"huari man" (after Huari Art) by devi laskar

Every Day, A Little Death Knell

It seems as if death is all around lately. My wonderful, kind neighbor passed away last week. I’m going to a friend’s mother’s funeral on Saturday. These events have me thinking about how many ways death influences my writing. The story I’m currently working on centers on a dead loved one. My novel’s conflict involves the very legitimate concern that one of the major character will die. I fear dying before I effectively communicate these ideas and other ideas that will emerge before I finish them. During my daily writing time, I swear I hear “Taps” in the distance.

Although it’s true that life gets in the way, it’s at least as bad when death intrudes. I’m grateful for a relatively brief death résumé (so far), but there are a few significant entries. In 1994, two of my friends died within two weeks of each other. Last summer, my father died, followed two weeks later by my dog. In the intervening 17 years between these bouts of massive loss, I spent a decade in unshakable grief and even longer in deep depression (exacerbated, but not caused by, death-related trauma). Seventeen years: that’s a short generation–a grieving adolescent person’s life nested inside my middle-aged one.

What have I learned? And, more important, did I at least get some material to write about? Forced to choose between a dog and a Dad, or which friend is really the BFF–oh hell, I couldn’t do it. I’ve learned that a loved one is a loved one. My experiences have death have revealed that life’s hierarchies are bullshit.

Death seems like such a deep subject when I can get some distance from it. When it’s close, I realize how shallow it can be. Despite the urge to find meaning in it, real death is not literary at all. One’s story just ends. The protagonist’s eyes are replaced by Xs. Death doesn’t come with meaning or resolution as a standard feature. You have to make it up for yourself.

And I do. My writing to-do “bucket” list includes mash-ups of everyone I’ve known and every experience I’ve had. I write dreams and quasi-reincarnations, and I totally fuck with time. I don’t know if I do it well yet, and I don’t care. If I die before I achieve perfection, I want my hope chest of writing to be filled with unfinished, flawed possibilities, not complete compromises.

Better yet, to properly immortalize everyone and everything, I estimate needing another 500 years or so, and when I’m finished, I insist on being immortalized, too. Let’s be honest: that’s why most of us write. We are presumptuous enough to believe we can survive the journey to the underworld, which isn’t so much about surviving death as about transcending the meaninglessness of death–and life.

This is all nonsense, right? We aren’t immortal. There’s only so much we can do as mortal beings. It’s true what they say: You can’t write without conflict. But we don’t write to resolve it. We pound on its heart to keep it beating: what possibilities could still happen for the living; for the departed, what could have been? We write answers to these questions that seem just perfect as they flow out of our minds. Later we’re not so sure and consider. We’ll need more time so we can revise. With so much work to do, we could not possibly stop for death.

James Black is a founding member of Book Writing World. He earned a masters degree in English literature with an emphasis in creative writing at the University of Missouri at Columbia. His work has been published in the anthology The New Queer Aesthetic on Television and in the journal Anon. He’s writing his first novel about the family of a closeted, gay soldier stationed in Iraq. Check out his blog, Quota. He contributes to the BWW weekly!