Writing Through the Tears

The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Sweetbriar accommodates approximately 24 artists on a piece of property that rambles lazily over hills and pastureland.  A hundred-year-old stone barn houses studios of all shapes and sizes so that everyone can be satisfactorily creative.  Every evening after dinner, the artists, musicians, writers, composers, and artisans who have worked all day on their various projects commune in a room where a piano gets center stage and a fireplace fills one wall.  The fire reflects warmly off a wall of sliding glass doors that look spectacular when the fire spreads to the roof . . . but that’s another story.

At one of those after-dinner get-togethers approximately a dozen of us circled the piano, Donald, a world-class composer, heartily played show tunes.  We sang and laughed for a while, and I was struck by the level of intense artistic abilities manifested in the people around me.  One man had just signed a contract to compose a major symphony.  The blond woman from New York had written for McCall’s and was deep in revisions for a nonfiction book, while her husband, a self-effacing man with a boyish habit of flipping his charcoal-hued hair back from his face, freely shared his problems with character in his latest literary novel.  A tall, thin artist, who wore black and dyed her hair to match, was the complete antithesis of the large, flashy pastel paintings she’d shown the night before, and the senior member of the group was agent to a major literary figure.  Since he’d shared stories of the author’s upcoming book about his problems with depression, it seemed natural that the subject of why we do what we do came up.  Why did we put ourselves through the rejection and torment of being artists?

“To share the songs going through my head,” Donald the composer sat at the piano, taking part in the discussion without missing a note of “New York, New York.”

“I want to get my fingers in the mud and shape it, work it, really see something arising out of the muck . . . .”  The artist to my right flexed her fingers in the air, as if molding a vase at that very moment.

“Could you live without it?”  The woman I’d become friends with, a thirty-something mother of a toddler, sat next to me on the tweedy couch.  She asked the question of the crowd in general, and a thoughtful moment of silence fell over the crowd before someone piped up:  “I couldn’t.  Nope, it’s who I am.”

The agent threw out:  “What if you were given the choice of losing your family or your art?  What would your choice be?”

One by one, the men in the room answered:  “My art.”  The women, for the most part, remained silent, except for my young-mother friend.

“I don’t have to think about that at all.  My child comes first.”  She settled back into the couch, having already told everyone at dinner about her young son and how much she missed him.  There was no doubt that she spoke from her heart.

And in one of those moments when the mouth is engaged before the mind, I blurted out, “I think I could lose everyone I love and make it through my grief by writing.  But I don’t think I could make it through my life without writing.”

My friend’s chin dropped, and she leaned forward, perched precariously on the edge of the couch.  “You can’t possibly mean that.”

“I do,” I replied, and a two-hour-long discussion about whether or not we’d give up art for love or vice versa began.

I never changed my mind, though I felt guilty when relaying the story to my husband and daughter upon my return home–especially since they had spent the time I was gone (two weeks) without power, water or heat because of a mid-winter storm.

*     *     *

Fast forward seven years.  I’ve moved from the chilly North to the warm, humid South.  I’m still writing, though I can’t say I’m making a living at it, and there have been some changes in the publishing world that would defeat the strongest.  But still, I write.  Because I can’t not write (and that’s a purposeful double negative).

I have a writer friend with whom I have many passionate conversations.  It is during lunch one day that the subject of living and dying for our art comes up.  Surprisingly, this relatively successful novelist has the same answer that my friend from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts had, and she sits across the table from me when I answer, her face as stunned as the young mother’s was.  “You mean to tell me if someone said they’d take away Bobby tomorrow, you’d keep writing?”

“Yes,” I answer.  “I’d miss him horribly, but think about it:  if you lose someone, how do you get through it?  You write in your journal or you sink yourself into your novel.  Somehow that writing process gets us through the grief and helps us to deal with it.  As long as I can write, I can deal with anything. Even losing my husband.”

“Okay, imagine I’m the devil.  I’m going to take away your children or your pen.  Choose.”

I squint at her and we laugh, but she persists, telling me I wouldn’t want to lose someone I loved and that if I had the power to change it by stopping writing, I would.  I acquiesce.  Maybe so, but would I be able to live without writing?  I don’t think so.

*     *     *

A couple of years later, my writer-friend Carol’s death would put that belief of mine to the ultimate test.  How did I get through it, those long and torturous days when I sat next to Carol’s bed and watched her suffer with a cancer that ate away her backbone and broke her body so completely that she could do nothing for herself except to think?  I brought a journal with me each time I went to visit her.  By writing down my feelings about how painful it was sitting there next to her bed, watching her vitality and life taken away by an onerous cancer, I was able to talk to her without breaking down.  The journal became the glue that held me together over several years of grief, knowing all the while that Carol (and her husband, Mike, who also had cancer and died a few short months before she did) would not live the full and complete life she had planned.

Nothing in my life has mirrored the absolute agony of that period of time — not only for Carol, but for those around her.  As I wrote about those moments in my journal, I cried through my pen.  It was the only way I could mourn, because Carol never wanted to see tears.

*      *     *

One Christmas, my mother (my greatest supporter) gave me a blank journal with two cats on the cover that looked a lot like my own felines.  It was a silly journal, but she wrote a note to me on the frontispiece that I should use the journal as a repository for stories about my travels.  I tucked the book in with a couple of other blank journals, intending to use it when I needed a new one.

Normally, I keep at least half a dozen journals simultaneously:  a dream journal, a writing journal (with ideas for my current novel), a daily journal, a travel journal, and several others.  There is always a journal at my bedside, one on my desk, one in my briefcase, another small one for my handbag, and yet another in the bathroom.  When I write on the last page, I file the journal on my shelf and open a new one.  Never do I go anywhere without a journal, because I never know when an idea or a thought will cross my mind and I’ll need to write it down.  (I like to tell my students that our minds are like Swiss cheese.  If you don’t write down those random thoughts, they fall out the holes.)

My mother is the one who taught me how to write.  She dreamed of being a journalist when she was growing up and infused in me her love for books and for the written word.  She sat at my side as I wrote my first article on the Cuban missile crisis when I was nine years old and proofread it with an eye more astute than some of my best editors’. That article was my first published piece, showing up in our local newspaper. I have a framed copy of it in my office after the editor found the original in the newspaper archives two years ago when I went home to launch my latest novel.

No one cheered more than my mother when my first novel, All That Glitters, hit the shelves.  Somewhere along the way, Mom started putting my articles in a scrapbook, so every time I wrote something or had an interview in a newspaper or magazine, I’d send her a copy.  She shared the articles with anyone who visited. When she passed, I found the scrapbooks, thick with the collected articles, the pages yellow as though she’d leafed through them often.

*     *     *

On July 10, 2000, I got the phone call that all daughters dread.  My father said, “You need to come now, Dawn.  Your mother’s had a massive stroke.  She’s not going to make it.”

All the way up to Boston on the flight from Jacksonville, Florida, I tried to focus on the magazine in my hand, but I couldn’t see the pages.  My hands found the small composition book in my pocketbook, and I wrote a few bleary words.

A couple of days later, I began writing for my mother:  her obituary, her eulogy, and the beginning of many letters to her that she would never see.

When I returned home from Boston after my mother’s funeral, it was hard to get back to the novel I’d been working on, probably because the story was loosely based on a family crisis we’d experienced many years before.  Time after time, I went to the computer only to stare at the screen, unable to write.

Finally, I knew what my young mother friend in Virginia meant.

Would I stop writing today if it would bring my mother back?  Yes, I decided while sitting in front of the computer. I wanted one more moment with my mother. Just one. And I’d give up anything.

Maybe it was time to give up writing, I thought.  Maybe I was just writing for my mother all those years.  Maybe it wouldn’t matter if I never put another sentence together.

The thought crippled me, and I lost it.  I cried out every tear in my body.

*     *     *

Several days later, I looked at my desk and decided to clear it off.  It’s a habit I have.  After every project is done, I clean my desk, file all my papers, Windex my computer screen, and get the bugs out so I can start all over again.  This time, however, the cleaning was more psychological than a physical habit.  I was starting over.

That afternoon, I decided that the best way to deal with what I was feeling about my mother was to devote a journal totally to my thoughts about her.  Perhaps my daughter or a grandchild would find it in the future and think of it as my tribute to my mother, but for now, it was the tool I needed to deal with my grief.

I reached for the place on my bookshelf where I store empty journals and chose one to christen.  I opened it, and out fell the Christmas tag.  “Keep on writing,” my mother had written on it.

So, I do.