And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.
So many mixed emotions. I feel like a blender, set on the highest setting.
On Tuesday, when my son came over, he stopped and collected the mail for me. “You have a package,” he called up the stairs to my office. “It feels like a book.”
I puzzled for a moment. I hadn’t ordered any books. A novel contest I’m currently judging had closed and the last books were delivered. Sometimes, people send me copies of their books in the hopes that I’ll review them. But I really wasn’t expecting anything.
Then I thought of the email I’d received from my poetry publisher the day before. The ARC (Advanced Review Copy) was on its way to me, they said. But that was just yesterday.
But…OH!
Andy brought the envelope up to me and I sliced it open with flying scissors. Out slid the book. My book. My title. My name on the cover.
And different from all the others, because this book is about Michael, and my experience of my first year of widowhood.
For me, books don’t become real until I hold them. I’ve compared writing and publishing often to childbirth, but you just don’t feel a book kick you from the inside out, once it’s on your publisher’s desk. You feel it kick you from the inside, outside, and every place in between while you’re writing it, but it becomes a quiet waiting game once it’s in the process of publication. To my students, I call it The Void. Even though you know where the book is, you know it’s under contract (you HAVE the contract, you’ve printed it, signed it, and you keep it within reach on your desk), in the silence of The Void, you keep waiting for an email that says, “Oops…we made a mistake. We meant to accept someone else’s book.”
Even 18 books in.
Eventually, you get a digital copy of what your book is supposed to look like. Following the pregnancy metaphor, this is like seeing an ultrasound of your unborn baby. Whole, apparently happy, but unable to be held.
And if you’re lucky, then the publisher will send you a hard copy ARC, which is your actual book, with a banner on it that says “Not for resale”, or “Uncorrected proof.” That’s who I held on Tuesday. And it didn’t need any correcting.
Since Tuesday, it has sat beside me on my writing desk. Often, I have one hand on it, or I pick it up, page through it, put it down again.
This is a book I never ever imagined writing, and I certainly didn’t want to write it. But then the book wrote me.
This book is to help others who are going through grief, not by offering solutions, but by offering companionship. Company.
This is also my way of making sure Michael still exists in this world.
But there’s still one more, very important, thing. This book is to raise awareness of a huge wrong that needs to be corrected. I (more than) hope, but I also plan on letting this book become an awareness raiser, a shouted voice, a picket sign raised in protest.
Michael’s death was wrong, wrong, wrong. And it’s wrong for those who experienced a death under the tires of a vehicle on Milwaukee’s streets before Michael, and for those who have continued to experience it after.
It’s something that some city officials just want to shrug off. They offer words of sympathy, and then turn away. Something has to turn them back and make them open their eyes.
When I pushed hard to have the driver charged with vehicular manslaughter, the ADA said to me, “I don’t think anyone would look at the video of the accident and think the driver was at fault.”
That video.
One of the poems in this book contains these words:
“You turned to face the passenger van
as it bore down on you as you walked
Within the crosswalk
With the light
Within your rights.
The van weighed 4464 pounds.
You turned and faced it
held out both your hands
In supplication
In desperation
In the most intense act of bravery I’ve ever seen…
You placed your hands on the hood of the van
and then it hit you anyway.”
Maybe that ADA believes in a world where people could watch this happening and not immediately turn their shocked glare onto the person behind the wheel.
I don’t believe in such a world.
So. Last Tuesday, when I opened the envelope and this book slid out into my hands, I felt a bit of the wrong begin to turn right. And I felt Michael’s presence too.
It’s a different sort of book. But I’m living a different sort of life now.
But not everything is different. The other day, I was asked, in a written interview, what it is that makes me write. There were several choices:
Be rich and famous.
Make money quickly.
Use the power of story to change the world.
The first two options made me laugh. And then I checked the one I’ve always checked, in my heart and in my mind, and in more formal interviews, like this one.
Use the power of story to change the world. Right a wrong.
Or at least try. Despite so many feelings of defeat that I’ve weathered in the last two years, I’m still trying. I can’t bring Michael back. His case is done. His life is over. But I can try to keep this from happening again.
We’ll see how it goes.
And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.
Me with the ARC.
