Death and Writing

I’ve read that the secret to writing is show up. Don’t wait to for inspiration to hit. Jack London once said, “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
So here’s for clubbing inspiration like a… baby seal. (What else gets clubbed? Sandwiches?) My dirty secret: sometimes I start writing when I don’t feel like it, and produce two or three paragraphs of absolute drivel.
I tackled the enormous pile of dishes stacked near the kitchen sink, contemplating this fact, wondering how I could start writing today. I need to write more, I tell myself. I’ve been writing ever since I was twelve years old, and age thirty is no place to stop. What would people say, if they were going through my things after my untimely demise, and saw that I gave up writing midstream? No. I have to write and I write and write and keel over writing. Writing is my one true secret love. I’m sorry Meg—you’re a fantastic wife, and I love you dearly. But writing has been with me since the beginning.
The thought crossed my mind, what would I say if I had to write something about my death? Death isn’t something that I dwell on. Well, now. I used to be suicidal in my college days ten years ago, but that’s over with.
But say if I died in a car accident as I go to Safeway to buy the groceries later today? Death happens every day. Just not to me, yet. But it could, and what then? Meg would be a young widow then, wear black veils and dress in lacey black dresses, mourning my passing in the dark rooms of our home. Not venturing forth except to let out the dog, she would fade into obscurity….
Well, no. Meg’s a bright person. She’d mourn me, but life would eventually carry her onto new endeavors. I imagine she would probably sort through my things, but maybe not read every little thing that I wrote. Who wants to read all the things that their dead spouse wrote?
And my raving fans, the ones who read my books and wrote me fan letters, breathlessly awaiting my next brilliant work? Well—if I die tomorrow, I’ll die unpublished. So I don’t have to worry about raving fans. (Speaking of which—why aren’t I published? I should get published. Then I can start getting some raving fans. Note to self: get published.)
So that leaves Meg, and probably her parents who would come over to our home to clean up the place a bit. To get rid of my stuff, so she could move on, after a while. Meg would fondly look over some of my things, and perhaps keep the more endearing things, and donate the rest to a charity. She’d shake her head and smile whimsically when she saw my library of atheist and philosophy books. “Atheism meant a lot to him,” she’d tell her mom. Meg would peel off the atheist A sticker from the rear window of Rambo. No sense trying to sell it with a bumper sticker, she’d think pragmatically.
She’d venture to go through my computer hard drives and get distracted by the G: drive labeled Porn. “Nobody needs that much porn,” she’d sigh. She never minded that I looked at porn though, and would be satisfied with deleting the lot of it. No need to donate that to charity.
She’d go through my music hard drive and wonder why I liked dance music so much, for a white boy who didn’t ever dance. She’d keep this for later—after all, there were some good albums in there.
She’d eventually find my Writing folder. It was separated by several subfolders: Blogging, College Papers and Projects, Correspondence, Diary, Novels and Books, Philosophy, Poems, Research, Ongoing Projects, and Ideas, Short Stories. Would Meg shudder, suddenly feeling my stubble grazing her neck and kissing her softly from behind? Would Meg think of me as she touched my words, smelled my paragraphs, tasted my choice of words, read what I thought about everything? How many minutes would she look at my years of accumulated ideas? Would she care? How painful would it be to see so much of something that wasn’t there?
Yes, it’s my legacy, the way I live within the words that everyone else uses. But to the only person who truly cares—will it even matter? I suspect that I am something within Meg that can’t be put into words. She doesn’t usually read what I write, or ask about the hours I spend filling blank pages. She just assumes it’s something I need to do, and gives me space when I need it. But does she care? She gets what she needs from me, and I suspect it isn’t my creativity at all that intrigues her the most.
The truth is I don’t write for Meg. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to write knowing that she’ll be looking at my computer folders, reading every word I wrote. She’s not going to. I don’t her expect her to. She’s not some Christopher Tolkien. She won’t publish my writing years after I pass away.
If I died today on my way to the grocery store… I’ll be a complicated footnote. Having embraced the void, life would trundle onward, unable to stop its breakneck whirl around the sun. My molecules would crumble and become everything else. Eventually, even the most published authors die out, everything dies out, as the sun goes supernova and the earth dies. But that’s billions of years off, and right now, butterflies can cause hurricanes. Surely my words can do more than that.