Writing About Loss

Since the movie takes place in my home town, I was lucky enough to see a screening of the documentary, Young @ Heart, several months ago, before it was released for national distribution. I *loved* it–and not only because I enjoyed seeing familiar street shots and knew several of the people. What struck me was the resiliency and love of life possessed by this extraordinary senior citizen chorus, and how they continually went against their grain, singing songs from the likes of The Talking Heads and James Brown. It was a movie that really played to emotions, and at many different points, I found myself quickly transitioning from laughing to crying to laughing again.

So I was shocked when my 20-year-old daughter went to see it this week and didn’t like it. “It was too sad,” she said, referring to the untimely deaths of two of the members during the six-week period when the movie was filmed.

Yes, it was sad. Death is sad and scary. Loss, whether it’s close to us or from a distance, will often make us cry. But the point as I see it is that death happens–in life, in film and in fiction. You can be scared, philosophical, or in denial. We all deal with death in different ways. I’m not sure what my own way is, other than it keeps worming its way into my writing. I remember when I was writing mostly short stories back in my twenties, my mother remarked that I had a thing with death and it was true–so much of my fiction involved, and continues to involve loss, even though I haven’t had an excessive amount of loss in my personal life.

I believe it was Flaubert who said that writers don’t choose their subjects; the subjects choose us. I don’t consciously know why my work often involves loss. But in my fiction, as well as in Young@Heart, the point isn’t the grieving; it’s the connections formed to self and others through the grieving process. In a key scene in the movie, the chorus is on a bus on the way to give a performance at a correctional institution when they are told that one of their members has died. Minutes later, they are standing out in the sun announcing his death and dedicating their next song, Forever Young to his memory. You see shots of tears coming out of the eyes of prisoners who did not even know this man, and I doubt there are too many dry eyes among the movie viewers. Later you see the elders and prisoners hugging; a prisoner says this was the best concert he’s ever seen in his life, and you know, it’s not about the music, but about the emotion–the connection.

So perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to writing about loss. It’s a way of allowing people to process and connect with themselves and each other. And it’s a way of giving permission to grieve in a grief-phobic world.