Big fn topics
We call this "heavy lifting," kids
Today, write about the first time you learned about a really big and difficult concept like war, death, bigotry or danger. How old were you? What happened? Did someone in your life try to help you make sense of it, or did you wrestle with it and decipher its meaning yourself?
A memory comes into focus for me on this front of the way in which death was explained to me early in my life, and it was in a way for which I continue to be grateful because it continues to color the way in which I view words like urgency, later, wait, and patience.
I was little and it was the morning after a family member had been killed, who was only in her 20s at the time. I knew what had happened in almost real-time the night before, but my dad explained it again, and made it clear to me death meant the end of life and killed meant outside forces had accelerated the process. There was no softening of the edges or dressing it up, and any effort at a “but, she was going to….” rebuttal was met with a reiteration that death meant she now wouldn’t be able to do any of those things, and that her not being able to do those things were part of the grief.
I’ve shared that with a few people over the years and they have all looked horrified. Sure, we generally want to avoid scaring children with details too harsh and we have a baked-in cultural avoidance of death that makes many want to dress-up it up in a disguise rather than face it and feel it. It’s the thing that suggests we tell children Mittens went to live on a farm upstate, instead of admitting Mittens expired, and the thing that makes even adults say to each other that so-and-so died of (whispers) a heart attack.
But, in fact, the finality with which death was explained to me was, in a way, extremely merciful and life-affirming. It didn’t let me down easy; it made me understand the importance of experiencing grief. It didn’t give me false hope; it made clear the urgency of intentional living by making clear the finality of death.
So, that is our task today: reflect on when you learned about a big and complex topic and stick with it until you can zero in on how it continues to shape you.
It’s easy to write a piece about a bad thing that was and is bad. It’s easy-bordering-on-toxic to write about a bad thing and put a happy spin on it. It’s far harder to write about a difficult and complex thing that had an upside or that brought about an epiphany but without trivializing the original thing, and it’s even harder still to write about a difficult and complex thing that was and is bad but to write about it beautifully and with great clarity, complexity and vulnerability. Let’s push towards the more difficult path today.
