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The Book of Life
| Posted on September 29, 2009 at 1:24 AM |
This has been a big holiday season for me. For some reason, in the several weeks around Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, I attended four funerals or memorial services. I sat a long time in these various services and thought about the Book of Life and about these people I knew who hadn't been written in it and what that says to me as a writer.
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Ever since I began writing, I've felt an obligation to tell the stories of the people who died in my family who can no longer speak for themselves. Since my parents were both Holocaust Survivors, there were, of course, the family members who died in the war, but I also felt an obligation to tell the story of my father, who died in 1975, as well as the stories of my two grandmothers and my aunt. When writing, I can feel the pull of history and the pull of my family wanting these stories to be told.
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But there I was at a service for a high school friend who died too soon of breast cancer. Besides our various reunions, we had just gotten back in touch in the last year on Facebook. I had never known such a cheery, optimistic person, and she was cheery and optimistic while in active treatment for breast cancer. I didn't know everything about her, of course, but as I sat at her service, her son read off a list of her character traits. One was that she had wanted to be a writer. Dead at 49, but she wanted to be a writer.
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My first writing teacher told me one time that she didn't write poetry because she wanted to make money, she wrote it for eternity, because writing was the only immortatily she knew, short of heaven. That when we open a book by an author who's been gone 500 years, we know that's true - that words live on.
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My friend can no longer write her book, but her early death and this New Year make me wonder how I can best speak for those who will never get to write their books, those who will never get to tell their stories. How can I, hopefully, not only be written in the Book of Life, but write a book that teems with life, that maybe even touches lives?
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Happy New Year from JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog
Linda Pressman, Blog Editor
Categories: Creative Process, Holocaust, Writing Habits
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4 Comments
I am sorry to hear of the funerals and memorial services you attended at this time of year, and your recognition of the significance to us of the concept of the Book of Life.
Dying around and between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is considered to indicate a person's righteousness. My great-grandfather, one of his daughters, and then another one of his daughters--my grandmother--all died during this time in the past. This year, my mother and a close friend (who may have been distantly related to us) died two days before Yom Kippur. I have very literal associations with the Book of Life--but as you say, we each need to "write a book that teems with life, that maybe even touches lives."
I was able to put my writing to use immediately in commemorating my mother: we published a "brochure" with a bio of her life, a poem I had written about her (as an artist) years ago, and a lot of photos. People really appreciated having something like that to take away. My brother posted a video we'd done years ago, me reading the poem with her ceramics work in the background. So many people have told me how important it is for them to have access to this.
Lynn
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