Saturday, February 18, 2012

On consideration of writing

I am currently reading a book by Amy Welborn, called Wish You Were Here.  Although it is, may I say, an uncomfortable book about the death of her husband, her descriptions of a trip to Sicily had the ability to transform me from a sofa on a rainy Saturday to the sunny, warm Mediterranean.

 Writers are a funny lot, and although I consider writing  no more than an avocation (Good heavens! What IS my vocation?  Art student? Mom?  An art student Mom?) I have all the fatal characteristics of writers everywhere.

For one, writers are the nosy observers, the amateur psychiatrists and  sometime sociologists of their communities..  For me, it is hard not  to be fascinated with the traits of humankind  on display all around in an endless stream of combinations.  Each person's story is so alike in common themes, yet so different in  where and when and how they reacted to their situations.  And it is in the action that we find out who they are truly.  Fortunately or unfortunately for each of us, that is how everyone else finds out about us, too.

Writers take their observations, then, from the richness of life's canvas, and paint a picture with words through the lens of their own psyche and experience.  It is like a pastel artist I saw last summer who, had  the bluish gray slopes of the Colorado Rockies before her yet with great effectiveness,  painted  them pink. So for one writer, rain, for example, is a dismal and dreary experience and for another, peaceful and exhilerating. (As I listen to the rain beating against the wall of my house, I find myself in the latter category).

Yet when we pick up a good book and read what is on the canvas of the pages, we can be,  in a manner of speaking, seduced into the writer's point of view.  I find this to be the case when reading a writer whose philosophy of life does not agree with my own.  The pull of a good story, coupled with astute observation and painted with subtlty of a point of view masterfully done has amazing power..

When I was a young adult, I took on the opinions of what I read and immediately believed them.  This far along in my life, I can see behind the words better and take a look at what the writer is saying.  Am I  wrong here,  or, after reflection, is what I believed strengthened by new Truths I am discovering? It can be  a very uncomfortable feeling.  I harken back, in my own case, to six years ago, when reading led me away from my childhood religion into the Catholic Church.  I am still feeling the reverberations from that one. The story of another's journey to God had compelled me to look at my own  and the effect, while not immediate (it took months of study), was life-changing.

So the writer pushes and pulls us, bringing us along on a trip of discovery or else helps us to stand our ground in the realm of Ideas.  He is the conscience of the community as well as the recorder of the times. In the case of Amy Welborn's book, he is also a friend for the journey, to make us feel that we are not so very alone after all.

Friday, February 17, 2012

The Epitaph

I begin this with a sigh of resignation because writing appears to be an inescapable portal of discovery for me.

This all started yesterday.  I was helping a friend edit a small instructional pamphlet and it occurred to me how very much I liked doing that sort of thing.  Then today, I stumbled on a blog by Amy Welborn about how she dealt with the sudden death of her husband.  As I read it, I could feel the pain of my own loss spilled out in her words and I remembered the remarkable power writing has had in my life.

   I had placed my mother in the arms of God last year, after her surrender to cancer, and live in the house where she died.  It is a little house, but there are rooms I try to keep out of because it seems to me the ghost of her suffering image rises there,  Suddenly, as I dust or straighten things, I am reminded of sitting in the easy chair next to her bed as she lay in a coma, listening to her breathe,  Sometimes, the breaths would pause and my own breath would pause, too, coupled with the odd arrow prayer,"Please, God.  One more. Just one more."  Then she would sigh, and I would relax as the gentle breath reestablished itself.  She was still with me.

All that ended in mid-January last year.  I had left her side to talk to my son, when I heard an awful rasping noise.  I ran back to her room.  She was breathing agonally and finally sighed one last time and was gone from me.  There would be no more breaths. God had finally said,"No, child," to me. 

I cry as I write this. I hear people say "Let it go."  But how can I ever let go someone so entwined in my heart?  In the last year, I have become all the more cognizant of the people I have lost:  friends that have moved away or that I have moved away from; my father, now dead for over thirty years, but whom I seem to mourning for afresh;  finally,  Fr. Dick, the priest who had gently guided me to God five years back, succumbing a couple of years ago and also now with Him whom he loved.  I look, too, at the people around me still: my husband, David,  my friends and family, my parish, and Father James, my priest now.  I love them all, and they, too are entwined in that same heart that is still so pained.  I am told not to be too attached but the choices seem to me to be either "Do not love."  or "Abandon yourself to love and pain and loss."  It is a choice all of us make, I suppose.  It is not often I discuss this, even with my dearest friend, Diane, but as I relish my weekly latte with her, I think of how precious each moment is and how wonderful each dear face that God given me to love.  Once I heard a homily, and the priest asked, "What do you want your epitaph to say?"  In spite of the pain and the tears, I think I want mine to say, "She loved.".