Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me
By Tom Bentley | March 25, 2020 |
The guy with the scythes is happy—he’s still got a job
“We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying … literature has come out of it.”
—Marilynne Robinson
Trigger warning: several bummers ahead. Yes, your groaning is my groaning, and though this post will dig some dark coal, there is a writing diamond or two herein as well. And before we mention that effing virus, a little rehash:
Six months ago, my cat Malibu disappeared. I was deeply bonded to her, time and again laughed at her antics, worried when she was sick, looked to her regularly for comfort and companionship. Though I know she’s not coming back, I still scan for her striped shape in the nearby fields.
A few days ago I saw her sleeping on our bed—but it was just a crumpled-up shirt. She was semi-feral when we got her, so we continued to let her roam outdoors in the daytime. That felt right, but now I feel I failed her, that I failed to protect her. I still see her, purring with eyes shut in my lap. Six months later, the loss is daily.
Loss is a hollow place.
We try to help where we can, and try to survive our own trials and stresses, illnesses and elections. We work really hard at not being driven crazy by noise and speed and extremely annoying people, whose names we are too polite to mention. We try not to be tripped up by major global sadness, difficulties in our families or the death of old pets …
—Anne Lamott, Stitches
Two days before Christmas, my old boss skied into a tree at Tahoe and died. Though I hadn’t worked for him for years, I had always admired his goofy gusto, and how he drew others into his mad enthusiasm for skiing, diving, boating, hiking. At his memorial a month or so ago, many people testified to his fundamental decency.
On a cliffside above the beach, surrounded by the large memorial crowd, his son, a professional dancer, improvised to acoustic music a hard-twisting, and soft-flowing, and fully mesmerizing dance, a tribute to his father. Those movements were so knifing and experiential I can’t accurately describe their immediacy, but the dance made me burst into tears.
“They understood that the meaning of life is connected inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions–only those who do it well and those who don’t.”
—Thomas Lynch, The Depositions
A Visit to Vision Land
A month ago, my best friend’s wife died of pancreatic cancer. She’d become ill out of nowhere in the fall and died in less than six months. My girlfriend and I visited her a few weeks before her death and spent an hour or so with her on her bed. It was one of those times of astonishing transcendence: She was so even keeled, grounded and so communicative in her ease.
She was an accomplished person, but I’d always admired her modesty, her always seeming balanced and real. After we left her from the visit—at the end her reassuring me that everything would be fine, while I garbled out some blubbery froth—I thought she seemed like some kind of guru or saint, the spectacular way she looked at calendar’s end and nodded to it in grace and understanding. It was dazzling.
My friend—I’ve known him for 50 years—said she was much like that until the very end, when she went into an area he described as “vision land”: “… comfortable, chatty, but saying lots of stuff that was either delusional or cosmic or both.” Seeing her passage was a profound experience for him, and for their two teenage sons. It reminded me of the cliffside dance above, presenting again that there is vast depth in our often unseen nature, but it doesn’t come out much, because we have to shop, and pick up carpet nits and the like.
Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known—an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why.
—Maria Popova, Figuring
A week ago, an old pal emailed me that his wife has “… an entity in the right lung, the size of your thumb between the knuckle and the tip. Showed us in the scan. Turns out some lymph nodes have been invaded too.” This is a woman who just weeks ago had to have a truly brutal surgery as a result of excessive radiation for cancer treatment last year. The surgery had gone well and they were hopeful about prospects. Needless to say, prospects don’t look that good now.
“Then one day I have to run to catch a bus. I am so out of breath when I get there that I know in a flash all my preparations for the apocalypse are doomed. I will die early and ignobly.”
—Jenny Offill, Weather
One more, if you can stand it. (I can’t.)
Less than a week ago, a friend of mine who made it through breast cancer and treatment a couple of years ago told me she’d just gotten a CT scan for some discomfort, which turned up fluid around her heart, which can be indicative of a virus. Or metastatic cancer. Time will tell, whether we want to turn back the clock or not.
Are you still with me? If not, I understand. I’d recommend looking for a cookie, or seeing if there’s a spring bird singing in the garden, or pouring a shot of 100-proof Knob Creek for company while you sit on the porch. And I’m sure many of you could recite, in your own rhythm, the litany of grief that I have above, tied to the sinews of your family and friends. This is life stuff, shared by all of us.
I don’t know what to advise anyone about matters of grief and distance. You have to go with what feels right and console as you can. We are humans, we respond to genuine human sympathy. I’ve taken enough acid, mushrooms and peyote to be convinced that we sometimes walk through the walls of the everyday into something else—though the ultimate extinguishing of the candle on this side is another thing indeed, one for which we never seem prepared.
Since I have a tendency toward gloom, I’ve been using a light-therapy box daily since September. I don’t think it’s doing anything, but considering how sour the news is now, I’ve remained close to my usual baseline gloom, so perhaps it is working. I’ll keep using it, though spring has—hard to believe—sprung.
But There Is the Writing
For those still reading, all that death and desolation got me thinking about death and how it relates (finally!) to writing. To reference a 1960s product, death combines (and spatters) all the colors in the Spin-Art of our emotions. When death veers into the room, it sharpens our attention, and its aftermath often makes us reassess our place in the grand scheme, whether the reaction is terror, disquiet or even relief. So it is with death in fiction. (Spoiler alerts in named works ahead.)
We work hard, we enjoy life as we can, we endure. We try to help ourselves and one another. We try to be more present and less petty. Some days go better than others … Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude, and try not to be such babies.
—Anne Lamott, Stitches
A death in a novel doesn’t have to be a cataclysm. In John Williams’s Stoner, which I read last year, the protagonist William Stoner quietly, resignedly accepts his life force ebbing in much the same way he accepted some agonizing (at least for me, the reader) failures in his stoic life. The understated way he went about his work and personal life, which yet had a deep inner glow, builds a momentum of reader empathy that makes his quiet death devastating.
The death of Inman in Cold Mountain, a book I loved, was so moving, and so well developed because his tortured journey home built and built and built in challenge and error, seeming more steps backward than forward; but he had to get home to his lover, home to the mountain he loved. He made it, though it turned out his real home lay further off in the empyrean.
And then there’s a mass shooting, a nuclear plant melts down, just as a niece is born, or as you find love. The world is coming to an end. I hate that. In environmental ways, it’s true, and in existential ways, it has been since the day each of us was born.
—Anne Lamott, Stitches
And all the glitter and glow of The Great Gatsby ends up with him shot dead in a pool, because of a mistaken judgment by the man who kills him. Fitzgerald worked the weight of this by showering us with Gatsby’s optimism and cheer and gleeful displays of ostentation only for him to die in a confused state of emotional unraveling. You sense something bad coming, but it still surprises.
I defy you not to be wrenched when George kills Lennie in Of Mice and Men to save him from the murderous hands of an ugly mob. Their odd and enveloping friendship is so deep and intimate it seems a privilege to see it as a reader, and such a blow to have it taken away.
In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot.
—Maria Popova, Figuring
Even when death is oblique or unclear, like with the Nina character in Amor Toles’ great A Gentleman in Moscow, her death-like absence causes the Count to fundamentally become her daughter Sofia’s father, which is a pivotal turning point in the book. The mother is gone, but a reluctant—yet loving—proto-father emerges to consequential effect.
And like the loss of my beloved Malibu, it doesn’t even have to be a human death to move you and make you question how and why the universe works. I read Charlotte’s Web many times as a kid, and always teared up at Charlotte’s dying, even if it was presented as the natural order. I’d probably get glubby reading it again now.
“His hand reaches out slowly and touches his book and returns to his dark chest. Nothing else moves in the room.”
—Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
So, death. There’s a saying something like, “Death is the biggest trip of all. That’s why they save it for last.” Death has always come, and death will come tenfold in these viral times. May it spare your loved ones. If it has a place in your writing, may it illuminate, confound or extend the emotional depth of the story.
Be safe, tell the ones that matter you love them, and wash your hands.
But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die—in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love.
—Maria Popova, Figuring
Postscript (as though this hasn’t gone on long enough)
My father died at 93 on New Year’s Day in 2011, finally succumbing to complications related to his years of Alzheimer’s. I was down in LA visiting that Christmas days before his death, and though he had occasionally been struggling with exactly who his children were, we were all grateful that he still recognized my mom.
Though in that time he was mostly in bed, we brought him out into the living room in a wheelchair for a while every day for him to see and share a different part of his narrowing life. I was reading a novel on the couch when he turned to me and said, “Hey Tom, watcha reading?” To that point, a week in, he’d only been able to greet me with a “How you doin’?” and “Good” as the total of our conversations.
I showed him the book cover and told him a bit about the book and he said “Good” and went back to sleep. Though not a big reader himself, he knew I loved to read. I left that day, and that was the last conversation we had, and it was about books, and for that, I’m glad.
I will die.
You will die.
The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us.
What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.
—Maria Popova, Figuring
So, my WU friends, has death figured in your writing, as a pivotal point or as a rumbling in the distance?
Tom Bentley is a novelist, essayist, and business and travel writer. (He does not play banjo.) He’s published hundreds of freelance pieces in newspapers, magazines, and online. He is the author of three novels, a collection of short stories, a how-to book on finding and cultivating your writing voice and a memoir of his sordid teenage criminality. His singing is known to frighten the horses. See his lurid website confessions at tombentley.com.
Tom, thank you for registering these pains and losses with us, so we can bear them with you.
These days I find myself regularly refreshed by the ending of W.H. Auden’s poem “The Fall of Rome.” After several stanzas describing specific ways the world is falling apart, he ends like this:
Unendowed with wealth or pity
Little birds with scarlet legs
Sitting on their speckled eggs
Eye each flu-infected city.
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss
Silently and very fast.
Poignant and apropos, Anna. And you’re right–Refreshing. Thank you.
Anna, though I’m not deeply versed in Auden, I know and admire much of his emotive and beckoning work–that poem has the feeling of both distance and intimacy. Thank you for letting us all step into that landscape.
First, Tom, it’s good to hear from you. I’m glad you’re okay (I say that a lot these days, I guess we all do). I really am. Second, like you, I’ve had some fairly recent brushes with loved-ones’ deaths… my dad, a brother, a best friend, a beloved soul dog. I saw Abby (the soul dog) for a long time, as you did Malibu. I’m so sorry for your losses. The story about your dad and your reading really got to me…
Finally, one of my novels that I’ve shopped around (and had one good nibble) is about a young woman whose true love is killed in Vietnam midway through the book. It’s based very loosely on the horseback riding instructor I had as a young child who was killed in the waning moments of Vietnam after being there just two weeks. It was life altering for me, but what’s weird is that when I wrote the novel, it didn’t feel like the book was about his death. Rather I felt like I was writing about what we do in the aftermath — how we go on.
Which is I suppose what we all must do. Now and in the aftermath of whatever we are going through right now. We go on. And your post helps me put that into context of going on together. Thank you and stay well. I’m glad you’re okay.
Julia, thank you for extending your hand and heart to me regarding the losses; I extend mine to you for yours. The issue in your novel reminds me of our bewilderment of the cosmic indifference of the universe toward death, no matter how it tears our own fabric.
Have you ever read Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”? It’s a starkly moving collection of linked short stories, quite autobiographical, of the ravages of the Vietnam War, of courage, loss and bitterness and beauty. I recommend it.
We do go on (until, of course, we don’t.) Stay well, for you and your own, and for this rattled country of ours, and indeed for the globe.
I don’t dread death. I lived my life flat out, and I’m very interested to find what’s next (not willing to venture a guess).
The hard part is the in-between. The dying. Sometimes I feel if I really worked at it, I could be calm, going down in a plane crash. We live our lives with the illusion of control, to soothe ourselves, but we still know we’re whistling past the graveyard, don’t we?
All I can hope for is to do it well, like your friend.
It’s my hope.
Be well while we can, friends.
Laura, I have heard it’s a mystery what’s on the other side. I’m hoping it’s a café with excellent coffee, and a cynical penguin telling uproarious standup jokes. Could be worse.
I appreciate that you’ve lived your life flat-out—living with undue caution (but still, wash your hands!) and fear ain’t living.
And Lisa, my pal who died with extraordinary grace (and who would never characterize it that way), is an example for the ages. Be well back at you
A lovely and poignant post, Tom, with lots of food for thought as human beings and as writers. Thanks for sharing with us here.
My condolences for your loss. May we live our days well and celebrate those who went before us.
Heather, that’s a fine statement in its eloquent simplicity: “May we live our days well and celebrate those who went before us.” Indeed.
I appreciate the good thoughts and send in kind back to you.
Hey Tom–You’ve offered so much of yourself today. It’s beautiful and generous.
I started to do a count of the number of deaths I’ve written over the course of two major arcs. I tried limiting it to named characters with speaking roles. I swiftly and easily got to a dozen and thought, “That’ll do, Grim Reaper Boy, that’ll do.”
I think I started the exercise to signify something along the lines that I’ve been learning how to die via my fiction, but that’s not quite it, though I think it’s more than a mere side-effect. I think it’s more like I’ve been striving to learn how to live with death and dying–both my own and of those I love and on whom I depend. I’ve often said that my writing journey was launched by loss, and that one of the primary (and most keenly felt) was that of Maggie, the black lab in my wife’s and my life when we married, who pretty much steered the flagship through the years of building a business. And I swear, her guiding spirit has appeared in some way in each of her two successors. (No, I’m not lobbying for you to accept a new cat into the family… or am I?)
I stand with you, brother. In the case of like minds and supportive souls, there is no social distancing. Wishing you peace and healing as well as enlightening productivity. Be well.
Vaughn, if something nourishing—and something that asks a lot of you in its exploration, sifting and condensing—comes of loss, that’s as good as it gets.
And I know from your explorations of your work here that the Reaper wouldn’t be just a bit player. I hope you can do some scenes that rival Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” where Death and the knight have a lovely chess game, followed later by some fine dancing from souls on the precipice.
Thank you for the warmth, which seems consistent with you (hey, are you trying to make up for some foulness you did as a child?) in all your good work here. Cheers!
This post was beautiful, Tom. Sad, but stunning. Thank you.
I’ve met that guy with the scythes, and he’s not been far since. Maybe that’s why my WIP has its young protagonist face death in the end, and–spoiler alert–doesn’t fight. There is something precious in knowing death can be a surreal, comforting experience. It can, in the case of my protagonist, be a possible beginning.
Thank you for sharing your deep thoughts, Tom. My sincere condolences. It’s the living who ultimately carry the loss.
Hugs,
Dee
Stay well, Dee. Sending love.
Dee, yeah, that scythe guy has never had any manners, and the gulf left by his visits can leave a pool of sorrow that flows and ebbs, and ebbs and flows.
There is beauty in what you say about death being a possible beginning, perhaps both for the parties that move into it and those left in its wake.
Thank you for the condolences; mine are yours as well.
I find your post to be a lovely testament to the friends- including Malibu-you have lost so recently. (This is where an heart emoji would go.)
My own experiences with death are many and varied. Some are more personal than others. But the sense of being left with a hole in my world, while the rest of the world spins on, is the strangest feeling.
I do have deaths in my stories which are pivotal, but I’m having a hard time explaining any of it in this comment! Strangely, some of the deaths are more personal and emotional than the others. I imagine the difference is because of the protagonists relationships with the characters, and also why they died. I suppose that’s the difference between my story deaths and real life. In real life, sometimes people just die, there’s no reason. We just slip our earthly bonds. When I’ve written story deaths, there’s usually a function. It’s my way to make sense of death, I guess.
Lara, I have deaths in a few of my stories, some to main characters and some to peripheral, and their consequences were significant in all. But as you say, different because of the emotional impact felt by other characters as a result, or the story pivots that did or didn’t happen as a result.
And in real life, sometimes people do just die for no “good” reason, but often a bit of us (or more) goes with them—that “hole in your world” that you mention. We’re lucky if we can fill that hole with both cherished memories and a way to move forward with strength. And sometimes you just have to grieve, for a long time to come.
Tom, I’ve said this to you privately but I will say it here, too, without the expletive: This is a great gift of a post. Your generous giving of deep thoughts and whole-self reflections is just part of the reason we’re lucky to have you as a part of Team WU.
Death plays a huge role in my storytelling, and I know it’s at least in part because my father’s early and unexpected death made me into an existentialist. But for me it isn’t about ‘death, oh death, you take and leave us nothing but fear.’ Once a book club attendee asked me point blank: ‘So this is what you write about: death?’ ‘No,’ I told her, ‘I write about hope.’
Therese, thank you for the warm words. I didn’t suffer the falling-without-a-parachute of early family death; that could not have been easy, to put it mildly. That you have used the alchemy of words to transform that baseness into hope’s gold is a gift. And please keep on giving.
But I’m much more lucky (along with a teeming throng of us) to have WU rather than the other way around. Sometimes it’s like going to church. (Which amusingly enough, made me immediately remember when a nun lifted me by the ear when I’d been messing around in Mass, and marched me out with such a vigorous clamp that I had to get up on my tippy-toes to retain my ear. Good times.)
Thanks for everything you do here.
And thank YOU for making me chuckle. Very glad you kept your ear. Keep on keeping on, my friend.
Death would not be so fearful if life was not so beautiful. We can’t have one without the other, though, so it makes sense that novels so often deliver death.
In my WIP, I am just about to write the scene in which my MC realizes that he is able to die. (And does.). Your post made me realize why—and why I can take him across that river. Thank you.
Benjamin, that line “Death would not be so fearful if life was not so beautiful” is a keeper. I’d start the manufacturing process for the t-shirts now. I’m piqued by your statement “is able to die.”
What do you mean? That he is ready, or that his condition calls for it, or that it’s an irreconcilable fact, and can’t be stayed?
I’ve always loved the “across the river” metaphor. Thank you.
If I accept death as a concept, if I read about it, listen to music inspired by it, weep at every play that contains it–then maybe it will leave me alone. My father died when I was three. That’s kind of like having death nearby, until you accept it as your normal and push on. But it’s often there–you search medical journals as you grow to figure out WHY his heart gave out and not someone else’s. This leads you to becoming an RN, to inserting that fear in your novels. Doesn’t life always come into our work, what we feel, the pains we struggle against? Tom, this piece was so moving and the excerpts you offered us today so amazing. THANK YOU. Stay well, keep writing, Beth
Beth, damn, your dad gone at three. That’s a cliff fall, for sure, but as you say, the “normal” is then established. And if the notion or instance of death, with all its complexity and unknowns can make an absorbing place in your fiction, you’ve make some kind of valuable settlement with the pain, if that can ever be said to be settled.
Thank you, and well wishes and continued writing back at you.
Truly a beautiful post, Mr. Bentley. And I love the use of a memento mori image at the start. It touches my lapsed medievalist’s heart.
In reading your post, I realized I have several deaths in the novel I’m revising, but I glide past them too quickly. Both events are to secondary characters, but they drastically alter the circumstances of the main characters. And I need to give both a more thorough exploration, as well as allow the MCs more time to grieve.
I think I gave them short shrift because death has long been something I feared, although I lack much experience with it.
My parents were nearing middle age when they had me, and my siblings are a lot older. I’ve long known I’d likely bury all of them while still relatively young.
That knowledge has, perhaps, led me to glide past similar events in my work. When what I really could do is to use my own fear and unease to explore my characters’ reactions.
My condolences on the losses that you (and the other commenters) have experienced.
Stay well, one and all. And thank you for the gifts of your works.
Ruth
Ruth (you lapsed medievalist, you), thank you. I do think you should revisit the deaths in your work to see if there is more there—which, considering the encompassing scope of death, it’s likely there is. (Look at me now, an expert on death.)
But yes, fear and unease of your own tells you of the subject’s potency. I understand what you are saying about being the younger in the family: my mom, bless her good soul, is 97, and I’m 65. (However, that allowed me to shop in the elder line at Target this morning, and yes, I did get toilet paper.)
My older sisters have lost many more people than me, but of course, there is the randomness of accident, early illness and fate, whatever that tangled word means.
Thank you for the good words, and good writing to you.
Oh, Tom, I felt your loss of Malibu all over again. You need another kitten to sit on your chest and paw your chin. Because although each animal is unique, life with a cat is simply better.
My mother always thought I was a morbid child because I contemplated death from a very young age. But to me, it was a source of delight, thinking about being with Jesus in heaven. I was aware of my guardian angel and I had interior thoughts directed towards my older brother and grandfather (who’d died before I was born), the angel and Jesus. Adults would say, “what an active imagination” but I think children are closer to the spiritual realm.
I lost all of it when I lost my faith at age 12–that terrible problem of suffering–but I’m returning to that childlike faith I had and death is sweet to contemplate. I was very sick for a couple of months (dreadful migraines) and was praying for death. I begged–take me home or heal me. He did the latter :) Deo gratias (my husband wasn’t thrilled to hear my prayer). There are far worse fates than death.
I’ve always loved that quote from Richard Bach: What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly. And as you can imagine, death plays a role in my fiction.
Be well, Tom, and get thee a feline. It’s my cure for all ailments.
Vijaya, that is such a sweet comment about Malibu. I sometimes still call for her in the fields surrounding our house and look for her all the time, but to nought.
Interesting about your childhood fascination with death, which I didn’t share (except for interest in gory films), but considering how kids can fixate on any subject—I had several—I understand.
And having spent 9 years in Catholic school, I yet thought that Jesus would be a fine companion in heaven, but some of those other biblical ruffians would need to stay home. These days, I’d be fine with having a drink with Jesus as well as Buddha in heaven and maybe Confucius too.
And whether God’s work or the healing air, I’m glad those migraines disappeared!
I love the Bach quote. And though it’s too early for me to think of having another kitty, there might be some furry paws padding about in time to come.
Yes, a beautiful post and, I imagine, devastatingly difficult to write. Thank you for your work. I think it’s hardest to be the one left behind – the one left grieving the loss. The one who leaves, I believe, goes to a better place, heaven as described in biblical accounts. I’ve told my husband if I’m the first to go, I’d like not to be drugged unconscious. Then I’ll be sure to tell him what I see on the other side. This is not said lightly, as others in my family have done so!
But I’ve lived a full life, although unless I get the call, I’ve got perhaps 20 years left on my warranty. Harder to accept are the dying 10-year-old boy and the 40-ish mom of four, for whom I pray daily. Yet both are cheerfully focused on living each day to the hilt and console all visitors. Bless them.
Dana, it does seem that being left behind is the hardest, though that emotional stabbing is what we know, not what those who have made the passage can tell us. I would like to get some reliable messages from the other side (Mark Twain, please send me the jokes you left untold).
It is really hard when kids die and people who seem to have so much time ahead; good that the folks you mention are breathing deep while they can.
Hope your warranty outlasts your calculations.
Thank you Tom for your raw and authentic voice during these difficult days. I have been a trauma hospital chaplain, worked at 911 twice and a paramedic for sixteen years. The re-membering is one of those things that get me through grief even as it also holds pain. I value your sharing.
Yes even before covid 19, it seems like so much sadness and loss has intensified in the life of so many. It is also a time for community. I’ve noticed that “people of words” are one of those communities that bring comfort. Thank you for being part of this amazing group. Sending light to share the darkness.
Gosh Becky, a trauma hospital chaplain and a paramedic? Death has been a companion for you, even with unease about its presence. Thank you for working with those in severe pain and distress, and for the power of remembering, which is a way to cherish people’s lives.
As you say in your comment about that work below, it’s been a teacher, if the lessons are the hardest ones. There can be comfort in words, and I hope you find comfort in yours that matches the good you’ve given.
Okay, so I went back to the post and read the question you asked whether death was part of my writing. Yes. I am the odd duck in this group because I am writing a memoir- about being a hospital chaplain. So many times I am revising, trying to go deeper, and the tears flow once more. Whether it is the chapter about the 4 month old whom I rocked and sang lullabies to for the hour until his heart stopped, the sudden deaths when life had been normal two hours before, the cancer patients who taught me about courage and vulnerability. It seems I have chosen work that involves loss and it has been a teacher of compassion and healing
What a great and unusual post. Most people in our culture hate talking about death and go to great lengths to avoid contemplating it. I guess writers aren’t in that group, thank God. I’ve been witness to two end-of-life cancer scenarios ( mom and MIL) within the past ten years that taught me exactly how I don’t want it to be for me at the end. So, a heartbreaking lesson, but a good one. In my current writing, both MC’s lost their fathers as teenagers, and they both blame themselves in different ways for their losses. This guilt makes for some nice, juicy dysfunction. Now they unexpectedly find themselves about to have twins…and the fear of inadequacy and worthiness is about to blow it up. Wish me luck in weaving it all together!
Ellen, death isn’t my very favorite subject (chocolate comes to mind), but it’s such a life-changer (pun intended) that it HAS to be talked about, or written about, or thought about, whether those measures are dreaded or simply necessary.
My sympathy for seeing some of the very hard sides of death; I’ve seen some of that as well. But if you can sublimate the terrors and unknown into your writing, good things could happen. Best of luck with your weavings.
Thank you for sharing your grief with us, Tom, and giving us permission to feel our own. Death comes into almost all of my stories; it’s a familiar companion, as it is for those of us who have reached what Jane Smiley calls the Age of Grief, as everyone does eventually, losing someone too dear, a loss from which we never recover.
To deal with these dark days, I’m holding onto your image of the cafe & penguin. Be well. I hope you find comfort.
Barbara, yes, I don’t think we fully recover from the death of someone dear; I only hope the deeper reflection that follows gives us something to go on.
As for that penguin, I figure he will be sly but not snide, crafty but not cynical. And obviously, the best-dressed character in heaven.
Thanks for the good words.
Tom,
What a beautiful, thoughtful piece…and love all those quotes…the one that always comes to my mind and reassures me somewhat is Whitman’s from Song of Myself…..”All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
Trebor, thank you. It was “fun” to find the quotes, if mulling over extinction is one’s idea of fun. Beautiful writing though.
Whitman’s stuff is always so good, even if it’s loud, like when he sounds his “… barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”