Let’s call it “The Sedaris Problem”.
Can you write about your family?
What does it mean to write your story, if you cut all the family parts out? What is lost? Is it even possible? Do you wait until everyone involved is dead? Is that actually any better, or is that just like talking about them behind (or 6 feet above…) their back?
Mine is the sort of family where when you casually mention an anecdote at a dinner party, other guests sometimes drop cutlery. Something you grew up with or around (or still do) is greeted by incredulous “wait, WHAT?” Get my siblings in the room at the same time, and our joint memories and experiences get jaws a’droppin’. It’s been a hell of a ride.
It is important to me to not be a monster. I’ve never been on board with the “but if it’s a really great story” cop out. I don’t believe in religion, but I do believe in a good idea. There’s merit to the principle of “treat others as you would want to be treated”. I try not to tell stories I wouldn’t tell – the way I’m telling them – in front of the people involved. I rebuke myself (a little) when I do. But what about telling those stories on “paper”?
I’ve had the fortunately rare-ish experience of losing two of the family members and confidantes I was closest to within 2 years of each other. Both unexpected. Each tragic in a different way.
It’s a shitty club, and you don’t want to be a member.
If I can callously brush to the side what their deaths meant for them, I can consider what it has meant for me. It’s pretty simple: It messed me up.
It has led to a lot of questions. It fundamentally changed who I am, and shaken to the bedrock how I feel about life. For the past two years, it has sucked a lot of the light and hope away. Or at least blacked it out.
Kumail Nanjiani said it much funnier and about something quite different when he said “during that movie, I’m pretty sure I lost the ability to smell rain.”
I went to the double feature.
This blog has been quiet because most of what’s preoccupied me the last couple of years has been about this “journey” (<-barf). Because the stories and experiences sometimes involve other people, I have been unsteady on how much I can write. If I had ever been successful at keeping a journal, perhaps I should have written it there. But journals have never worked for me.
Pushing the big thoughts and discussions into secret books and locked drawers seems to miss out on learning from each other. Humans struggle each by themselves, and whatever they learned from their struggle is inadvertently hoarded and lost — with the best of intentions, but with unfortunate results. Why don’t we talk about the things that really matter? So perhaps I should try. Mostly for myself, but if someone reads something they’ve felt or experienced, so much the better. We read to know we are not alone. We write to remind ourselves of what we’ve learned. (Or at least I do, as I have the long-term memory of a mole rat).
I strongly regret not having captured more of how everything went as it happened. If you grow up with some messed up things, instant repression can be a powerful instinct. But fortunately(?), when the hurt is this big, it stays with you for a while.
Loss and death are big inescapable truths, which happen to absolutely everyone. And which we barely talk about. Despite its perfect inevitability, in our lockstep cultural balking at death, we still treat death as an “if” not a “when”. We are all of us mortal. We all have our time. We all lose people. We all end.
If we don’t explore the big things, the big questions that we/I wrestle with in our head, doesn’t that leave us just talking about so much nothing? All the world is a polite dinner party with strangers. We never move forward. We don’t learn from each other. The discussable world is cut away until we talk about nothing that matters. But I want to move forward. I want to learn. I want to figure it out. That seems rather the whole point of existence.
(Not all the time mind you. Sometimes, you just need to watch cat .gifs.)
I think it is possible to do both — to respect the cast of characters, but also to dig into some of the big hurts and joys and look around. I hope to try. If I’m wrong, well… I’ve been wrong before.
A few principles I think serve as guides along the way of tackling the “Sedaris” challenge: Don’t write other people without empathy. Most people most of the time are not acting out of malice. You don’t have to excuse callous behaviour, but it’s worth trying to understand. Don’t write out of spite. Don’t betray confidences. Be cognizant of your own motivations. Write nothing you wouldn’t say in front of the people involved. Have a sense of humour about yourself and others. Be forgiving, but not complacent.
And remember that, in someone else’s story, it might be you who is the villain.