How Books Can Help Us Survive Tragedy
Last Tuesday, I ate meatloaf with a friend, and we talked about death.
Death by electric chair. Death of natural causes. Death by roller coaster (yes, really). Death by doctor.
Shoveling down wet green beans, we aired our trauma and opinions. John and I both served hospice duty: he as a pastor, me as a brother. We can talk about it, odd as it may be.
Death stalks my thoughts like Terry Pratchett’s version of the grim reaper. Human. Tangible. Inescapable. I think it started at age 14 when my granddaddy died in a car crash. An SUV pulled into his lane. It crumpled his Crown Vic and left him lifeless. Later, my mother stood in our kitchen and cried into my chest. Comfort typically passes from parent to child. That was my first experience with the inverse.
Probably this obsession is why I write eulogies for living people. I could stand and speak at a funeral for my other grandfather (Pawpaw), my father-in-law, my mother-in-law, a couple of uncles, and my own dad, even if they died tomorrow.
“The first time I beat dad at golf, I was 12 years old.”
That’s how dad’s eulogy starts.
When the day comes, of course, it seems unlikely I’ll be able to choke out any of those 13 words.
Recently, I read Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, a summer New York Times bestseller. Just after the middle of the book, a main character dies. A horrifying, random tragedy. I sobbed.
The surviving central characters cope with their friend’s absence in the remaining pages, answering every question from “who gets this large blood stain off the floor?” to “what is the point of our relationship without this person?”
It’s as if a pot of soup went missing in the kitchen.
“What do we serve instead?” the characters seem to ask. Meat? Salad? Dessert? How do you find satisfaction in a meal when your favorite dish is absent?
This type of story - where a character dies halfway through - is unusual. Death typically swings his scythe at the climax. Tales like Bridge to Terabithia, West Side Story, Romeo and Juliet, Promising Young Woman, and The Fields are the mainstream portrayal of death. In romantic comedies, couples get together at the end. In dramas, someone dies.
Final? Definitely.
Realistic? Not really.
We modern humans experience death most in our media. We don’t bury family every week, but it’s common that we’d “lose” a beloved character more often than that. Stories of tragedy serve as guides. They show us how to hope and to cope.
After all, on every occasion but one, our experience of death will be this: it happens to someone else, and then we have to keep living.
Fiction can make our brains think they are flying. Is it so odd to expect it to guide us through trauma as well?
Death in literature is most instructive when it is not the climax, but a turning point. John Green’s Fault in Our Stars is memorable, mournful, and more famous than his other books; Looking for Alaska is his thoughtful book. (The former is about loving in the face of death; the latter, about finding purpose after it).
Great literature helps us grapple with tragedy, wrestle it, and reconcile.
There is no other way out.
The first draft of this post finished with a proud middle finger to death. How prepared for it I was. How foolish humans are for fighting against it.
Then, my wife got the flu. Then, I started tending to her. Then, for the first time, an unbearable thought crossed my mind:
“What if she doesn’t get better?”
Which triggered instant panic:
“Nonononononononono please god nonono. No. NO. Anything but that.”
But one day, either Kate or I won’t get better. We won’t improve. One of us will slip down the black slide — maybe hopelessly clawing our way back up, maybe welcoming the dark gravity — and then… we will be gone. All roads lead to the hospital.
If I go first, maybe Kate will finally enjoy a few moments of quiet. There will be no one randomly bursting into a verse from Legally Blonde, The Musical.
If she goes first, I’ll probably read a book.
