waking & feeling the fell of dark

i feel very reluctant writing about death.

well, let me clarify - i can discuss death in the abstract.  i can write about the impact of death, the mysteries of death.  how death is portrayed in books and films.

but i find it nearly impossible to write about it on a personal level.

i don't think i have exactly figured myself out on this, but i think it comes down to a mixture of things. one would be that i just can't seem to wrap all the events, the emotions, and the effects of it into words.  the way i can just kind of think and ponder about certain inconsequential or lighthearted topics (food, korean-ness, the la vs ny dichotomy, relationships, etc) and pump out some vain opinion or another, i can't do the same about this topic. not necessarily because it's a "sensitive" issue, but because it's that much harder to form a more singular, packaged idea/thesis about the whole thing.

they say words/stories can breathe people back to life.  i still remember one of my favorite books we had to read back in school was tim o'brien's the things they carried. in the book, there was a poignant chapter on the narrator losing his childhood love (linda) to cancer and how he dealt with it (years later) by writing her into his stories. i remember i loved this particular story so much, i cried when reading it. i even remember reading it to my boyfriend (at the time) on the phone - though i'm pretty sure he couldn't have cared less.  however in this chapter, i realized that through the craft of storytelling, tim wasn't saving linda's life, but saving his own.

and then it dawned on me that writing about it would ultimately just be a selfish move on my part (at his expense). i don't have the "right" or the authority to write about it.  i don't want that person's life (or the memories of his life) to be made immortal through my words (especially since i wouldn't know if it would be against his will).  all these words would probably be for my own benefit or my own need for "closure" and/or self-expression - a means of coping.

so that is why (or at least partially why) i can't write.

i was re-reading excerpts of joan didion's the year of magical thinking.  she is so spot-on that she has a way of making me short of breath and drown in her grief.