Tag Archives: Death

#Lessons Learned from #UmbertoEco: Like this character? Tough tamales, I’ll kill him. Why? Because I can. Mwa ha ha!

Posted on by
16

mediaLast Time, on Jean Lee’s World…

To be clear: I LIKED The Name of the Rose. I admire Eco’s grace with language–hell, the man could write in what, four or five languages with ease? He felt the thrum of narrative in his fingers and his heart. As a reader, I took great pleasure in the rhythm, and danced where I was led.

But just because I danced does not mean I agree with how this dance went.

~*~

Now: This is the second step, and the more irritating of the two at that.

Death is a natural for the mystery. Death is itself a mystery, after all. Being a daughter of faith, I learned that death is but a door, a turning at the crossroads. All reach this turning when God says it’s time. Since the birth of my daughter I have seen four important people of my life take that turn: my father-in-law, my grandfather, my grandmother, my father. One year after another, Death’s crossing led my family away from me. The air tastes like vinegar when I think of it.

So when it comes to death in a fictional world, I do not take it lightly. In fact, I am infuriated when an author does. Like Eco.

Yes, Eco.

“But Jean, it’s a mystery. People die in mysteries ALL the time.” Well duh. My all-time favorite tv show is Murder, She Wrote, for cryin’ out loud. Once I started reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I lost myself in the intrigues of Agatha Christie, Colin Dexter, P.D. James, Ellis Peters, and Elizabeth George.

Yes. In a mystery, someone dies. A bunch, even.

But those deaths are still not taken lightly. At the very least, those deaths serve the story, and press it forward. Justice is sought, and usually served. If justice is not served, there is at least some sort of reason to answer why.

Does Eco have such deaths? Oh, yes. A number of monks die in The Name of the Rose due to their involvement with something sinister. Their deaths work with the story. Eco even seems to relish the foretelling of their murders, which…eh. A little foreshadowing is fine, now and again, such as when Ado alludes to a future tragedy in the midst of a religious debate:

Perhaps I made a mistake: if I had remained on guard, many other misfortunes would have been averted. but I know this now; I did not know it then.

Or he’ll stick his foreshadowing into the chapter heading to hook the reader:

MATINS: In which a few hours of mystic happiness are interrupted by a most bloody occurrence.

Yes, it worked on me every time, blast him.

Yes, I’m still infuriated. Not about that–about the fates of two particular characters.

First, the girl. A poor villager smuggled in by monks for sexual favors and paid for with food. The only physical girl character in the novel (as opposed to female saints or witches), our narrator, the novice Adso, discovers her in the kitchen waiting for whomever has bought her that night. But his entry interrupts that, and they…well Adso’s far more poetic about sex than I could ever be. A few chapters later she is discovered by an inquisitor and branded a witch. Adso pleads with his master, William of Baskerville, to save her. He shakes his head. Nothing to be done. She is, as he puts it, “burnt flesh.”

Not that we see her death. We’re just told it will eventually happen in some other town. Adso never sees her after the arrest, and she quickly fades from importance.

I gritted my teeth over this one. So, the character was created to help propel seedy events. Growth of Adso’s character. Expose the absurdity of witchcraft accusations back then. Okay. Sure. But her death doesn’t matter? Even the screenwriters of the film version didn’t care for this, and had the girl be saved from the pyre. Saved or not, at least give the girl a chance to finish her life’s arc on the stage instead of off.

But the “death” that REALLY gets me is way, way in the beginning of the novel, with one of the first major characters we meet: Ubertino. An older man, very learned, experiences with the warring Pope and the Emperor, friend of William of Baskerville, and now in hiding for his life awaiting the secret religious debate to take place at this very abbey. At one point in their first conversation, Adso gets a little freaked out by Ubertino’s behavior:

At that moment, terrified, I thought Ubertino was in the power of a kind of holy frenzy, and I feared for his reason. Now, with the distance of time, knowing what I know–namely, that two years later he would by mysteriously killed in a German city by a murderer never discovered–I am all the more terrified, because obviously that evening Ubertino was prophesying.

Part of what makes a mystery a mystery is that there’s no telling who will be killed, when, with what, or why. Because Adso is writing this account years later, we know he survives, but that’s it. We don’t know if William of Baskerville lives through this murder. We only know that one monk has died under suspicious circumstances, but the book is massive (my edition is 538 pages long), so there HAS to be at least another death. Who will it be? Readers want to be invested in the characters. Sure, they want them to live. That makes them read on: so they live.

What we DON’T like is being told: “Sure, this guy will live. For now. He dies later, so you know. His efforts are pretty pointless here. But hey, he lives through this!”

Then what’s the point?

Why should I care about him, if I know he’s going to live through this ordeal only to die for no reason offstage? Any suspense surrounding this character is gone. That means the mystery around this character is gone.

And the last thing a mystery can afford to lose, is mystery.

 

Strange Grief

Posted on by
14

As desperation mounted in the search of Where Can’t Biff and Bash Reach Yet, the hutch felt like a safe haven. Shelves at my eye level, and a long wide ledge higher than that for sticking the drumsticks and plastic tools they use on each other’s heads. Candles were shoved in there, writing utensils, sharp things and long things that could become weapons. Even Blondie started shoving toys up there, or asking Bo and I to stick such’n’such race car “way up high where my brothers can’t get it.”

Then my boys discovered the joy in ladder-building. Nothing is safe on any edge ANYwhere.

Thank God wee arms can’t reach too far. To create more space in the depths of the hutch, I dump piles of papers and old toys from the hutch shelf onto the table. Blondie is happily surprised in finding an old magnetic dress-up set she thought lost months ago. Then: “Mommy, what’s this?” She holds out a blank card.

20151215_092346

Cheery thing. Blue-white check, two pastel, happy owls sharing a sparkly red heart. “Whoo’s nicer than grandparents like you?” “Nobody, that’s whoo!”

I take it, primly set it to the side. “It’s nothing.”

Bash notices. “Owls! Two owls! They are hugging!” I rip it from his hands before he can bend it. Primly set it aside again. Glare at my son for daring to bend a nothing.

Biff looks up from the Tinkerbell math game to see what the fuss is all about. “W.H. O. O. Spells? Spell?” Very keen to learn, that one.

I have to answer, don’t I? “What’s an owl say?”

Bash, voice high and syrupy-sweet: “Hoot hoot!”

“That’s what it spells.” Which of course it doesn’t. I look at the garbage can, the card, the garbage…

Blondie goes on tip-toe to give the card another once-over. “But what’s it for?”

“Valentine’s Day.” I can’t help but look outside at all the raking we’ve yet to do. Now that Bo found some kid-sized rakes, the kids can work with me for a change and clean up our yard before November gives out.

“What’s Valentine’s Day?”

“You know what it is, Blondie.” Why am I getting so heated about this? But I am. I snatch a cookbook from Bash when his only crime is touching the cover.

“Why was it in there?” She asks, pointing at the hutch.

“One. Two. Three hearts.” Biff pokes the card with his pudgy finger.

How did he get it down?!

I yank it away and just…hold it.

“M-o-m.”

“Yes. Blondie.”

“It’s Thanksgiving time, not Valentine’s Day time.”

“I know.”

“So why do we have that?” She points to the card. The entire planet is fixated on this one card and the weight of this, of IT, almost makes me answer:

Mommy got your grandma and grandpa a card for Valentine’s Day, but forgot to send it, because Mommy always forgets things, forgets little things and big things, and then Grandpa died. So now she can’t send it, because it says ‘grandparents,’ and the merest mention of Grandpa makes Grandma and Mommy cry, and we don’t want to do that to Grandma, do we? Yes, Mommy’s crying, let her cry.

Bash shoves Biff off the chair for a shot at the Tinkerbell math game. The distraction gives me just enough time to dodge the falling weight and say, “Because we can’t send it until another Valentine’s Day.”

Satisfied, Blondie returns to her prodigal toy. I scold Bash, he whines, “Go on timeout! Go to my room!” and he does so with the flair of a teenage girl. Biff discovers a raisin I missed in yesterday’s clean-up and tries to eat it.

I know I didn’t answer the question.

Hell, I can’t even answer the question for myself.

Why keep it? Why not throw it away?

I see that card, and I see the last chance I had at sharing a bit of love, of appreciation, with my father before his heart failure. I see the last chance stuck in a pile of papers like it was nearly two years ago. It was lost and forgotten then. I seem to lose it now, on purpose, forget it on purpose, just to remind myself of what I didn’t do.

My grief demands strange pieces to linger in the here and now. My father’s Facebook feed still shows up online. His handwriting on random post-it notes in books I borrowed long ago, or that Mom’s returned since then. His voice in a recordable storybook. I cry whenever my daughter opens it. I sometimes wish my sons would erase it, cast his ghost out of this house. Yet how dare I wish to destroy what is a warm reminder of happiness from my daughter’s past. How dare I.

I shove the card into the drawer with other cards—forgotten baby congrats, retirement wishes. Out of sight, out of mind. But never out of me.

The Need for Place

Posted on by
8

Old Streich Land 6

I walked through hunting grounds on a frigid April morning. This used to be a farm I looked upon often from the cemetery, where my grandparents are buried. It is an old cemetery, as you can see by the stones, and the church itself has been locked away to the world for decades. I would look upon those broken stones and that gaping maw of a tree as a child and wonder if the stillness in the day truly continued into the night.

 

Why do I feel drawn to these places? My grandmother’s death was the first major loss I experienced as a child. It also helped me realize how much I depended on my grandparents for stability in the world.

When you’re a preacher’s kid, your allegiance is to your church. You go to the church’s school and hang out with other church kids. The town is to be held at a distance, what with all its heathens and *gasp* Catholics.

Yet even in the church, I felt held at arm’s length from everyone. The Powers That Be considered my dad to be something of a problem solver, so every few years he was sent to a new church to deal with frictions inside the church or between the church and the community. Every few years we had to pack up, say goodbye to people we were just barely beginning to know, and walk to the front of yet another church and be stared at by hundreds of people as the “and family” of the new pastor package. It’s hard to become a part of something when you’re set apart from the get-go.

My grandparents, however, never moved. For years, I walked with Grandpa to the same park and fed ducks. Every summer I dragged my feet behind Grandma to the same craft store so she could sift through dress patterns. (Note to Craft Stores: put something to do by those blastedly huge pattern catalogs!) We grilled out at their house every Fourth of July and parked on the same mosquito-addled hillside for fireworks. My grandparents knew contentment through place in their community, and with every visit, I knew it, too.

When Grandma died, they buried her in this small rural cemetery, not far from the open-mouthed tree. After the burial, my mother pointed across the street to a hollow yellow brick house. “That’s the Streich farm, your grandma’s.” I stopped listening after “grandma’s.” When you’re twelve, you don’t think much about cousins twice removed or however that works. You just hear that something else was once a part of your family’s place. I looked upon the fields of corn, the fallow lots of grasses, and inside made it mine. I imagined that land during my years in boarding school, where we learned to tie ourselves to God and prepare to move across the world on His Whim. I wanted that house and its fields. Let God maneuver other people about like game pieces. I put my time in. Let me have place.

Then they tore down the house and turned it into wild lands for hunters.

 

I don’t blame the Streich relative, however distant, for selling to the Department of Forest and Wildlife. At least the land won’t be buried under concrete and strip malls. It’s acquired a new beauty in this wild phase, with hidden pools, peculiar clumps of trees and shrubs, and grasses tall enough to hide wolves. The land may never physically be mine, but I can wander through it, touch its soil, and imagine, for a while, what it means to have place.

Writer’s Music: Thomas Newman

Posted on by
2

lemonysnicket_soundtrackNewman’s work throughout this album fulfill several needs for the children’s writer: you have the quirky theme for Olaf (a personal favorite). A quiet, music-box like quality for children. Crazy and proud themes for the different relatives the orphans meet. Newman’s got a delightful uniqueness for every setting the Baudelaire Orphans encounter. I was torn one which track to write about, actually, because Newman’s score has helped me with character development and plot drive. Today, I will focus more on the plot angle.

“The Letter that Never Came” is a beautiful balance between strings and piano. It portrays hope and apprehension all it once—just the mix one experiences when watching doctors move about a child’s sick bed. I write this scene from the human pet’s perspective; she stays close to her troll master while they work, desperate to hear good news of any kind.

When a writer kills a character, it absolutely must happen for the sake of the story, and not just for gut impact. I’ve had enough people die on me in real life to have an inherent need to keep all my characters alive no matter what explosive battles they endure. But in my story about trolls who keep human children as pets, I knew I had no choice. The trolls have made their world toxic, but they refuse to admit it. It takes the death of my main troll child to push the human pets to fight against those hiding the cure. “The Letter” helps me combat the emotional drain and stay on task, forcing my characters to face the inevitable loss and inescapable future.

 

Click here for more on Thomas Newman’s LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS