Does life make you appreciate death?

I am doing more work on my novel outline today and am at the point where I seem to be struggling with the duality of both my character and my story.

Not struggling in a bad way, but trying to figure out how I am going to make both sides fully available without being at the expense of each other.

I know that within people there are many different sides, different stories, I perhaps struggle with the drastic differences and wonder how to make them real and believable?

It should be both, because in reality that it the true-ness of people, we have both good and bad within us, just to varying degrees and stations. Perhaps because I have never truly had to struggle with drastic degrees because of the kind of life I have chosen to lead, I have never had to think of true evil.

That should be a good thing, but in writing to see how it exists in each of us, I do have to look to see what it is within me, even to the smallest degree. I don't want to see it, to identify it or have anything to do with it, but I fear that I must in order to make a true exploration of what it is within other people. Especially those who like me, do not want anything to do with that part of themselves or anybody else.

Is it crucial to know all the parts of oneself to live fully? To appreciate the choices that we do make? To be glad about the choices we have not made? Do we appreciate evil in degrees and at some point it just simply stops being in our realm of understanding?

Can evil and love be from the same place - just opposite ends of the scale? One healthy and the other not? Can evil be healed by love, just as love can create evil? Are they two sides of the same coin? Like the devil being an angel thrown out of heaven?

Can we make one happen but not the other? Or do both remain inside of us, dormant until something happens to bring it forward? Does one exist without the other or are they both drawn together in some inexorable dance of life and death? Is this the beauty of life - knowing one to appreciate the other, no matter what side you are on?

Can we choose to not share our dying?

How many layers do we have? Of ourselves, our soul, our body and our mind? With each of them are many parts of us housed together, yet miraculously we, for the most part, work together as one integrated human being.

I love this picture of these old trees reaching out into each other as they have done for centuries. It is beautiful and haunting at the same time.

It seems as though they are growing together as the journey continues on - providing both a history and a future by their own path. The decision to move forward through it, however is yours. That is , until someone or something makes it for you.

For this years novel I wanted to highlight the difference between the choices people make when death is approaching. Whether it is your own mortality you are exploring or avoiding, or that of the ones you love.

What choice would you make? Does it change because of the people in your life? Is it selfish to think only of yourself if you are the one dying? Is your final gift to include them in this passage of time, or to exclude them to protect them for as long as you can?

What if you are the loved one and dont want to know your own mortality? Does it change if it is your spouse that is the one that will die? What choices, or perhaps better said, what implications do both choices have, for both the living and the dead and dying?

I thought I had a pretty clear idea of where I wanted to go with my story and how to get there, but after today, perhaps I have a more personal, in depth place from which to write from. As you all know, today is the anniversary of my fathers death, but the newest revelation of two friends dying from their second cancer, brings a new focus, a new discovery, a new perspective from which to base my writing on.

I am struggling a bit with not wanting to be selfish in exploring the secrecy or choices made behind death and dying by those involved, but want to find a way to explore it carefully and sensitively. But I want to do it in a real way - a way that makes people truly feel it, understand it, live it. Perhaps even reconsider their choices, whatever they may be.

My one friend and his wife are going through her second cancer, and while I will mostly refer to her situation, his own is also something I want to examine, but not from a personal expose perspective, but from a questioning human perspective. He watched his mother die from cancer when he was a young man. His finance committed suicide. Now his wife is dying from terminal cancer, what does that do to someone? How would that affect him, his life choices and how he chooses to spend the time with his wife? Would it be easier for him to not know she is dying and be blissful in their last months together? I have no idea.. but that has always been one of the ideas I wanted to explore in this book, now it is just more real.

At what cost do we live, when we know we are going to die? Is it fair to make those we love pay the same price? Do we even give them the choice or do we just take them along for the ride because we haven't thought not to?

Reclaiming separation is hard to do...

I love a good cemetery where those we love are laid to rest. This however is not your traditional place of rest, yet it is however a "real" picture of a grand house being reclaimed by nature over time. Since its discovery there has obviously been some attempt at "rebuilding" to keep it safe on some level. I wonder if they will keep it this way as a symbol of the truth of all things.

It makes me think of a tv program I watched a few weeks ago about how long it would take the earth to recover once all humans had left it. It surprised me to see how short a time span it would be actually.

When you look at this picture do you see the beauty or do you see the work to be done to restore it to its previous state? Do you see how nature always survives despite our best attempts to forget it exists in order to build the next "highest ever" tower? For me it gives me hope and restores my faith. I know when I am in need of something - even when I don't know what it is exactly, I can go out into nature of any sort really - the beach, my garden, a walk in the park, and it restores and rebalances me. It gives me a sense of calm that no matter what we do to our planet, it will always overcome. I just don't always know if it can do so in my lifetime.

I think on some level that there is a moral divide in this matter. As I sit here in my home office typing on my laptop with my blackberry beside me, I am obviously aware of the benefits of technology and how much it impacts my life. Yet there is another side of me that loves the beauty of nature and wants to do nothing to harm it. I do my best with recycling and other things that help the environment, yet I continue to use so many things that are not eco friendly. I guess that is one of the true dichotomy's we live with, this is just one example.

I seem to have that in the characters I write and right now, even more within myself about this new character I want to explore more fully. I've written before about how I find it hard to write this dark exploratory stuff from my own voice and that I feel the need to create another persona to do so. Why is it easier to say the things you want to know about, from someone elses voice? I know the people I am going to write about feel the exact opposite.

All they want is to be heard on some level, to feel as if they mattered and as an ultimate result of their actions, they will be remembered. Where is it that things go so off that people lose their sense of humanity and want to be remembered for how many people they have ridded society of? What about the others that don't take out only the bad guys, but take out anybody they can find, how can they possibly hope or expect to be remembered for that in any kind of a good way? What does it take from the inside to not actually care that you are not remembered for anything good, but for the horror you inflicted. Is that actually true that they do not care or is that how they make their actions tolerable? If that is true, were they born with this type of callous disregard or did something, or a combinatoin of things make this combustion of imperfection happen?

On some level I feel the need to research this before I get into more depth with my character. Years ago I read Hunting Humans and In the Mind of Murderer and so many others, but I have started to re read them to get a good feel of this type of person. Yet I need to do so in my own way, with my own protection so this doesnt actually touch me. I know I have spoken of it before, but as you can see, I am still working on it. I wonder how other authors do it. I wonder how they keep the divisions of the characters separate from the divisions within themselves.