Things About Grief

Grief is the worst party guest ever.  First of all, nobody invited him. It was supposed to be a fun evening, a chance to relax and God forbid—have fun. And everyone else is having fun, and speaking of things unrelated to Grief’s preoccupation, which only you know about because he whispers it in your ear any time he finds you alone in the kitchen, or the bathroom, or having a thought unrelated to the party. He’s always more than happy to remind you, when you forget.

Grief isn’t rational, not ever. No matter how many times you point out to him that his presence isn’t quantifiable or reasonable, not in any way that relates to time or space or influence in your actual, day-to-day life; no matter how many ways you try to explain him away, he doesn’t care. He stands there, defiantly, staring you down.

Grief has magical, infiltrating ways. Say, for instance, you’re out enjoying a very nice concert. Grief can travel in the strains of a piano, or the lyrics of a song, even one that’s not meant to be particularly sad. Grief can hijack a perfectly nice scent—like cologne, for example—and attack your senses before you even realize what has happened.

Grief loves company. Nothing recharges his batteries more than having a roomful of people to feed on. It’s where he lives, like a virus. 

Grief also loves to be alone. With you, anyway. Because that’s when he can really focus and gets things done. Much like a poet or artist who needs solitude to concentrate and create, Grief does his best work in a quiet room, with no distractions.

Grief is like a friend you can always confide in, but he’s also like the friend who sometimes has several drinks and talks too much. You can forgive Grief, because everyone needs an outlet once in a while, only you wish he wouldn’t have dumped on you this time (again).

Grief is a dark, gray evening and a bright, sparkling morning. He is high noon sunshine and the blackest part of night. He is rain, and snow, and everything that absorbs back into the earth.

Grief accepts no apologies, doesn’t need them. He’s good like that.

Grief stays away from very small children, mostly, and they are the only true antidote against him. Sometimes, he can be deterred by great beauty, such as you find in art or nature, but often he uses it as a shield and weasels his way right in.

You can move to a new house, or travel, or change your habits or job, and I’m pretty sure Grief will find you no matter what. He’s his own GPS. It’s almost a comfort at times, knowing he’s there, although you hope he'll keep his distance. He doesn’t always have good manners or social skills; he can’t read cues.

Once in a while, Grief takes a vacation. I imagine him, lying on a beach chair, pink umbrella in his drink, drifting off to the sound of endless waves. Come Monday morning, however, he’s back and ready for business.

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Things You Learn on Your First Writing Retreat

 

-     Writing some place outside of your house and writing inside your house are two vastly different enterprises. With one, there are additional tasks constantly clamoring for your attention. With the other, your only distraction is yourself. And the internet. And food.

-     If a rental place looks rustic online, it is probably very rustic. Very.

-     If a rental place looks like it offers exposure to natural elements, it is very likely those natural elements will come to visit you inside the rental place.

-    You may lose some time chasing ants out of the kitchen.

-    You can really get a ton of writing done if you’re sitting in that chair twelve to fourteen hours a day.

-     Your house, with you not in it, will not burn down (probably).

-     Your husband, the fire chief in your absence, deserves a medal.

-    On retreat, many more meals and snacks are required than when you’re not on retreat. It’s probably good that retreats don’t happen often, or all writers would weigh six hundred pounds.

-   When your weather app says it will be 100 degrees in Joshua Tree, it will be probably, in fact, be 100 degrees and therefore, too hot to sit on that patio you admired online.

-   Your kid will still expect you to be the house’s IT person, even though you can’t really do much about his iPhone from Joshua Tree.

-   Natural elements make a lot of noises. Especially at night.

     -  When you cry over your writing while on retreat, nobody knows about it except you, and the desolate desert nightscape, and that goddamn, unidentifiable bug that can somehow fly AND crawl AND hide under the covers.

-    Motrin PM will help you sleep while the bug crawls over your lifeless body.

-    Just like at your house, three hours can pass in an instant when you’re immersed with your characters.

-    All of the stories you write on retreat will involve characters drinking wine.

-    Twenty minutes of yoga a day is not enough to combat the excess calories entering your body. But don’t worry about that...keep writing!

-    You will feel guilty for missing your kid’s baseball game, and your other kid’s first day of camp, but you’ll know you’re doing them a favor by expending your creative urges. Really.

-    You will have no dogs to snuggle while on retreat and there’s nothing positive about that, except you’ll gain at least an hour a day you would have wasted at home, snuggling.

-    On the third day, when a mouse runs across the floor of your tiny rental place, you will be 100% justified in packing your bags and leaving said rental place within the next twenty minutes.

-    You will cry big, fat tears of relief when you see the fluffy, white bedspread at the Hampton Inn, the pristine white tub, and the proper desk with a comfortable, leather chair. No one will know except you and--that's it, actually, because there are no bugs or mice at the Hampton Inn.

-     You’ll discover something you already sort of knew, in your heart of hearts. You’re a HOTEL person, not an OUTDOORSY person. Nice try, though.

-    You will end your experience with 10,000 new words and an appreciation for your same old desk, at your same old house.

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The Ordering of Place

I was reading a memoir recently, and the author talked about sitting down to draw a detailed map of a home where she felt safe and happy when she was a child—her grandparents’, I think—and I took a breath because I have done the exact thing; once, I pulled myself from bed to draw a recollection of my grandmother’s house, blueprint-style, with what I imagined was true-to-proportion squares and rectangles for each bedroom, the hallway, and the kitchen where it was always cool, clean, and bright. My grandma had a house that would be considered cramped by today’s standards—three small bedrooms, a living room, a dining area within the kitchen. No family room, no loft, no “bonus room.” And yet in it, she raised three children with my grandpa, and continued to live there after he died in his early sixties. I was eight years old when he passed and do remember my grandpa a bit, but I still think of the house as hers. To this day, I can visualize her well-organized closets and cupboards and what was kept in each one. I remember the sheen on her dining room table, the pattern in the dark green carpeting.

I wonder if everyone thinks about special places this way, or if it’s those of us drawn to some sort of creativity. Among writers, there’s lots of talk about place and how it figures into the stories we spin. But when we say “place,” surely there’s much more involved than the placement of linens, the size of a bathroom, the view from a quiet bedroom to the empty clothesline outside. It’s not where the rooms are, of course, but how we felt in them.

Perhaps this compulsion to document the layout of my grandmother’s home is a way to begin to give order to memory. This ordering must come first, because while it’s very well and good to talk about how wonderful it was at Grandma’s, someone has to make sense of it—the whys, the hows, the everlasting ripples of memory, what it meant to be warm and safe and happy within those walls. This sometimes unwelcome task falls to the creative types, I suppose, just as certain tasks fall to grandmothers, and grandfathers, and children whose only job it is to absorb, and live, and love.

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Word Mantras

Every so often, usually around Mother’s Day, lists are circulated which detail the extensive duties filled by anyone with the job title “Mom.” Housekeeper, Chauffeur, Chef, Teacher, EMT, Janitor, etc.—the point being, mothers fill many shoes, on the daily. And it occurred to me that people who choose writing are often expected to master a variety of roles as well. Apart from the artistic requirements of the job (too extensive to get into here), a writer is also Administrator, Secretary, Public Relations, Marketer, and much more. But I think the most challenging expectation for a writer (and mother, for that matter) is to be her own best counsel and at more dire times, her own therapist.

 

The peaks and valleys of the writing life are relentless. Small victories followed by demoralizations; any bit of burgeoning confidence soon squashed by doubt. At least that’s how it seems sometimes. Lately, I’ve been grappling with uncertainty. I started a novel for NaNoWriMo last November but have lost the spark. I can’t decide what it’s about, or remember why I started it in the first place. I’m not sure if I’m writing it for myself, or whether my motivations are murky with outside influences. I can’t determine whether it’s worth pursuing.

 

Outside factors press in, as always. I’m distracted by other, non-writing things. I can’t focus, can’t find time. I wallow. And then, as we writers always do, I began to undertake the long process of picking myself up, dusting myself off, and rebuilding my mental stamina for another round. Basically, I’ve been giving myself therapy. Okay, well really, I’ve been avoiding that damn novel and once in a while, giving it a think until my brain starts to hurt. In the meantime, I’ve been reading and reading. My balm. My respite.

 

I read Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels and for several weeks and almost 2000 pages, let myself get lost in another time and place. Books can do that! my therapist self reminded my despondent self. As I pondered the purpose of writing anything at all, this essay claimed “the purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair.” This seemed like a good litmus test, my therapist self said, should I decide to dive back into that abandoned novel. I mulled this over for days. And when I read a novel that surprised, delighted, and joyfully embraced language, sentence by sentence, (my review here), my therapist self suggested that I break things down to basics.

 

Words, words, words. For some time, I had been obsessing about the word despair. Sitting at the veterinarian’s office, an injured dog came in—panting, head tilted, unsteady on his feet—and I thought: “despair!” In a parking lot, a woman shrieked in anger when someone took her parking spot—and I thought: “despair!” An old man trudged along the sidewalk, mumbling to himself—surely, “despair!” Often, I recalled that Thoreau quote about countless lives of quiet desperation and thought: “Yes, despair!” It was everywhere. I was invoking it and inviting it.

 

Then I found this poem by Wendell Berry, a sun beam that broke through my despair-filled cloud cover.

 

I began to fixate on another word: resolute.

 

From the Latin resolutus, past participle of resolvere (loosen, release, disperse). First known use: 1533. Synonyms: bent, bound, hell-bent, purposeful, determined, set.

Descendants:

Catalan: resolut, resolt English: resolute French: résolu, résous Italian: risoluto, risolto

Portuguese: resoluto, resolto Romanian: rezolut Spanish: resoluto, resuelto

Each version has a crisp, decisive sound, an accented syllable to signify purpose. I highly recommend finding the audio pronunciation online and playing it over and over, when you tire of saying it to yourself.

“It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.” –Theodore Roosevelt

“To a resolute mind, wishing to do is the first step toward doing. But if we do not wish to do a thing it becomes impossible.” –Robert Southey

“There is nothing in this world which a resolute man, who exerts himself, cannot attain.” –Somadeva

First and most basic job tile an author must take on: Craftsman or Artist, whichever you prefer. Keep it simple, my life coach/therapist self says. And so I return, once again, to the basics: stories, sentences, words. Resolute. Try saying it a few times, try imagining it on a page, the determined black lines and curves of it. Resolute. It’s a great word.

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Remembering Ella Wheeler Wilcox

 

An old edition of The Scarlet Letter recently came into my possession. It was published by W.B. Conkey Company in Chicago and although there is no other publication information (possibly pages are missing), my rudimentary research dates this copy to right around 1900. The pages of the book are yellowed, crumbling, and separating from the cover. The novel belonged to my great-grandmother, Addie Viola Flowers, who was born in July of 1884 and was twenty-one years old when the book was “presented” to her in 1906.

 

The top line on the inscription page reads “Auction Thursday Evening,” and “.22”—perhaps an opening bid? Whatever the winning bid was, my great-grandmother appears to have made it. The rest of the inscription reads “Presented to Addie Flowers, Feb. 8, 1906, By Mr. William Malotte.”

 

It’s interesting to hold in my hands a book held by her. My grandparents were from West Virginia, and we used to visit in the summer. I have scant memories of Addie, whom we called Nanny. I remember her as very old, walking with a walker, and then bedbound before she passed. She died when I was nine. Watching my grandmother care for her and realizing, even at that young age, what type of dedication that took, is something I won’t forget.
 

But this post was intended to be about another woman, a Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox. I was drawn to the advertisement at the back of this edition of Hawthorne’s classic. Here, W.B Conkey claims to be the sole publishers of this author’s work, and they invest a two-page spread highlighting her works. These books, like The Scarlet Letter, were hardcovers, published in different editions depending on your budget. The prices ranged from fifty cents to two dollars, with most regular editions costing one dollar. I couldn't recall having ever heard of Ella Wheeler Wilcox and maybe you haven’t either, but I’d bet you’ve heard some form of her most famous poem:

                Laugh and the world laughs with you,

                Weep and you weep alone.

                For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

                It has trouble enough of its own.

    

Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born in 1850 in Johnstown, Wisconsin. At the age of nine, this precocious girl wrote her first novel, using scraps of paper from around the farmhouse in Westport where the family had moved. She grew up reading magazines and newspapers, a practice that "caused me to live in a world quite apart from that of my commonplace farm environment, where the post office was five miles distant, mail came only two or three times a week.”


She briefly attended Madison University, but quit after one semester to spend more time writing. Her first success was the publication of a lengthy narrative poem, “Maurine,” in 1876. She followed that with a book of poems and by 1896, she had written thirteen books. A contemporary of “the Fireside Poets”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Greenleaf Whittier, etc.—her poetry was always positive and encouraging, and it focused on humanity’s spirit and themes of reincarnation, in which she was a firm believer. Although these rhyming poems may seem outdated, at the time, they were extremely popular and often recited at public occasions.


At the age of 28, she married Robert Wilcox. They had one child, a boy who died hours after his birth, and they remained married for thirty years until Robert’s death. Her spiritual beliefs led her to make many attempts to maintain contact with the spirit of her husband. She also played a part in the establishment of the American Rosicrucian movement.

Mrs. Wilcox died in 1919 from cancer, having written over forty books of poems, stories and songs and having built a small fortune by writing. Here are some links, if you’d like to explore her life and legacy:

 

Ella Wheeler Wilcox Society

 

Poetry Foundation: Ella Wheeler Wilcox

 

Rosicrucian Library entry

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