Death in the Family

I feel very privileged when writers allow us into their personal experiences of death and grief.

Telling the True is children's author Jane Yolen's online journal. She has chronicled the illness and final days of her husband, David Stemple, who died only two weeks ago:

Grief comes at peculiar moments, and sets landmines. I suddenly break into fits of weeping where seconds earlier I seemed just fine. Little things start me: a smell, a photograph, trying to say something to a concerned friend or neighbor. And then as quickly, the spasm of grief has passed.

David moments: Astonishing birdsong. A friend reports a double rainbow with three birds flying through. Friday morning a huge air balloon flies past the Owl Moon woods and lands in the field by David's grave. Heidi, Betsy, and the kids chase it down, talk to the balloonists. Jason sees an eagle.

In John Terpstra's book The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electrician's Daughter, he writes about the life and death of his wife's three brothers, who had Duchenne muscular dystrophy:

It is not better this way. It is not better to not have Eric or Paul around. It is worse. It stinks.

No one has said these words to those who came to comfort, either in the funeral home or at the reception afterward. The words should have been shouted.

And no matter what anyone may think, a household that revolves around the care and comfort of three young men in wheelchairs, in bed, is not a horror. Young men who rarely complained about their condition, their lot. Who transcended their condition.

People mistook the relief the caretakers might feel in being freer, with happiness.

I have already mentioned Donald Hall's book, The Best Day the Worst Day, about his wife Jane Kenyon's death from leukemia. At some point I plan to read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she writes herself through the year after her husband John Gregory Dunne's fatal coronary.

For those of us to whom death is relatively unknown territory, reading these beautiful, harrowing accounts is a way of preparing, of casting out fear, learning how to survive. And for the authors, there must be some gift in writing them, too.