And so today’s moment of happiness despite the news.
Last week, my daughter Olivia messaged me, saying she was having “a moment”. This is not to be confused with my Moments, but it’s what we’ve begun to call those times when we are suddenly overwhelmed with grief. Sometimes, it’s expected, like with the holidays. Most times, though, they come out of nowhere.
In this case, she was working on a paper for a class in grad school. She had to report on an art project she did, and also how she felt that type of project could be used in her future career as an art therapist. She’d just written a paragraph about how the project kept her distracted from thinking about how it was the first Thanksgiving without her father. But then grief leaped in sideways when she realized that her father would never see the artwork she made for this project, And in fact, he will never see her artwork again.
As we talked about this, I started thinking aloud, and wondered if this was the reason why I was having such a hard time working on my new novel.
“Really?” Olivia asked.
I thought about it some more. “I think so,” I said.
The new book is coming slowly. I find myself staring at the blank page more than I ever have before. I’m not blocked (I don’t believe in writer’s block). I know what I want to write. I know what I want to show. I know these characters, and I watch them run ahead of me in my thoughts, but when I reach for the keyboard, I just find myself frozen. Most of the time. Not all of the time. I just passed 110 pages of this thing. But at my usual level of work, I should be just about done with the first draft by now, and…I’m not.
My first husband wasn’t a writer at all. He wasn’t much of a reader either. When we were in marriage counseling, he was told that he really needed to show an interest in my work. His response to that was to come in and ask me how many pages I’d written. And once he told me he was a writer too, because he wrote computer programs.
Yeah.
Michael was totally different, of course, He was a writer himself. His first question when he came home from work every day, well, the first question after asking me how I was, was “What did you write about today? How’s it going?” And I would tell him. Late at night, after I was finished with all my student work, I would read to Michael what I wrote that day. He’d read to me what he was working on. We’d workshop. But it was the only workshop I’ve ever done where we held hands while we did it.
Michael heard every single novel, short story collection, essay collection, and poetry collection that I’ve written. But now, when I read aloud, I’m reading only to myself. This will be the first book that he didn’t hear in its development. He even heard my latest, Don’t Let Me Keep You, while he lay nonresponsive in the ICU. He told me later he heard every word.
Well, maybe he’s hearing this one too, as I stumble along with it. Maybe.
But the thing is, this afternoon, I sat down to work on the book.
Before I wrote, I played the song I’ve assigned this book, just as I’ve assigned songs to all the books. In this case, it’s “Hello” by Evanescence. And I hugged an orange foofball cat as I listened to it. She pressed her nose to mine and we swayed together.
When the song ended, I set Cleo to the side and then I put my hands up to my temples, as if they were blinders, like on a racehorse. It drew my vision sharply to the screen, and to the last words I’d written. It blocked out the rest of the world.
I looked at my words and I said, out loud, “I can do this. I am going to draw from everything I know, everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve done, and I am going to put that knowledge and experience into this book. I can do this.”
And then I lowered my hands to the keyboard and that’s just what I did.
I can do this. And I breathed a sigh of relief when I did.
I think, goofing off with pronouns here, that when you become a we, and you remain a we for a very long time, and it’s a very good we to be a part of, you forget that before you were a we, you were a me. And that me is still there, the whole time. Including when the other half of your we is gone.
I’m still here. I’m just learning to be simply me all over again.
And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.
