The meaning of writing: What's it to you?
For the third time in as many months Death's scythe swung low and cut deep, and I, in the horrible wake of carnage and waste, am left to make sense of otherwise insensate acts. As I consider the matter before me, my life now void of one more precious individual who made my life so much more so with theirs, as I give serious consideration to actually nailing the front door shut from the inside so as to avoid having to deal with loss on this scale again, I reflect inward, exhale loudly, and utter a rather cliched remark:
I am getting too old for this crap.
It is one thing to live a full and complete life, to die with loved ones around you, to know that at the end you did the best you could with what you had. It is another thing entirely to watch - helplessly - as those you care about dearly and deeply be taken from you because of disease, recklessness, and irresponsibility on the part of others.
My friend, 'A' died recently at the hands of a certain asshole, who, as I write this, is probably going to get away with manslaughter because he thought himself above the law, and the law apparently agrees.
Before she died 'A' did something for me that I can never forget or pay on sufficiently: She made me believe in me as a Writer. She convinced me, after Harlan Ellison had his way with me as only Harlan Ellison can, that he was correct in his assertions and prouncements and that I should pursue writing to the best of my abilities. It was 'A' who stood by as I presented my first storytelling workshop to an audience of twenty. It was 'A' who watched with pride and delight as twenty became two hundred, then several hundred. It was 'A' who laughed with delight, who applauded, who cheered, who roared because it was 'A' who knew what it was I had to offer, and all I needed was a gentle push from the shadows into the light that is Life.
Before 'A' died 'C' died. 'C' was a self-style 'white trash priss'. She took great pride in this perception and fact, because she believed it elevated her above her station in life. But when it came to writing all pretension and prejudice fell away and she became what she was: A Writer.
Oh, yes. She was a Writer. Her writing staggered and stunned, the sheer beauty of it. The undeniable natural designs of its construction, the music, the voices within. For someone who dropped out of school at fifteen to become a single, unwed mother at sixteen, who woke up when she was thirty-two, and on the verge of becoming a grandmother before her time, she was something. So she attended a workshop I did and I told her what had to be said.
She listened, and she did what needed to be done. She went back to school, got her G.E.D., and went on to a junior college, where she read the masters - and I don't mean just the dead white guys - and then some. She went through two years of school as if she were on a sled riding greased skids. She finished her four year degree remaining requirements in a year and a half, and left a body of writing in her wake that I have yet to see matched or rivaled.
The last time I talk to her - the day she died - she was excited about starting graduate school because she knew what awaited her - the promise of a life of letters and all that entails.
The autopsy showed she died of a toxic build-up in her system. The damn fool that was her doctor prescribed a medication in a quantity far too great for her delicate body to handle and her heart attacked her, killing her in the end. I don't what it says - her last place on Earth: Among the books she cherished and loved almost above everything else.
Before 'C' died 'M' died. 'M' was the sort of person we should all aspire to be like more. He always had a smile and a firm handshake. He never judged anyone. He accepted you as you were. But let him find out what your particular talent was and he would become relentless in getting you to act on it accordingly.
When 'M' found out I was given to writing he took to pushing me in my writing. Every time he saw me he demanded to know what I was working on and he demanded, with equally parts terror and genuine interest, to see it. Of course once he laid hands on my writing he would all but literally tear it apart.
'M', I learned as we became friends and enemies and enemies and friends, had a doctorate in Veterinary Medicine. But he made his living basically pushing a broom. A honest day's work for an honest day's pay. He truly believed that. A job doesn't make you what you are, he told me time and again. YOU make YOU what you are.
It is hard, at best, to argue with absolute truth.
'M' was all but fearless. That is, until Death came in the form of Cancer. The theft of his life was swift. It was less than six months after he was told of his fate that he died. The day he died, the day they took him home to die, 'M' made me make a promise. A promise that was echoed by 'C' and 'A', none of whom, interestingly enough, knew the others.
We define ourselves by what we do. We validate our existence by our accomplishments. But in the end it is not us that matters. It is what we did, what we do for others that matters most of all.
What I do for others, through the written word, is to make them hear, to make them feel; above all, to make them see, and that is everything. (If you recognize the source of this last line, thank a teacher. If not, shame on you, for your life is grossly less for the deficiency.) What I do, for others, is to engage them, entertain them, enlighten them. All through a simple thing called the written word.
But as I sit here, in gathering shadows, at the edge of the slow-moving shroud of night, a book published in 1914 across my lap, filled with names all but forgotten to time, as drops of rain begin to softly fall and splatter on the broad green leaves of the vineyard beyond the window that may outlive me, as sleep comes for me I wonder - The meaning of writing: What's it to you? (1148/11771)
