Weeks 15&16

You never know which words are going to become the right ones, right?

Until they do.

I’m navigating around the side streets of Chicago because there’s a shit show of a police funeral locking up the entire Northside and I’m wondering which topic I’m gonna land on for my next Substack. I’ve wandered away from writing, at another memorial, trying to lay to rest someone I loved and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to land and I’ve been unable really to write anything except maudlin tributes to Taylor Swift (“this is me trying”) and elaborate descriptions of the pall that has fallen around the neighborhood because I live next to the church where the cop is being laid to rest. Then I remember the text my brother, a man of very few words, wrote to me in which he said keep writing. This is his entire text:

Now that all the crowd has dispersed; I hope you can cherish what a wonderful send off it was for Richard. A truly remarkable event. Stay well, do your writing, continue to talk to him. Love you brother Sam.❤️

This is a man who may not have read my first novel, probably doesn’t read my Substack. I don’t know because I haven’t asked and actually, I’m not sure that matters, because what does matter is that he knows what suits me. He watches, quietly, because, as I said, he doesn’t talk a lot. He pays attention and he knows and loves me so he says keep writing and I think about this text again today because I’m stuck in this car, this hunk of metal, trying to make it to a cafe to–you guessed it–write. This trip usually takes, I don’t know, 12 minutes and I’m going on 45 and nowhere close to my destination, and I think yeah, write already but I can’t ‘cause I’m driving or rather standing in traffic and so I start talking into my notes app about writing and here’s what spilled out.

My second novel had been in the hands of a beloved editor for over a month, because as tidy and meticulous and efficient as she usually is, her father had recently started failing and she had to go into caregiving mode and put my manuscript aside. She apologized and I said I understood, grudgingly to be honest, because this was in the first weeks after Richard died, and I was scrambling for the next distraction like a drowning woman in a tsunami.

Then, on the Tuesday before Richard’s memorial (about which I was already spinning, unnecessarily) the manuscript lands back in my inbox and I just can’t face it because I know the novel I sent to her? It’s not done and she’s gonna know it and she’s gonna say I need to do more work because the conflict in the novel or rather the conflict in my writing of the novel is illness versus family. It is set in 2020 during the first chaotic year of the pandemic and my main character is a caregiver in a nursing home and it’s the first onslaught which you may remember: masks and distancing and no vaccine and no help, no real knowledge yet and a lunatic in the White House telling us all, I don’t know, spray Lysol down your throat and rifle toting people raging about civil rights because they are being asked to stay safe.

And I coat, I have literally coated the novel in the disease, which is really about love and community and family. I soak it in COVID, lather it in details about the first year of the pandemic and my editor keeps saying no the novel isn’t about the disease. The novel is about this woman coming into love, all kinds of love, romantic love, sisterly love, familial love, breathing love. I know this, and for some reason which my therapist probably has a theory about, I have been unable to excise this thick, sticky mess of sick, and let the love surface.

Then this week, after the memorial, when I felt OK enough, I opened the file. She had nice things to say, and then noted what I knew she would, steering me away from the pandemic and towards the love, making dozens of notes in the margins, all unfailingly polite: “I would drop this mask reference,” and “this detail is unnecessary,” and “as above, I would omit these details.” Bless her patient heart. And because it was after what happened last Saturday in a crowded room filled with tears and laughter, I could begin to see, finally, what she was after.

Because as it turns out, at my beloved’s memorial that is what everybody had landed on. No one lingered on Richard’s disease or his illness or his suffering although that was in the wings everywhere. They landed on love. The love he had for his family. The love he had for his work, the love he had for his students, for justice, for fun and fairness. And yes, he was ravaged and shut down and stopped finally by his disease, but the disease is not what survived. The love survived and that is what my brother‘s text was about.