Life Imitating Art
I have to stop this terrible habit that I have, of neglecting to write down and organize my thoughts when things get messy. It’s rather counter-productive to the point of keeping a blog in the first place, and yet every time things in life pile up I simply let them do so, expecting that somehow these well-polished updates or pithy blog posts will compose themselves.
Oddly enough, I face a similar dilemma in that I always expect my novels to write themselves, too. How has this worked out so far? Not well.
It bears emphasizing that in the story on which I am currently working, I killed the protagonist’s grandfather many months ago. I did this for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that it was a safe way for me to explore some of my own thoughts and questions about death that I had been facing of late. How are you supposed to react, to feel, when you lose someone you love (but may not have necessarily been close with)? What do you do afterwards? What is the point of faith in an all-loving God that allows us to experience such loss, and, if no such faith is present to begin with, where is the shock in death?
I chose the grandfather, as well, instead of other potential characters because it allowed me to keep the overall mood of the story, which was suspenseful but generally upbeat, while still exploring these issues, and because it was safe for me on an emotional level. I’d lost one grandfather many years ago, but the other was still alive and kicking and ranting about kids these days. It was a comfortable sandbox to play in, and so toward the end of May, I began to do so.
In early June, my own grandfather checked into the hospital with complications from pneumonia, multiple infections, and diabetes. At first we were not worried; at 81 he was in and out of the hospital frequently, and I was always far more worried about the doctors and nurses than I was about him. The man was certainly lovable, but he had a talent for driving people more than a little crazy.
He took a turn for the worse and after a month in the hospital he passed away, on the 6th of this month. I suddenly felt bizarrely guilty, feeling on some nonsensical but subconscious level that my literary experiments had endangered my grandfather’s health. Untrue, certainly, but the notion was no longer a ’safe’ one to play with – and while the key scenes of the book in question had been written already, some of them as of yet needed to be typed up. This book was suddenly far less entertaining to me.
My family has dealt with an extraordinary amount of death and illness in my lifetime, and an even more extraordinary amount in the last year or two. My luck is certainly not something I’d wish on anyone, but sadly I will be travelling to New Jersey this weekend to pay respects to the mother of my high school best friend, and spend time with her and her family. It seems everyone I know has drawn the short straw in the last two years, and we’re all quite sick of it.
I don’t know what the moral of this story is, besides loss is painful and confusing, life imitating art can often be more disconcerting than titillating, and the next person to go on life support gets a bullet between the eyes. But it felt like something worth mentioning, the fact that sometimes grief is even more confusing than upsetting, the idea maybe I should stop writing shiva scenes for a while (lest anyone else get any ideas), and the aforementioned threat.
In any case, rest in peace to my grandfather, my good friend’s mother, and all the other people we’ve lost as of late. And to the rest of you – knock it off. Now.
