Death came calling on November 23, 2024. My mother died after a few months of illness (and a few years of decline.) In the words of the poet, Emily Dickinson,
Because I could not stop for Death — He kindly stopped for me —
I’m still sorting out all the feels (and file drawers full of personal papers) and don’t have much coherent to say right now about her death in and of itself: the loss, separation, grief, regrets, and ugly face of illness.
But thoughts about how our final experience together impacts my creative life are beginning to coalesce. They are a bit muddled, but maybe writing them down will reveal a secret message, from me to me.
A Death Changes Time’s Flow
Logically and practically, my productivity should have soared with more time spent at my desk rather than at a hospital bedside. But as the dust of funeral arrangements and insurance claims settled, the most obvious change in my creative life was that, while my time became my own again, my inner state made using that time for work more difficult. I needed to just sit with the experience, so my psyche and body conspired to make me do so.
And the rate of time’s passage sped up and slowed down, randomly. In the first weeks after my mother’s death, I caught up on sleep. (I can now sleep past four am!) Yet I spent my waking hours in a busyness that didn’t actually move much forward, and I prodded my long-suffering family to do the same. It feels like we’ve been in a liminal way station for years, although it’s only been a few months. Frenetic busyness isn’t very conducive to story (although maybe the sleep was helpful.)
Death Brings Changes to the Creative Process
In a sense, I’m picking up the pieces of my creative life and re-assembling them. Like a two-sided puzzle, the picture will turn out to be something different than the one I put together previously. I was one sort of person before the final medical crisis, the sullen yet ultimately dutiful daughter. With the powerful parental figure only living in memory and my life patterns, whom will I become? As my own daughter said, “Now you’re an orphan.”
My role in life has shifted, so perhaps that will change the nature of stories that come to me. Or how I tell those stories. I wonder if I’ll be more honest with myself and the material. Less fearful of disapproval. I spent a lot of time and energy reacting to people and events. What will I initiate, given the space?
Developing a Spine
The most important tip for continuing to write during rough times is to continue to write during rough times. But that is much easier said than done. Setting healthy boundaries can make you feel like a fraud and a shirker; at least in my experience. Yet, I’m beginning to address work long neglected. I have insights to share, and ambitions are bubbling to the surface. How do I want to use my remaining years and resources? How do I want to be remembered?
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How about you? Have life’s traumatic events been a force for creative change? I’d love to hear your ideas for maintaining some sort of balance. Comment on the blog. Navigate to my website, click the blog title, and complete the dialogue box that will open at the end of the post.
If you enjoyed this journal entry, you might like to read about Roll With Life.
I started this blog thread on the gritty details of the writing process on my Facebook Author page, @kbkathylbrown, but think I might be better served putting it over here. If you’re interest in following my writing process, you’ll find a few posts on Facebook that might interest you. You can subscribe to the blog from the website landing page (scroll down).
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St. Louis Writers Guild just published Weird STL, an anthology celebrating the strange, spooky, and just plain wonderful aspects of our hometown. This volume of short stories, poems, a play, and essays includes a Sean Joye universe short story, “Big Magick.” Joseph Arwald, one of the baddies from The Big Cinch, tells us what really happened to the Ferris Wheel from the St. Louis 1904 World’s Fair.
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