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A friend of mine passed away the other day. My wife and I raced to his house shortly after he’d been found so we could talk to the police and wait for the people from the funeral home to come to collect his body. It was a fairly long wait, one we spent surrounded by all his stuff. There were his sandals where he’d left them by his chair the night before; the crossword puzzle he’d just finished; the plate and napkin from his last snack. In his office were piles of receipts, photographs, notes, and boxes and boxes of copies of a memoir he’d recently published.
I was a little surprised that the sight of all this stuff didn’t depress me at all, though it did remind me why I don’t like to write about death. Or, at least, I don’t like to write about it by name. It’s a word that tolls like a bell in conversation, is as uncertain as to the look in the police officer’s eyes as he greeted us before he learned that we wouldn’t be wrecked by the news. I hate the word, frankly. I hate what it does to people, how we bow our heads to it like it were some god so mighty no poem or song or medicine can conquer it.
I am only interested in writing about things that grow–mostly ideas and relationships and people. A story is something that grows from me, or through me. A lot gets thrown away before a story is called finished. Ideas come and seem nifty and useful at first, but I learn by and by they don’t belong, and they’re easily discarded and forgotten. Throwing away an unnecessary sentence is almost as satisfying as finding one that’s needed.
All throwing away feels good, actually. There’s a lot of stuff around my house I don’t need–books I’ve read, clothes I don’t wear anymore, toys my kids stopped playing with years ago. Now that stuff just gets in the way, a cluttering reminder of something I once was. Everything I’m not anymore has to go so I can make room for what I’ll become.
Rummaging around my friend’s house, I found a picture of my wife when she was 18. That was the year I met her. Seeing it, I could still remember that feeling of discovery and recognition, of relief that I’d found her. I mentioned this to her while we waited.
“Really?” she said. “I was such a different person then.”
“I was too. I just remember the feeling.”
“Weird. I can hardly remember anything about her except that she wasn’t that happy.”
I thought of the time I was giving a keynote and the woman introducing me to read a short excerpt from a book I’d written. I had no memory of having written it. If she had told me someone else had written it I’d have believed her. I did like it, however, and it actually served as a little boost of inspiration for my talk. That guy who wrote that, I thought as I stepped up to the podium, he did a good thing. I can’t really remember who he was, but I’m glad he wrote it because it’s helpful to me now.
The funeral folks had come and they were having trouble getting his body down the narrow steps from his bedroom. There was a lot of huffing and thumping and talk about the best way to do it. I was reminded of when men had come to move our piano. Eventually, they got him down, and I glanced toward the front door as they wheeled the covered body out. The officer had asked if I wanted to see him before the funeral people came, but I declined. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t him any more than his sandals or crossword or even books were him. But I could still feel what it was to sit and talk to him, could still feel the relationship we had, could feel it exactly as I had the day before he left all this stuff behind.
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