On Story and Death and Life
By Kathryn Craft | October 13, 2022 |
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
A disheartened writing friend recently said to me, “I don’t even know why I’m writing this book. We’ve just been through three years of Covid. Who wants to read about grief?”
Well, if she was wondering who wants to read an entire novel about the kind of despondency that results when people become enmired in the emotion of grief, she’s right, her readership might be scant. But if she’s asking who needs to read about the act of grieving—entering into it without warning, navigating its challenges, and emerging from its grasp with new perspective? Well, that’s pretty much what fiction is all about.
“Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke
All stories begin when a character must relinquish his attachment to the way things were: whether to a loss due to physical death, divorce, or a job; the old way of doing things; the need to leave a home; the forfeiture of rights or freedoms; a huge shift in identity. Covid exacted loss in all of these forms and more, knocking many of your potential readers right onto their backsides. The effects are playing out still, and will be for a long time. Even if your story is not set in a Covid world, it can help readers take stock of their losses and figure out how to move forward.
On his two-hour(!) podcast episode “The Science and Process of Healing from Grief,” neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, PhD, shared research that explains why moving forward can be so hard after a loss: in essence, our ability to predict our next interaction with our beloved (person, animal, object, place, vocation) in space and time is closely tied to our sense of our attachment to them. Grieving requires that we untangle that complex space/time/attachment relationship. After a loss, we continue to feel the attachment, yet our brains can’t figure out when or where we’ll once again see our beloved.
In this episode, Huberman read a letter from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman to his childhood sweetheart and wife, Arline, who died at age 25 from tuberculosis. Feynman begins by apologizing for not writing in so long—he’d regularly written her love letters before, but it took him almost two years to write this letter to her after her death. At one point he writes, “You can give me nothing now, yet I love you so much that you stand in the way of my loving anything else. But I wanted you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.” His letter ends with this tragicomic post-script: “Please excuse my not mailing this but I don’t know your new address.”
Feynman “knew” that his wife was dead—in the letter he even referred to her in the third person at one point, saying, “My wife is dead”—and yet his attachment remains. This is because our brains can’t easily conceptualize when something isn’t there anymore, Huberman explains. Neurons are dedicated to our attachments based on our experience of the other more than on any knowledge of our loss. (The origin of show-don’t-tell, you think?) Even as love holds her close, Feynman has lost Arline in space and time. One way organized religion helps to alleviate this acute disorientation, beyond the rituals that begin the long, slow process of grieving, is to assign a new place where the beloved can be envisioned to exist.
For those whose imaginations enjoy a good leap from the springboard of real science, Huberman’s episode is chock full of story starters. One might conjure up a retiree who still gets up with his alarm and puts on a suit and tie. Or the former owner of an ice-cube-loving dog who for some dozen years still expects his presence at her side whenever she opens the freezer and that blast of cold air hits her face—even while standing in an apartment where he had never lived.
Curious about whether people are still reading about life after some form of death, I read the teasers for a handful of novels released just this year.
Book Lovers by Emily Henry:
Nora Stephens’ life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. But when Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city, what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.
A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham:
When Chloe Davis was twelve, six teenage girls went missing in her small Louisiana town. By the end of the summer, Chloe’s father had been arrested and imprisoned for their murder, leaving Chloe and her family to grapple with the truth and try to move forward while dealing with the aftermath. Now 20 years later, Chloe is a psychologist in private practice when once again teenage girls are going missing. Is she seeing parallels that aren’t there, or for the second time in her life, is she about to unmask a killer?
Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Carrie Soto sacrificed nearly everything to become the best tennis player the world had ever seen. Now, six years after her retirement, Carrie is about to watch her record be taken from her by a brutal, stunning player named Nicki Chan. At thirty-seven years old, Carrie makes the monumental decision to come out of retirement and reclaim her record.
The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn
In 1937, Ukrainian history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son–but Hitler’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia sends her on a different path. Given a rifle and sent to join the fight, Mila must forge herself from studious girl to deadly sniper–a lethal hunter of Nazis known as Lady Death. When news of her three hundredth kill makes her a national heroine, an old enemy joins forces with a deadly new foe to draw Lady Death into the deadliest duel of her life.
I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston
When a month before high school graduation, Shara—the principal’s perfect progeny—kisses Chloe and vanishes, Chloe loses her only legitimate competition for valedictorian. On a furious hunt for answers, Chloe discovers she’s not the only one Shara kissed. She teams up with Shara’s longtime quarterback sweetheart and her bad boy neighbor to untangle Shara’s trail of clues and find her before graduation, so she can beat her fair-and-square.
Romance, thriller, women’s sports fiction, historical, young adult—these bestselling novels in multiple genres suggest that people are still reading about negotiating their losses. It’s hard to envision a world in which this premise would go out of style.
“Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
In her TED talk on the decidedly uncomfortable topic of watching other people grieve, Nora McInerny, author of Bad Vibes Only (and other things I bring to the table) and host of the podcast “Terrible, Thanks for Asking,” said, “Everyone you love has a 100% chance of dying.” I loved that her talk was both moving and funny. So often, only humor can see us through.
Because truth is, when we write about the ways our characters negotiate the death of something, we are also writing about life—and life offers up a rainbow of rich emotional colors. Don’t get stuck writing in black. If you can show us how our attachments enrich us even after they’re gone, and do so while using all the crayons, that story will be a great gift to our post-pandemic society.
Is a character in your story moving on from some kind of “death”? Even if you aren’t now writing about them, what real-life losses surprised you by being the hardest to grapple with, and why? Did you still expect to encounter the person/animal/thing that was lost? Can you share additional resources that helped you write about moving forward through the grieving process?
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her forthcoming book, Crafting Story Movement: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Novel Forward, draws from decades of experience as both a story consultant and a movement specialist/dance critic. Learn more on Kathryn’s website.
[coffee]
I’m writing about a 16yo who has lost her father, which feels very different than a loss at an older age. Hers is full of rage at the unfairness of what has happened. She does knock at the door of a hard-won and begrudging acceptance (eventually). But as I’ve revised, I see how death is only a part what a young person must let go of and that life really is a process of letting go. I recently lost a dear friend and am still unraveling my grief. Thank you for quoting Andrew Huberman; “This is because out brains can’t easily conceptualize when someone isn’t there anymore.” I was thinking about not getting that monthly phone call, or forgetting that now can’t make it. That notion jarred me. Now I understand why. I also related to the owner of the ice cube loving dog. As a reader, I need to see how others navigate loss and sail our eventually into calm waters. As a writer, I hope to give this gift. Wonderful post, Kathryn. Thank you!!
Thanks so much for this meaningful augmentation of the topic, Susan. Your line, “I see how death is only a part what a young person must let go of and that life really is a process of letting go”—there’s so much truth there. And the owner of the ice-cube loving dog, by the way, was me. The Old English Sheepdog my family has while we were growing up loved ice cubes so much. He’s been gone some 40+ years now and still I sometimes expect to feel his hair brush my leg after I open the freezer.
Terrific post, Kathryn and I loved the quotes from Rilke, especially this one “Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.” My nonfiction book, The Many Faces of Grief, is partially a sharing of experiences as a hospital chaplain and facilitating grief support groups, but it also shares my grief journey that encompassed major losses in a span of about 6 years – father, husband, mother, sister, home, my horse, and other cherished farm animals. The grief goes on, we just learn to live in spite of it. That is the lesson that I’ve learned through reading and writing about loss.
More recently, I’ve lost a dog and two cats, and when you asked about expecting to encounter the person or animal that is gone, I immediately thought of those three pets. When I see a tennis ball, for a moment I wonder where Poppy is. She loved to chase the ball. When I start the dryer, I look for Harry to jump up to get some warmth. When I come into my office to work, I wait for Sammy to come and spread his long, languid body across my desk in front of my monitor.
Do I expect to see them or just wish I could again? I’m not sure, but those moments are little triggers of memory that are sometimes sweet and sometimes tart.
You’ve given us a lot of information to process, Kathryn, and I appreciate the links to the resources. I’m going to check out the Bad Vibes Only podcast, as well as the one from Huberman.
Thanks.
Thanks for the storytelling in this comment, Maryann. I smiled at the memories you shared of your pets, who of course I never met but who I could so clearly envision. Whether they are disguised or not, we keep our loved ones alive through story, which is another great reason to write. Thanks for mentioning your book, The Many Faces of Grief, too, which sounds like another great writerly resource.
Thanks for this post, Kathryn! It’s funny how loss and absence can take up more room and create a more palpable presence sometimes than that occupied by everything still with us. I like Huberman’s neuroscience framing of it as a disorientation that simply doesn’t compute, for our brains. It still doesn’t feel very real to me, that an early mentor of mine really has been gone for a couple years now, and I’m never going to talk about film or books with him again.
In my novel WIP, I have a protagonist still grieving the sudden loss of an older sibling roughly a decade before, in his teen years. His own brush with death at the beginning of the narrative brings him to examine over the course of the story if he’s still fundamentally the person that brother, with whom he was very close, knew.
Thanks Marianna! You wrote: “It’s funny how loss and absence can take up more room and create a more palpable presence sometimes than that occupied by everything still with us. ” Interesting observation. I wonder if it’s because our brains are working on the puzzle of why that thing is no longer available to us—all of our back burners on fire while trying to figure it out.
That’s a premise that can work really well—there’s a significant “lost brother” backstory that drives a lot of action on the TV show The Good Doctor also. The opening brush with death is a great portal for the return of the protagonist’s feelings and his self-examination as well. I look forward to reading it one day!
O Kathryn, that Feynman love letter is so sweet. I didn’t know his wife died so young. I’m deeply touched with this essay and the comments above. Thank you. Truly, it is better to love and to lose than not to have loved at all. For all the beautiful memories and the hope of reunion. My Christian faith gives me that assurance. But there was a period of over 30 yrs when I only believed in myself and what I could see and touch and measure and the death of my mother in that state left me bereft. I was no stranger to loss–my father was absent. Still is. My memories with and of him are so impoverished even though he’s in his 90s, whereas my memories of my mother in her short life that I shared only 20 years with are abundant. I still remember her silvery laugh. Singing. Cooking. Her feeding me slices of a peeled orange. Me walking on her back taking the tiniest steps. We’re practicing Faure’s Requiem Mass right now for All Souls and you bet she’s on the list.
In my historical, still a wip, my 12-yr-old protagonist puts all her hopes and dreams upon the parrot she receives from her father because it could well be him. She’s Hindu and her belief in reincarnation gives her so much hope. That parrot has brought so much joy not only to her but to me and my beta readers. I think without hope we couldn’t live. It is one of the greatest gifts a person could have. And in all my stories, no matter whether light or dark, hope is elemental. I think it’s essential esp. in children’s fiction. Because their entire future lies ahead and they’ve got to be able to dream beautiful dreams. Because when you can dream it, it becomes possible.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment, Vijaya. I agree about hope, no matter how irrational—I can’t imagine I’d write a novel without it. I once heard a keynote by Katherine Ramsland, PhD [she’s written 70 books(!), mostly nonfiction], who said that to be a writer is an act of faith. “It doesn’t matter what you believe in,” she said, “but you’ve got to believe in something.” I simply adore that your character believes in a parrot. A stroke of genius!
Kathryn, this is an amazing post in so many ways. Of course I thought about your second book… I also remember when my mother was dying and we having this conversation about maybe she would come back to me as a tree or a cardinal. Living in California right after her death, there were very few cardinals, but I think of her every day in some way. Is it ever enough? Present life is so involving. Writing helps me infuse loss into words. Thanks for this….
I’m glad the post struck a chord with you, Elizabeth—just as your mother’s comment about coming back as a cardinal stuck with me, after you first posted it on Facebook. I guess I just proved it: details matter! I never met her, and yet I think of her when I see a cardinal—plant of the here is SE PA. And yes, my second novel, THE FAR END OF HAPPY, was the conclusion of a 17-year arc in which I was processing my husband’s suicide through writing. So many traumatic echoes were laid to rest with creating my protagonist’s arc. She—and I—were now better prepared to enter our futures. See you at OnCon!
Wow, Kathryn, I thank you and my Jinni, my dear mother, thanks you. There is something amazing about attempting those connections with the spirit world. How lovely of you to remember, Beth
Kathryn, I wrote a piece for Chicken Soup for the Soul recently about my high school girlfriend, my first love, disappearing in Colombia many years ago, and how years after her disappearance I had the most vivid dream I’ve ever had of her telling me she’d drowned in a river, but that everything was OK. After my sweet kitty Malibu disappeared a few years ago, I thought I heard her meow, clearly, from the nearby fields many times. My mother’s death of a few years ago was so wrenching for me, but I have beautiful letters of encouragement that she wrote to me for the many times over the years I was down, and I cherish their renewing power.
Loss is so disorienting, as your post suggests. Writers can certainly use loss, of many sorts, to probe and expose the emotions of characters in fine-grained or hammering ways, in showing withdrawal or renewed faith or bitterness or kindness. Or maybe measures of both.
By the way, great presentation at the OnConference the other day!
These are great examples of that disorienting effect, thanks for sharing, Tom. My parents both died long slow deaths from differing kids of dementia, a disease that comes with a built-in disorientation package. But in death, their spirits were freed to return to me, so fully refurbished that they felt returned to me, if that makes sense. Did you ever find out what happened to your high school girlfriend? Or did the dream provide as good an explanation as any?
And thank you for your kind words about my presentation!
My father died of Alzheimer’s after 10 years of increasing fog, though my family was so lucky in that he remained the warm, good guy that he was, if severely reduced, and still recognized my mom to the end of his 93 years. No, my girlfriend’s body was never found (she was traveling with her boyfriend, years after we’d split up) and nor was his, though both sets of parents went to Colombia multiple times to search. Dreadful.
They did disappear on a canoe on a river they were warned to not go down, so the dream had that logic to it, however logic can work in a dream.
thanks so much for fleshing out the story of your first girlfriend—that was quite a teaser. I’ve heard too many true stories of adventurers that didn’t heed warnings. I’ll happily follow established safety guidelines!
And I love hearing that about your dad. Thanks for sharing that with us
My protagonist, a rather eccentric older woman, frequently talks to her deceased husband. She assumes that he listens, and believes he provides feedback in unexpected ways. But toward the end of the novel, she has a chance to marry again. I want her final conversation to come across as honest, but not too sappy. Waiting for inspiration.
Yes, death and life are intrinsically linked — and there are all kinds of deaths, literal and figurative — so how can we write about any kind of life without including death?
I’ve been working on two manuscripts for a while now, and one is very overtly about loss and grief, and the search for understanding and acceptance in that wake. The other really isn’t ABOUT death at all… but now you’ve got me wondering what kinds of losses ARE in that story, and how they should be shaping the characters and actions…
Yes exactly, Kristan. Death is like the ultimate stake, always hovering in the background. I think your exploration of the losses in that second manuscript will help shape it in significant ways. Great idea!