I was actually going to do a piece today about how writing is a part of our broader thinking process, and how sometimes when we get tied up in our story and can't find our way out, we can use this connection to resolve a lot of our conflict. However, that whole concept kind of fell apart after I wrote Friday's post, and now I want to make a very special point about the things that move us to write and what we lose when we stop writing.
A few hours after I wrote my last post, "Being Haunted By Words," the author I mentioned in that piece, Linda Berry, passed away. I can't say her passing came as any surprise - she was 85 and in declining health. When I visited her last Friday, it was to help her get her affairs in order and make sure her final wishes would be seen to. Quietly, I knew it would likely be the last time I saw her. It was. Fortunately, I did get the chance to tell her how she and her husband were the writing mentors that turned me into the published author that I am, and that I was thankful for her guidance, her wisdom, and her friendship. Letting her know that leaves me with no regrets. However, there's still a frustration I will never be able to resolve.I can't help thinking about all that she left behind as a writer. In the time when her health started to slide, she talked more and more about the things she wanted to say, the poems she still had in her. She wanted to express so many things about so many subjects, but it had become difficult for her. The writer in her was alive and well, but there were fewer and fewer ways for her to get those stories out. She couldn't type anymore, her hands were too arthritic for writing, and I can't help but to think that the loss of her husband - a fellow writer - placed too much of an emotional weight on her. She still had so much to create, but in the end it never came into existence. In some ways, that's just as terrible a loss as Linda's passing, because it was a part of her I never got to know.
Now that she's at rest, the mind naturally turns inward and I think about my own mortality and my own writing. Granted, I am three decades younger than her and in better health than she was at any point in the past year, but I still think about all those stories I have yet to write. I've shared plenty of my humorous anecdotes and silly experiences. I have also gone through writing and processing my own amount of trauma. However, both categories still have plenty of stories to be told. Some are not Earth-shaking, others I still haven't mustered up the courage to write about because they damaged me to the core. But whatever the reason, I am no different than Linda in that I haven't gotten around to doing something that deep inside I want to do, and if I don't make it to tomorrow, all those stories vanish along with me.
All of us writers are the same. We write things we feel compelled to produce, we create things for the joy of writing or to purge them from our soul, and each story - fictitious or factual - is a modest revelation on some facet of our existence. And for all that we create, there's plenty that we just never get around to. And no matter how boring those stories may sound to ourselves, someone else might take an interest in that because a part of you resonates with a part of them. However, it will never happen if we never write them.
Tonight, write something. Write anything. Post it on social media. Say something about yourself. Make yourself a little more known than you were yesterday. It might not make a difference for you, but it gives someone else a chance to see you a little more clearly. And someday, you will no longer have that chance, and people out there will wish they had one more thing to know about you.
Rest in peace, Linda.
Sorry for the loss of your friend & mentor. Your message rings true -but is one, can one ever be finished?
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