What We Write About When We Write About Death

 

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“How do I write kindly about someone who bullied me?”

 

This is the question that lingered in my mind this week, because that person recently passed away. This situation got me thinking about how we write about death, as well as the people who have passed away.

 

When I told someone about a book I have been writing in which I write poems in memory of people who have passed away, he wanted to know how it was possible for me to write these poems about people that I didn’t even know. That’s right; I have written poems honoring the memory of celebrities, public people, famous people, and important people – and they were all people I never knew or met. People like Michael Landon, Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy, Jr. and even Ozzy Osbourne. I never knew these people. Never met them. But their deaths affected me, so I wrote those poems.

 

When it comes to writing about death, however, that’s when extra care should be used. Death is such a delicate subject to write about. There is so much that we don’t know about death, about the great beyond. We don’t know what it’s like for a person breathing their very last unless we are the ones to do this. We don’t know what people see when they are about to die – though some people have told stories.

 

Death is a subject I have written extensively about, and not just in the scope of grieving the loss of a loved one. In a poetry book that will be released next month, I explore the topic of death as an object of fascination, the superstitions attached to it, the stigma associated with it, as well as how some people crave death so much that they live as though they are not living at all. I have met people who were so obsessed with death that they even pursued careers that had them handling corpses in some way. And a novel I have planned explores one such fascination with death that it drives someone to make it happen in a variety of ways just so he can witness it again and again.

 

Writers have taken other approaches when writing about death. In the novel The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, the story is narrated by Death. In Scythe by Neal Shusterman, Death is also a character, as well as a role in the story. Then there is the portrayal of Death in various movies and plays.

 

The big thing that tripped me up about writing about my former bully, though, was how others would feel after reading what I wrote about him in this poem. Especially his wife and his adult kids. This, too, is one aspect of writing about the death of someone that must be handled delicately. What words will we write about someone after they are gone? How does someone’s death affect us as a whole? Of course, how they lived will affect what we think of them after they have died. It will affect how we feel about them – if we feel anything at all.

 

Ultimately, however, it can depend on our own personal experience with that person. We can’t expect someone who was abused by their parent to write lovingly about that parent after they are gone. We can’t expect someone whose last encounter with a person being a painful one to reflect upon them fondly after they have died. To do so would be fake, and writers are doing a disservice to their readers when they are being fake with their writing.

 

Still, this person’s death was not about me. It was not about how I knew him, my experiences with him, or what I thought of him. I can keep this to myself, in private, but never in something that will last after I, too, must leave this mortal coil.

 

But here I was, presented with this task of writing about someone for my poetry book, and unsure of just how I should write about him, because my experience in knowing this person was more negative than positive. Never mind that he once gave me a ride on his motorcycle. Never mind that he once took me on a test drive when I was learning how to drive. Never mind that he helped me out with a couple of things I was stuck on with a book I was writing. His bullying was what stood out when I remembered him.

 

And that’s not what I wanted to affect the poem I had to write for this book. Because this book is not about me. It is not about how I knew someone. Ultimately, the poems in this book are meant to serve as a lasting testament to a life someone lived. And these poems do not include the bad things they have done while alive.

 

The key to writing about someone in a positive way when we were not close to them when they were alive is to find a method that works best for us. One way to do this is to change the narrative and record the lessons we learned from these people. Or we could change up how we see their death and write about it in a way that feels more comfortable for us. Alternatively, we could write about our very last positive encounter with this person, if there was one, or we could write about their qualities or personality that people liked about them.

 

There is a poem in this book that I wrote about someone who often physically assaulted me, but I did not mention this at all in the poem I wrote about him after he passed away. Other people knew him in different ways that did not include violence, so I kept the violence out of the poem and wrote about his good qualities that made him so likable.

 

Yes, I wrote kindly about a former bully after he passed away. And I know that if I can do that once, for someone I knew for a lesser period of time than my other former bully, then I can do that again.