And Now For Something Completely the Same

Well... that was complainy. And it was almost a month ago. During that month, I moved on, almost made my original deadline, didn't, but didn't care. Now I'm here, and it's time to share.

And by share I mean give some huge spoilers for the next two books of... well, that's the thing...

Due to the sudden, recent death of a friend's father, I have once again had my little aminal brain collide with mortality and the concerns thereabouts. I suddenly realized as I thought about the death of a stranger that superficially touched my existence, that I am, once again, writing a story that heavily involves {spoilers coming}


resurrection as a means of negotiating with death. TRO is like this, The Wide and Burning World is like this, as are other projects yet to be mentioned. I could be about to reveal the content of either work, since it's the content of both. But only in TWaBW am I dealing with it directly (so far).

When I am confronted with mortality, usually the peak moment of my grief is the knowledge that my husband is going to die. I begin to cry and say simple, childlike things like "I really just don't want you to die. I really just don't." Then it comes to me that while this is an absolutely true assertion in the way very few things are absolutely true, that there is an equal and opposing truth: I can't do anything about it. Then I cry harder. "There's nothing I can do to change it," I wail, burying my face in his chest.

Instead of telling me "no, but," this time, he simply told me that there was something I could do. Something that was a rival to the inevitability of death, and answer to it: Live my life well. It's that clear, that simple. And don't we know that? Isn't life the opposite of death? Living defies dying: We can't be partially alive, it's an either-or. And Life has the advantage of time. Death is an instant.

It doesn't have to be a perfect life, full of joy and good decisions and moral fortitude. It can just be a conscious life, that someone who is now dead asked you to live. The conversation and realization that I made in my kitchen, likely decades from the end of either my or my husband's life, can be condensed down to the handful of minutes before the end of life. It's not a new idea that the deathbed is the moment of ultimate truth, perhaps because it is only mortality that is absolute. Here's what I learned from this little brush with it. The man who craves immortality only longs to live himself, the man who desires that others live is the symbol of resurrection.

There will be all these choices, these aspects in Soil, Ocean, Air. Lives lived too long, too thoughtlessly, lives that would satisfy the dead that have gone before and those that would disappoint them. Immortality, legacy, sacrifice, surrender, heroism, resurrection and ultimate loss. It might seem too broad now. I mean, we all live and we all die. I can live and die thousands of lives in my writing. It won't make a difference in the end of ends, of course. But it makes a difference in the middle, and that's all anybody--real or otherwise--has got.