The Blight Man Was Born For

Some of you guys know that I'm working on a novel.  One of the major plot points and themes revolves around grief.  As someone who hasn't yet experienced a major loss, I wonder if it's crazy to try to put a character through it and to write about the grief that follows death in a meaningful way.  Sure, there has been serious pain and depression in my life.  There has been loss.  But for the most part, it's an experience that's more on the horizon than reality.

Grief and mourning and luck have all been kind of tumbling around in my head this week.  Last night, I watched Hotel Rwanda and struggled to imagine the burden of drawing a card like that out of the Universe's deck.  Even in our attempts to break genocide down and understand it on a human level through art and writing and documentaries, it's so hard to separate the individual lives involved from the capital-E Event of it.

About an hour ago, I finished Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which she wrote in the year after her husband John's sudden death and the catastrophic illnesses of her daughter Quintana.  This passage perfectly sums up for me the way our ideas about luck and grief are tangled:

Once when she was still at the Westlake School for Girls, Quintana mentioned what she seemed to consider the inequitable distribution of bad news.  In the ninth grade she had come home from a retreat at Yosemite to learn that her uncle Stephen had committed suicide.  In the eleventh grade, she had been woken at Susan's at six-thirty in the morning to learn that Dominique had been murdered.  "Most people I know at Westlake don't even know anyone who died," she said.  "and just since I've been there I've had a murder and a suicide in my family."

"It all evens out in the end," John said, an answer that bewildered me (what did it mean, couldn't he do better than that?) but one that seemed to satisfy her.  

 Several years later, after Susan's mother and father died within a year or two of each other, Susan asked if I remembered John telling Quintana that it all evened out in the end.  I said I remembered.  

"He was right," Susan said.  "It did."

 I recall being shocked.  It had never occurred to me that John meant that bad news will come to each of us.  Either Susan or Quintana had surely misunderstood.  I explained to Susan that John had meant something entirely different: he had meant that people who get bad news will eventually get their share of good news. 

 "That's not what I meant at all," John said.

 "I knew what he meant," Susan said. 

We are not supposed to live our lives with one eye looking wearily around the bend for the tragedies sure to come, and I don't intend to do so.  But they are coming.  They will be brought to us or brought on ourselves in a million different ways, big and small.  And it doesn't take an event like the Rwandan genocide or even a death in the family to remind us.

One of my favorite poems (and a really great YouTube channel):
"Spring and Fall To a Young Child" by Gerard Manley Hopkins