was the kind of deskless 9-to-5 gig he sought upon reentry to the work force. While driving around all day can be tiring, Segura said that helping people get where they need to go—especially those depending on paratransit rides—makes it all worthwhile.
“I definitely always get fulfillment out of it,” he said. “It’s exactly the sort of thing that, when I go to work every day, I come home feeling like I did something productive.”
Segura also cares for the remaining pets he and Lough enjoyed: two dogs, two cats and five chinchillas. He’s also in the process of editing his second completed novel, an alternative history-horror-fantasy tale set in apocalyptic 17th century France. The idea for the book came to him shortly after Lough was diagnosed with cancer.
As a longtime fan of author George R.R. Martin, Segura said he enjoys books that dabble in the greys of morality, people’s motivations and the deeper meanings of human existence.
“When I write, that’s what I’m delving into,” he said. “No matter the subject or the genre, I’m looking either for catharsis or pathos. I’m delving into that human condition, and using the genre to help the reader get into it.”
Rebuilding a future
It has been nearly five years since Lough passed away, and there’s still a wedding ring on Segura’s hand.
It’s one of two he bought—for himself and Lough—two years into dating. Around his neck is a medallion she gave him when he was 19; his first birthday gift from her. Segura said he looks at life much differently now than before her death. He approaches it more immediately—in weeks and months—rather than the long-term planning of years.
“It really (brought) the focus to the finite nature of time,” he said. “How much time you have, and how it slips away much more quickly than you think.”
While Segura has learned to live with the grief and emptiness of Lough’s loss, he said it will likely never go away.
“There were all these plans that we had,” he said. “But without her, I feel very hollow.”
Alongside that grief is now the fulfillment of writing, however, and the meaning of being the published author Lough believed he could be—even if she’s not here to see it.
“I think she’d be very proud of me for writing it,” he said of his novel. “I think she would have been very moved by it. When I read this book, even a chapter of it, I come away feeling like I had a conversation with her that day. And I am so uplifted from that subconscious feeling.”
—By Matt Benoit