Death and Writing: What’s the Connection?

By Laura Harrington

I know, I know, what’s my excuse for dwelling on death in July, for heaven’s sake? Not even the dog days of August, but bright beautiful July?  The truth is, that’s just me, and yes, I know it’s weird.  And also, this week, I lost two elderly friends. Which makes me think about mortality even more than usual.

Okay, we all know we’re going to die. But most of us, I’m guessing, rarely pay much attention to the one thing in life that is guaranteed.  Why not? And how does this relate to our writing?

A decade ago an artist friend of mine shocked me when she said, “When I realized that I’m going to die, I asked myself what do I really want to work on?”

And even though I do occasionally (sometimes frequently) contemplate my own mortality, she forced me to ask a critical question: If I only have 10 working years left, (20, 30, you fill in the blank) what do I want to do with those years?

Virginia Woolf, facing her 50th birthday in January of 1932, wrote in her diary:

“I am in one of those lassitudes and ebbs of life when I cannot heave another word on to the wall. My word, what a heaving The Waves was, that I still feel the strain!

“Can we count on another 20 years? I shall be 50 on 25th, Monday week, that is: and sometimes feel that I have lived 250 years already, and sometimes that I am still the youngest person in the omnibus. And I want to write another four novels: Waves, I mean; and the Tap on the Door; and to go through English literature, like a string through cheese, or rather like some industrious insect, eating its way from book to book, from Chaucer to Lawrence. This is a programme, considering my slowness, and how I get slower, thicker, more intolerant of the fling and the rush, to last out my 20 years, if I have them.”

We all know that she didn’t have 20 more years. She was dead at 59.

I’ve always identified with Virginia Woolf; she was the first of my literary heroes. I am 59, the age Woolf was when she put those stones in her pockets and walked into the river. My mother began her decline into dementia when she was 62. My father-in-law dropped dead from a heart attack at 63.  The question of how many more years I will have is vibrantly real to me.  I do not suppose that my mother’s fate will be mine, although that idea did terrorize several years of my late twenties.

And yet …

Waking up – or being jolted into awareness of our mortality – is a gift. How we choose to spend our precious time is a gift as well. Can you write a book a year? Good for you. Do you want to? Do you want to write the book you think will sell? Or do you want to write the book that feels so risky you haven’t even told your best friend about it yet? Do you want to try writing a children’s book? A screenplay? Long-form journalism? Do you long for time off?  Like Woolf, do you long to go through all of English or Cuban or African literature?

What are the criteria we use when choosing what we will write? How much do our careers, our “platform,” our audience, our readers, our own expectations, those of our agent or editor or spouse, impact our decisions?

Do we have so many voices in our head that they drown out the small, inner voice of who we are, the artist we believe and hope ourselves to be? What is the work that we must do, that we are called to do? And when will we begin it?

The composer John Cage famously said, “Begin anywhere.”

What are we waiting for?