WYG Day 29

 WYG Day 29

Context: How do we write, as we are called to write, and bow with respect to the fact that death is at the core of this story? That this isn't a story at all?

How do you respond to this? What is the story of the story you're in?

I am 47 years old and I have been writing for about 4 decades. I had dreams of being a published writer, of seeing my words in my plays come alive on stage. And I still have those dreams. I struggle with my brain when I think about having written for about 40 years and have not a whole lot to show for it. I’ve been published, in newspapers, on websites and in print. But there’s not money that comes in for it, or rather, very little money that comes in for it. The idea of trying to make the leap to having an agent or submitting things to a publisher makes my anxiety spike. There’s not enough anti-anxiety meds in the world to make me deal with that. I don’t have a best seller anywhere; hell, I can’t even seem to finish a full draft and haven’t for years.

I mention these things, not because I want pity or whatever, but because those are the concrete things that people on the outside of being a writer see as ways to measure the success of a writer. In reality, just getting yourself to the page is a success. Just sitting in front of a blank piece of paper and actually spilling words on the page that assembles some kind of a story or an article or journal entry is an act of self love so seldom seen as such. But that isn’t something that really has value in our society; I can’t pay my mortgage with self love.

I am called to write. The call doesn’t specify what to write and how to do it and how to submit it to a publisher to create some kind of currency valued by our society. THe call just says write. So I do.

And there is a kind of holiness to writing, a hoaryness that comes from standing on the centuries of other writers who have come before, and of being in company of other writers, that comes from just answering that call.

And now I am called to write about grief and death.

It is obviously a hard call to answer. How do you write so that you don’t make the story seem trite? If you google how many books have been written about death, you aren’t going to get a large number (although, to be sure, there’s millions of them out there).

How do you write about an indescribable thing? Death is not something we can write about in terms of what happens after death, or even during death. We don’t have access to the thoughts of the deceased and of those around them when they go. We only have our experiences. 

And our experiences, generally, are going to be out of step with our culture and how our culture deals with death. It’s so clinical. So clean. And I understand, generally, why it has to be clinical and clean; there are sometimes diseases that could spread, and obviously we want to be careful. But I am talking beyond that.

Have you ever noticed how pristine and quiet funeral homes are? They are generally nicely furnished, beautiful buildings. They are so quiet. And I am sure that a lot of you would agree when you say that that seems out of step with our missing loved ones.

I went to a funeral for a nearly 2 year old who died of cancer. It was a sad situation for sure; I had been lucky enough to meet the little girl once; she had been born just before the pandemic and hadn’t met a lot of people except for those outside the hospital. I got a side eye from the beautiful blonde girl and I still treasure that side eye to this day. The day she died was a dark day indeed.

And as I stood in the funeral home, looking at the pictures of this family, and saw the loved ones gathered, speaking in low voices, Evee’s little pink car near her casket, with a wreath of flowers on it, I couldn’t help but think this was all wrong. Not that her family did anything wrong; clearly each funeral should be as individual as the person who died. But I felt that the core of who Evee was wasn’t being represented. I hope that if Evee’s family sees this, they don’t think less of me. I just felt that a joyous celebration of who she had been would have suited me better.

And this might not work for other people, but it seems to me that funerals in general don’t capture who the deceased was so this was not only a problem I saw for Evee’s funeral. It’s a problem I see in general. I know people are sad. I know people are in the midst of holding up that boulder of grief, and attempting to not let it crush them. I get it. So maybe laughter and joy aren’t what should happen. But something different needs to happen.

And that’s where I’m going with this. I feel like the approach to death in writing is often from a clinical and clean point of view; like I said, nothing wrong with that, but I feel like, at least for myself as a writer, it’s more than just clinical and clean. Like the way that our culture handles grief, as a disease that needs to go away, it seems to me that funerals and writing about death need something missing: the deceased. Who was this person? In my case with Sarah, Lula and Tyler, who were these people who were so senselessly murdered? There will not be a happy ending. There will not be a neat bow at the end. There will be masses of flowers that look pretty, but in the end, what happens?

How do you write the unwriteable?

You look at your grief, the lumpy, sharp, sometimes too squishy, sometimes too deep, sometimes a mountain to scale, sometimes a sea to drown in, and you see the negative invisible space of the person lost. You find that love. And that’s how you write–you just do it, with love.