“Everything will be ok in the end.  If it’s not ok, it’s not the end.” (Unknown)

I don’t know how to write about tragedy.  This is my attempt, though, an exploration of previously uncharted material in my journey as a writer.  When devastating news recently affected my family, my internal editor said, “You’re going to write about this.”  One month later, each draft has revealed itself to be a natural progression through the process of mourning.

My first draft was drenched in emotion.  I wrote in great detail about standing in my kitchen, eyeing the timer I had set for vegetables broiling in the oven.  It was a rare occasion when I attempted to cook and not patronize the ready-food case at Whole Foods.  (I’ve since resurrected my role as a loyal patron.)  I remember being in a good mood, planning to eat, read for an hour, and then go for a run.

As the vegetables approached the early stages of crispiness, my sister called and said that our parents were fine, but she had bad news.

“Tell me,” I said.

She asked me some questions about what I did after work, attempting to stall the bad news she didn’t want to reveal.  I became frustrated quickly because I just wanted to know what happened, so I raised my voice and said, “Tell me already!”

She said that Bob, one of our parents’ best friends, had killed himself that morning.  He was found in a hotel room in Ft. Lauderdale.

My first draft continued with a detailed account of my response – how much I cried, sitting on the floor in the middle of my studio sobbing, calling my parents and asking, “Why? Why did he do it?” repeatedly, almost choking on my own question.  I was startled by my response, like when you don’t know you’re capable of screaming as loud as you can until you try, or in my case, crying as uncontrollably as I did.

Like a writer gathering all of her facts before sitting down to pen an article, I was consumed with the details of Bob’s death in the early stages of my grieving.  How did he do it?  Who found him?  How did his wife first hear?  Did they speak that morning?  Who told his kids from his first marriage?

About two weeks later, I was at my parents’ house when I saw a photo of my dad and Bob in Rockefeller Center, resting on the kitchen counter.  I started to cry.  And while I didn’t feel like I needed to be comforted, there was a part of me that did feel like my parents should know that I was crying in proximity to them.

In the months before his death, Bob’s business suffered and he had to shut it down.  He had trouble finding another job, had debts to pay, and, in his own words (learned from a note he left), he had no hope and felt like a failure.  While Bob’s wife sensed that he wasn’t his usual self, he succeeded in concealing the depth of his depression.  In the spirit of honesty, I went into the next room where my dad was watching TV and sat next to him with the photo in my hand.  When he saw that I was crying, he inched closer and said that sometimes people can’t cope and they make mistakes.  Then he started to cry.  I had a towel on my shoulder, soaking up the water from recently washed hair.  We both sat there crying, wiping our faces with an oversized pastel yellow bath towel.

I let my first draft sit for a while, knowing that it was not what I wanted to say, just things I had to voice (or pen) before I could sift through to better material.  For my attempt at a second draft, I tried to answer questions I was grappling with, beginning with how do I label his death?  The word “suicide” felt too harsh.  When I said “killed himself,” I felt like I was pointing a finger at Bob, attributing blame to someone who desperately needed help.  Saying “he died” felt like I was hiding something because he didn’t die as a result of old age or illness.

I wondered if I would start thinking of my life in two phases: the period of time when Bob was alive, when he, his wife, and my parents were an inseparable foursome, bonded by laughter – uproarious, obnoxious laughter if you’re sitting at the table next to them in a restaurant and don’t know why they’re laughing so hard; and, the period when Bob wasn’t alive, a reality I still can’t internalize because, to me, it seems so unreasonable.  With a little hindsight, and I feel insensitive saying this, time has a way of aiding you in forgetting things that, at the time you learn of them, seem unforgettable.  Now, sometimes the only time I think of Bob is when I look at a miniature dry-erase board on my home desk and see “BC post – Bob” I have jotted down, reminding me to work on this article.

My third draft was plagued by an advice section, where I wrote prompts that I wanted to elaborate on for the benefit of others, like, “When you feel like your place in the world is negligible, here’s how you can attempt to assert the validity of your life…”  I’m not someone qualified to answer this for anyone except myself, and that’s only true sometimes.

The “take-away” is what I continued to struggle with, both in wanting to write this article and, more importantly, coming to terms with someone ending their life unnecessarily.  I thought of the Matchbox 20 song, Long Day, and the lyric, “Reach down your hand in your pocket, Pull out your hope for me.”  And it hit me that as writers who want to impart a message to readers and people who want to wake up in the morning, we’re relying on a sense of hope that is critical to the survival of our craft and our lives.

Hope, as writers, that we can think of something to write about, that when we do we’ll find the words to convey what we truly mean, and that people other than ourselves and trusty best friend will read our musings.  Hope, as people, that we’ll feel secure in our choices, our relationships, our jobs, our economy, and countless other barometers of confidence that, if unsettling, can leave us profoundly anxious.

Hope, as writers, that the end of a story we write does justice to the middle, and that the opening entices readers to hang in there until the last punctuation mark.  Hope, as people, that neither the beginning nor middle of our lives will present us with something we’d feel we couldn’t overcome, something so unnerving that we’d rush the onset of our ending.  Hope that in the face of writer’s block or a financial crisis, we’ll believe that ultimately, it will all be ok.