Fodder

My friend called me early one evening to let me know her grandmother had died. A tough death for them all to endure, although not at all unexpected; the woman was in her 90's and had been in poor health for years. Still. When she called, my friend was en route to the airport to pick up her brother, who was flying in from the opposite coast. As she went along she chokingly told me the story of how it had all happened, pauses for crying, emotion preventing her from editing the story in the telling, so that I knew I was getting the visceral version, she was letting me experience it the way she had experienced it.

Then she said this: don't tell anyone else this story, I mean, I don't want you writing about this anywhere.

I never did tell that story, and I'm not telling it now. Even though I don't understand her impulse: I've racked up a few death stories of my own and love it when I have the chance to tell them, and whenever I do, it's with the hope that I'm getting it just right, that I'm managing to convey to my listener exactly what it was like, at that moment. How mysterious and profound, and how my ability to tell it that way is the only thing I have left of that mystery and profundity. (This would also explain why my two birth stories haven't kept their hold on my imagination: my two children stand as testaments to themselves. The dead among us have no more voice.)

At least, that's what my writerly self feels like. What my human self felt like at hearing her request was considerably less ennobled--I felt as though I was being accused of something really unsavory, perhaps opportunistic, scavenging. In any event, something inappropriate to the circumstance. As if a penchant for making stories was itself somehow inappropriate. I know she meant it, and I also know she didn't mean it. I know she loves me, I know she is generous about supporting my creative work. We have hours together on beach walks, while I nattered and she listened, to prove that. She has been present at the genesis of most of my ideas for the better part of the last decade. But I never knew, until that night, that she--or anyone in my life, for that matter--would feel the need to protect herself from that.

People love to ask: where do you get your ideas? I gather mine by bending down and picking them up, the way crows gather corn out of a field. The material is all around every one of us, falling off the people who walk through your life, or maybe developing as any other feature of the landscape develops. I suspect sometimes ideas even grow the way crystals do, in invisible chemistry that suddenly blooms into the visible world. An idea isn't there, then simply, it is. Before, after. But I have a secret fondness for the stories that aren't mine at all, that come from what other people tell me. There is something partly elegant, partly elegaic, to be had in the retelling. The shift in emphasis, the decision to stress this adjective, that scene, some little piece of the plot over another. The detail that you nearly overlooked becomes, at my second look, rather central to the whole. Your story becomes our story and the desire on my part, as it turns out, has been not for gossip, but for intimacy.

So, if I know you and you one day see yourself in my writing, know that my putting you there was itself an act of love. If you are someone to whom I want to be closer, but cannot, sometimes this is the best I can do. Here's a story now, part of my mother's death story: my aunt, who you will know I love because I am about to tell you something about her, was with my sister and I the night my mother died. The thing she never wanted known about that was how, at 5:30 in the morning, she asked for a shot of brandy in her tea. My mother had just died, and it was a perfectly reasonable thing to want. The last time I spoke with my aunt she still remembered that. She remembered the drink, she remembered not wanting us to tell anyone she had had that drink. What I still remember is how she sat for the next hour while she nursed her tea and we all three talked, my aunt's toes tucked under my mother's left leg. It kept her warm, she said, it kept her feet warm that whole time, in the chilly early morning air on that early June day.