Grief: Yearning for a World that Makes Sense

January 21, 2012 — Pat Bertram

In a week, it will be twenty-two months since my life mate/soul mate died. Sometimes it seems like he slipped out of my life just yesterday; sometimes it seems as if he’s been dead forever. And I still cannot fathom his goneness. It makes no sense that he is no longer here on this earth.

The worst trauma I am facing now is his continued absence. I don’t have the totally mind-numbing pain that I did in the beginning, nor do I head to another room in search of him a dozen times a day. I do, however, still desperately yearn to talk to him, and the longer I go without talking to him, the more the yearning builds up with no way to relieve it. (Yearning sounds so mild for the longing that claws at me, but it’s still the best word to describe what I feel.)

My own experiences and the experiences of my fellow bereft have shown that it is not anger or any of the other Kübler-Ross stages that fuels our grief, but yearning to see our mates once more, to have one more conversation, one more word, one more smile. I do talk to him, especially when I’m walking in the desert. (Though why there I don’t know. He didn’t like the desert, didn’t like the heat.) But he never answers back. One-sided conversations do little to satisfy the yearning, though sometimes they bring a bit of comfort.

I am lucky in that we had a chance to say everything we needed to say before he died, so there are no lingering issues or questions I have to discuss with him but, for me, need is not the issue. I want to talk to him. He had a great grasp on the intricacies of life and on modern history, he had a well-researched historical perspective on current events, and he loved books and movies. We could talk about anything and everything, and not once in our thirty-four shared years did he filter my words through his prejudices or beliefs. That is such a rare quality in a world where it’s so easy to bang one’s verbal shins on the rocks in other people’s heads.

We all have rocks in our heads — the rocks being our opinions, prejudices, beliefs, stubbornly held viewpoints, preconceived notions, assumptions, attitudes, falsehoods we hold to be true. Sometimes the rocks are soft and fall apart under the touch of reason. Other times the rocks are boulders that take up all available space, leaving no room for a new idea. If my mate had any rocks, they were more like a few shifting grains of sand that could take into account anyone’s truths, and that made him easy to talk to.

I should be glad I had him for all those years since so few people find someone they can truly talk to, someone who will listen, and I am glad. But . . . how can the earth survive without him? After he died, the planet felt tilted, and I had a hard time keeping my balance, but now I’m growing used to living on the slant. But I still yearn for a world that makes sense the way it used to, and I still yearn to talk to him.

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I Wish I Was, I Wish I Were

January 20, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I’m implementing the edits to Grief: The Great Yearning my last couple of readers suggested, and I was doing fine until I hit this passage:

I’m trying to find comfort in knowing he is no longer suffering, and for a moment yesterday I even envied him. I wish my pain were over, too.

Both readers said “were” should be “was.” Since they are readers, not editors or grammarians, I ignored the suggestion, especially since MS Word grammar check agrees with me. Still, something niggled at me, so I spent an hour online reading various articles comparing I wish it were vs. I wish it was. And this is what I found:

http://www.grammar.net/iwishiwere says: “Was” is used in situations where the statement might once have been or could be a reality. This verb mood is called “indicative”. These subtle differences once enabled a speaker to “indicate” something without using more words to spell it out.

“If I was home, I would be sitting on the couch eating chips.” The speaker indicates with subtlety that he intends to go home, and potato chips will be involved.

“Frank’s not here yet, but if he was, that blueberry pie would be gone.” Because “was” is used, even if it read, “If Frank was here, that pie would be gone,” readers can assume that Frank will show up eventually, and the pie is in danger.

In an unknown situation, it is admissible to use “was”.

“If Betty was smart, she’d go hide that pie.” Even if there is proof that Betty is NOT smart, it is certainly more polite to indicate she might be!

“If it was Friday, I don’t blame her for taking a short lunch.” “Was” is intended to emphasize “Friday” and that it was a fact.

How fun it is that certain things can be hinted at, if the listener can catch the subtleties. Can you think of any other words or parts of speech that change only slightly but definitely alter meaning?

I thought that was the solution to my quandary, change were to was. When I wrote the sentence twenty-one months ago, I deliberately used were. I thought it impossible that the pain of those early days would ever diminish. And yet, though I still have bouts of pain at his being dead, I don’t feel the total and constant agony I felt in the beginning. So if  was connoted hope rather than futility, it would be the better choice.

Unfortunately, wishes always take “were”s. When making a statement that is not factual, the verb is in the subjunctive mood, and the subjuctive of verb “to be” is “were” in the past tense, regardless of what the subject is.

So, despite my change in attitude, the sentence needs to remain as I originally wrote it.

I’m trying to find comfort in knowing he is no longer suffering, and for a moment yesterday I even envied him. I wish my pain was over, too.

Someday, perhaps, it will be.

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My Grief Book is One Step Closer to Publication

January 19, 2012 — Pat Bertram

Grief: The Great Yearning is one step closer to publication. Today I received what might be the final copyedits. One of my fellow bereft volunteered to proof the book for me (actually, a mutual friend volunteered him, and he was kind enough to go along with the suggestion), and he turned out to be a phenomenal copyeditor. Found mistakes that all the rest of us missed. We don’t even have the excuse that we couldn’t see the words for the tears, since he had the same problem.

Very few people have managed to get through the book dry-eyed. Even though each person’s grief is different, there are enough similarities that this book speaks to everyone. It’s been called powerful, profound, exquisite, wrenching, raw, real. One woman wrote me, “I really like your book. When my husband died I devoured books about loss of spouse…maybe 30-40. The ones that were most helpful were similar to yours in that they recounted the journey. NONE were as complete as yours and that is what I wanted.”

Some people think the book will be best as a companion to those who are grieving. Some people think it will be best as a book to give their friends and relatives to help their loved ones understand what the bereft is going through. Some people think it should be required reading in classes for would-be therapists. Some people think it should be handed out to everyone whose spouse signs up with hospice so they are not shocked and bewildered when grief hits.

I never set out to write a book about grief. I merely cried out to an unfeeling void, looking for whatever comfort I could, trying to understand what had happened to him and me and our shared life. Apparently all that chaotic feeling ended up on paper, and now those emotions are tidily packed away into a book. Well, packed away until someone opens the book; then emotion explodes out of the binding.

Writing fiction comes hard to me. I have to drag every word out of my depths, but the words in this book came gushing forth. Of course, I was writing for me, not for others, and I didn’t have to create emotion out of nothing. I had emotion to spare.

Perhaps the time is right for this book. Perhaps it won’t mosey along like my novels, but will burn up the atmosphere when it takes off. Perhaps I really did write an important book. What a strange thought.

Posted in books, culture, grief, writing. Tags: , , , . 10 Comments »

How to Make Transitions From Scene to Scene in Fiction

January 18, 2012 — Pat Bertram

At it’s most simplistic, a scene is an action sequence that begins with a character trying to attain a goal, is further developed when someone or something tries to prevent the character from attaining the goal, and ends when either the goal is reached or disaster ensues. Either way, we should learn something new about the character by the end of the scene.

A novel is a seamless flow of story from scene to scene without interruption. At least it should appear that way. In actuality, time sometimes passes between one scene and the next, and it’s the way the writer handles transitions that makes the story flow.

Authors used to write long pieces of narrative and exposition linking scenes, but that isn’t necessary, and in today’s fast-paced world is a serious drawback. Readers want to plunge immediately into a new scene without being distracted by boring discourses.

One of the easiest and perhaps most effective ways of making a scene transition is simply to skip a space and start the new scene. (Or rather, start in an interesting place in a new scene.) “I’m dead,” Scott said. He lay in bed under the blue patchwork comforter Gracie had made him, his head turned toward the window.

Another easy way is to start with the grandmother of all scene transitions: Later. Just that one word. Or you can add a bit of time, A month later, Scott fell from a high beam.

Another good transition word is After. For example: After Scott had been pronounced dead, after he had been cleaned and shrouded in a white blanket, after he’d been hauled away in a purple body bag like so much garbage, the hospice nurse remained to comfort Gracie.

Or you can use seasons: In the spring, she buried Scott’s ashes beneath the dead willow.

On Facebook, a writer asked if it was okay to jump forward six months in a novel. My response: ‘It’s perfectly acceptable to jump ahead, and in a lot of cases, it’s the best thing for the book as long as you do the transition right. That way you keep hitting the high points of the story. If nothing significant happens in those six months (and you need the time to pass) then it’s better to jump ahead rather than bore your readers to death with unimportant events and dialogue. It’s easy enough to do — just start the chapter with “Six months have passed since such and such happened, and now, etc.” Might not be elegant, but it gets the point across.’

Other authors disagreed with my transition suggestion, saying it was too much author intrusion, that it would pull people out of the story, but I do know it wouldn’t pull people out of the story as much as six months worth of nothing happening.

This isn’t the exact wording as my inelegant response, but it’s basically the same thing: During the following spring, as the second anniversary of Scott’s death drew near, Gracie realized . . . again . . . he would never come back. He was gone forever, and since grief hadn’t killed her, much to her shock, she knew she’d have to do something to get her life back.

These are just a few ways I made the transition from scene to scene in a short story I recently wrote for an anthology that Second Wind Publishing will release this spring. Since my 2,100-word story spanned twenty-five years, I needed a lot of transitions. Without the transitions taking me from scene to scene, all I would have had is a long, boring narration of an uneventful marriage that ended in death.

So let’s talk about scenes and transitions from scene to scene. How do you personally write scenes and make transitions?

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Appalling Remarks People Say to Those Who Are Grieving

January 17, 2012 — Pat Bertram

People make appalling comments to us bereft. At a time when we can barely manage to drag ourselves through our days, we have to find the energy and graciousness to make allowances for people’s tactlessness, ignorance, and downright meanness. Most people are unaware of what it feels like to lose a significant part of their life, such as a spouse or a child, and they seem to be terrified of even thinking about that unthinkable happenstance, so they distance themselves from our pain with unfeeling words. They want to believe that the universe makes sense; that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world (except for that one little slip when he let your loved one die); that everything happens for the best. It is almost impossible for people to comprehend that bad things happen for no reason at all, so of course, the deceased had to have done something to cause his or her death.

Although people were generally kind to me after the death of my 63-year-old life mate/soul mate, I still got my share of inexcusable remarks such as:

Blank stare, then, “My second cousin’s great aunt just died.” (How does that in any way relate to my having lost the man with whom I shared the past thirty-three years of my life?)

“I didn’t know he smoked.” (He didn’t. And what does smoking have to do with kidney cancer?)

“How did allow himself to get so sick?” (He took excellent care of himself, better than anyone else I ever met.)

“I know how you feel. My cat just died.” (There simply is no response to this.)

“You’ll find someone else.” (What kind of comfort is that supposed to be, especially a few days after the death of the one man who ever truly loved me and had time for me?)

“It’s God’s will.” (You don’t want to know what I think of a God who allows a good man to suffer for years and then die a horrible death just to satisfy His whims.)

“God never gives you more than you can handle.” (Wanna bet?)

“Everything happens for the best.” (Who’s best?)

As grief continues, even those who started out kind become impatient. They say things such as:

“You have to get on with your life.” (This is my life).

“He wouldn’t want you to grieve.” (Well, then, he shouldn’t have died!)

“Get over it.” (I’ll get over it when he gets over being dead.)

But the worst thing anyone ever said was:

“God will never take something away from you without replacing it with something better.” It’s bad enough to say (as so many people did) “God never closes a door without opening a window.” At least this door/window analogy acknowledges that the replacement might not be as good as what was lost. But for someone to say that He will replace what was taken with something better is totally reprehensible. How could He possible replace my life mate/soul mate/business partner/best friend/comforter/supporter/companion with anyone or anything that would be better than what I had? If you lose a job, perhaps (in a good market) you can find a better one. If you lose your wedding ring, perhaps you can buy a better one. But a person? How can one unique individual be replaced with another?

Besides, I know for a fact that the aphorism is wrong. It’s been twenty-one months since my mate was taken from me, and though many things, both good and bad, have happened to me in these months, nothing comes even close to being as good as what I once had.

Click here if you want to know: What to Say to Someone Who is Grieving

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It Makes It Seem as if It has too Many Its

January 16, 2012 — Pat Bertram

“It” is an invisible word. We use it so frequently and are so used to seeing it, that we barely notice its use when we read it or write it. It takes a good editor to look beyond the expected to what is and find the “it”s that make our writing so hazy. See all my “it”s? Makes me seem like a lazy writer, and normally that would be true, but it was very difficult using so many “it”s in such a short time, but I needed all these “it”s to make a point. “It” has its place, but most often, a more specific word would make the writing come alive.

I wrote a short story for Change is in the Wind, the Second Wind Publishing anthology that will be released this spring. I write so little fiction now that I expected red marks to litter the pages when I got the draft back from my editor, but surprisingly, the story worked. Or the piece would have worked except for those annoying “it”s.

For example, I wrote, Unshed tears filled her chest and lungs. For a few seconds she thought she’d die, right there in her kitchen, leaning against the granite counter. She finally managed to draw first one breath, then another, but it hurt so horribly it didn’t seem worth the effort. And Scott wasn’t there to comfort her.

These sentences show a grieving woman, and there is nothing wrong with them, but the description of her pain is so much better when detailed words replace the “it”s. Unshed tears filled her chest and lungs. For a few seconds she thought she’d die, right there in her kitchen, leaning against the granite counter. She finally managed to draw first one breath, then another, but her chest hurt so horribly, the inhalations didn’t seem worth the effort. And Scott wasn’t there to comfort her.

There’s not a lot of difference between the two examples, but in a short story, where every word counts, precise words are better than place-holding pronouns such as “it.”

On another page I wrote: A touch of green against the dry brown of the tree trunk caught her attention. She went still. Could that really be what it looked like? She leaned closer to the tree and studied the willow shoot sprouting out of the base of the trunk.

And this is the final version: A touch of green against the dry brown of the tree trunk caught her attention. She went still. Could she really be seeing a renewal? She leaned closer to the tree and studied the willow shoot sprouting out of the base of the trunk.

A single word-change made this climactic scene pop. And that’s the point of paying attention to vague words like “it” and replacing them with more exacting words. Details make good writing burst into life.

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First Look at the Cover for My Grief Book!

January 15, 2012 — Pat Bertram

It seems odd to be pleased over the imminent release of my grief book, as if I’m trying to capitalize on grief, but the grief is a done deal. That particular sadness is here whether the book gets published or not. I do think it’s something to be pleased about, though. It will be a helpful book, both as a companion for people who are dealing with a grief that few of their family or friends understand, and for people who want to understand what their bereft loved one is going through.  It also seems odd to be a cover girl — That certainly was never one of my ambitions! — but I couldn’t imagine a better photo for the cover than this one of me at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. It was a completely spontaneous photo. My hands were supposed to be on the rock, but I started turning at the last minute. (Much to the chagrin of my brother who took the photo. He made me do it over, but the do-over wasn’t as evocative as this one.)

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The Conundrum of Grief

January 14, 2012 — Pat Bertram

Tolstoy wrote, “Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.” This is especially true of those of us who have lost our soul mates. What we once were (or thought we were) has died along with our loved ones. Now we’re wandering the desert of aloneness and wondering why we are still here. Since we don’t know, life seems impossible.

Recently, there was a news article about an elderly couple who died within hours of each other. This is the sort of romantic story that we all believe in — that when one of a pair of soul mates dies, the other will die also. Unfortunately, that does not happen very often, which is why it is noteworthy when it occurs. Life is at once very fragile and very tenacious. Having watched my life mate/soul mate’s struggles, I know how difficult it is to die. People can suffer for years, fading slowly and painfully, hoping for death to release them from their agony, but still endure.

New grief feels as if it will kill you, but it seldom does. Such grief is so very strong that it takes your very breath away. It makes you feel as if you are having a heart attack and some sort of terrible gastrointestinal disease at the same time. It can cause Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, make wounds difficult to heal, retard recovery from illness. The death rate for those whose life mate’s died increases by 25% for all causes of death — disease, accident, trauma. Despite this, almost all of us, to our shock, find that we have survived the trauma of such a heinous loss.

Here is the conundrum of grief: if they got the better end of the deal, if they truly are in a better place, then why are we still here? And if life is worth living, how can we not care that it is being denied our loved ones?

I always thought I’d die when he did, and I wonder if that’s where some of my deep sorrow comes from — an unconscious feeling of not having loved enough, been connected enough to die at the same time as he did. But the truth is, I wanted to live, though I don’t know why.

About a year before he died, I hugged him and somehow so aggravated his pain that he pushed me away. A voice deep inside me, beneath conscious thought, proclaimed, “He might be dying, but I have to live.” I have no idea what that voice was. I’d only heard it once before, and that was when I met him. Thirty-six years ago, I walked into a health food store to buy whole-wheat pastry flour, and after talking to the owner for two minutes, that voice wailed, “But I don’t even like men with blond hair and brown eyes.” It wasn’t love at first sight, our meeting, more of a primal recognition. And that same part of me recognized that our shared life was over. After that day, our lives started to diverge — he to death, me to continued life.

I don’t know why I was so determined to live then, and don’t know why, almost twenty-two months after his death, I am still determined to live. Curiosity, perhaps. Curiosity to see what I can make of my life alone, to see what I am, to see who I become. Curiosity to see how I will make life seem possible once more.

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Who Gets to Define What is Art?

January 13, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been discussing the wild new frontier of the book business here on this blog, and it turns out the question of what qualifies as a book nowadays is not an isolated conundrum. The music business is going through the same upheaval.

When Lady GaGa’s debut album was released, Amazon sold 400,000 copies of “Born this Way” at 99 cents each as a promotion for their online storage service, and now Billboard has decided those weren’t really album sales, and so they don’t count. What qualifies as an album sale now anyway? It used to be a physical product, first a record album, then a tape, then a CD and now there are digital streaming services, iTunes, Utube, and other possibilities I’m not even aware of. (Turns out I’m not aware of a lot when it comes to music today. Haven’t a clue who Lady GaGa is.)

What seems to be really going on in the creative world today, whether writing, music, painting, is not just about new forms of distribution, but a matter of who gets to define what is art.

I never cared who authors were (except as a means of finding similar stories), why they wrote what they did, or if the books had any meaning other than that which I brought to them. I used to enjoy reading so much more when I saw books as something separate from the author, something that existed in its own right. Then the publishers started putting the author’s name above the title, the author became more important than the work, and books were demoted from art to commodity.

Or perhaps books were always a commodity. The point I am trying to make is that I somehow got the impression there was a great god out there, someone above us mere mortals, judging which books, which paintings, which music pieces were art and which were not. When control of one’s creative output was in the hands of publishers and producers, with professional reviewers handing out their opinions as if they were writ in stone, there was a narrow range of creativity that fell under the heading of ART. Now, anyone can publish, anyone can produce, anyone can review. So who is to say what is art?

Some of the books that have won prestigious awards are so appallingly awful I couldn’t get through them without gagging. Some artworks that command huge prices I wouldn’t even hang in a dark closet. Yet someone, somewhere, decided these things were art. (I wonder at times if they are perpetrating a joke on us, and they know the stuff is bad but want to see how many people they can talk into believing it is good.)

In her blog post “Why is That There?”, Mickey Hoffman, author of School of Lies and Deadly Traffic asks, “Is it necessary for someone to read books about a writer’s life to enjoy or understand their work? Will a biography or an art historian’s research actually tell you how a creative person thought and felt? . . . Do I really have to explain? Can’t you get whatever meaning you wish to get and be content? Either you like it or you don’t.”

And maybe, that’s the truth of it. Maybe there is no standard, no judgment from on high, and the question of whether something is ART comes down to us mere mortals and whether we like it or not.

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Perplexed by the Anything-Goes Publishing World (Part II)

January 12, 2012 — Pat Bertram

Yesterday I wrote about how this new wild frontier, this stampede to publish and be damned (or not) of the new publishing world and how it could be lowering literacy standards because of the almost blythe acceptance of errors in books. The prevailing attitude is that as long as the writer is satisfied with the book, that’s all that matters. Neither they nor their readers seem to care if their story is derivative, if the editing is slipshod, if typos litter the pages.

To add to the confusion of this anything-goes publishing world, books that do well are seldom the best. Often, these successful books are the result of a very aggressive promotion campaign or the result of luck — by being chosen by Amazon for an aggressive promotion campaign or by hitting the right market at the right time.

It seems as if the world is a poorer place if good books are destined to remain undiscovered simply because the author is a wonderful writer and a mediocre promoter. Since we reward wonderful promoters who are mediocre writers with huge numbers of sales, the whole book business becomes even more skewed than it already is. People think that good books will rise to the top, that such books will automatically find a readership, but that is not always the case. And shrugging off the conundrum as “survival of the fittest” doesn’t help matters.

Some people think readers are screaming for quality, that readers are lost in the stampede, but when you consider the vast number of sales made by a few mediocre but bestselling traditionally published authors, most people are not screaming for quality. They are screaming for . . . comfort, perhaps. Predictability. A community of like-minded readers.

To make the situation even more complicated, publishers are not taking responsibility for marketing the books they publish. They want their authors to do that.

I recently read an article by a publisher who said that a publisher’s role was simply to prepare a book for market and to make it available. That’s it. Learning how to promote, navigating the insanely competitive book market, marketing one’s book, paying for book tours and conferences — all of that is the responsibility of the author. So then why does an author need a publisher at all? With Create Space, Lulu, Smashwords, and now Goodreads getting into the epublishing business, authors can prepare their own books for market. And what they can’t do, they can hire done, and keep all the profits. And authors by the millions are doing that very thing.

Maybe the problem I’m having coming to terms with this new wild frontier stems from a life-long respect for books, a sense that books are somehow sacred. Maybe it’s time for me to give up that old-fashioned attitude and treat books like any other temporary reading commodity, such as a blog post or a cereal box.

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