Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

loss of a loved one

Christmas break, loss and pendulums

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Life is always at the point of the pendulum swing.

Events over the Christmas break have started me thinking about how reality and how we think we will react to life’s swings of the pendulum are always different.

Several years ago, after my father died, my sister and I decided we were going to go back to the family’s old country and reestablish our connection with our father’s family. I was enthusiastic and pushed down all my concerns about going to the airport alone, flying more than twenty-six hours by myself and meeting family members we hadn’t even known existed. Waiting in an empty terminal for four hours for my sister to arrive, having not slept since I had left home; traveling about the country in trains, subways, and ferries as we visited different parts of the country, including the small island our grandmother was born and raised on; and building relationships with, essentially, strangers was both more daunting and more amazing than I ever could have imagined.

Making that journey had been an important goal to achieve as our father’s death had been unexpected. Certainly, he wasn’t in the best of health, but he wasn’t ill or senile and was quite ambulatory though largely blind due to diabetes. We had needed that future adventure to save for and plan while we coped with losing such a special man.

So I had an idea what my husband was going to go through when we were told to expect his father to pass sometime before Christmas. Sure we were expecting it. Sure he had long since forgotten who each of us were, and certainly, my husband was convinced he was prepared for the loss. I knew he wasn’t. Even with having been through it already, I wasn’t ready to lose yet another special man.

The call came a week before Christmas; the funeral preceded Christmas by two days. We held a solemn family gathering with his close-knit family. There were times my husband and daughter showed that they were handling the loss well, and other times when it would creep over their false calm and tear them apart.

We’re never as ready as we think we are because we can’t really imagine what we’ll be experiencing when we get caught up by the big events in life.

This would not be my blog if I didn’t make a connection to writing. When we design our characters we need to keep in mind that they may think they’re ready to deal with what is being thrown their way, but they aren’t. It doesn’t matter if it is the big climax scene or just a little event leading up to greater stress: running out of gas heading to a picnic or a dishwasher leak. It is never as bad, good, funny, sad or exciting as they expect it to be. And they never are ready.

#loss
#writing

Personal experience (loss of a loved one) provided direction and depth

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Love is a foundation: loss a process

One of the main issues in the first two books of the series Students of Jump is loss of a loved one.  This is an area I have some experience in.  Though my original plot did not include a death, the events grew naturally out of the interaction of characters and circumstance.  My own mother died when I was a baby, and I was at first unaware of the effect it had on my father or myself. As I grew older, I realized he never allowed himself the time to adjust to losing his wife.  He buried himself in his work and in raising his children.  It was a new experience for him to be the sole parent of two small children. 

He shared a story with me about the first months he found himself caring for us.  He knew that my mother had always kept us fed and clean.  He had been guided on feeding us properly by the ladies in the neighborhood, and my father was always a good cook, but the requirements of keeping children clean was never addressed.

He bathed us night and day.  We were not particularly dirty children, both of us under two years old.  When he took us to our yearly check up, he asked the doctor if he was caring for us well, as he feared being gone during the working hours meant he could only bath us twice a day.  Our skin was a bit flakie, but the doctor set him straight relieving quite a bit of tension and reducing the bathing to a more manageable level, and our skin and hair returned to that shiny, moist quality inherent in healthy children.  When I had my own daughter and spoke to my father about her potty training not going well, he gave me just the information I needed to have a smooth process for my daughter.

Talking to and observing how my father dealt with his loss and my own later frustrations at not having my mother around during my teenage years helped when I worked through the changes my characters dealt with and their challenges dealing with loss.

What parts in the writing you have done is a reflection of your own experiences?