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?
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