My own father died a few years ago and one of the greatest griefs
came in the form of an empty parking lot. The funeral home hired parking lot
attendants to squeeze in all the cars as if we were showing up at a mega-church
with a parking lot ministry on a Sunday morning. But at my father’s funeral,
there were no more than a half dozen cars outside the funeral home. He had
alienated everyone in his life, including his family.
When I look at my writing, I realize I’m a bit obsessed with
funerals. They seem to appear regularly in my work. In my novel Try Again Farm, the main characters have
an odd and darkly humorous hobby: they enjoy boosting the funeral attendance at
the funerals of all the lonelies out there. “And there are more than you
realize,” says Mabel in the story. They look up obituaries in the newspaper and
recall those people who had little to no one in their life and they attend that
person’s funeral. I wonder where that idea came from?
Such is the beauty of writing. Like in Saving Mr. Banks, writers can adjust reality to erase and revise
what is ugly and painful. We can make the dad help fix the kite as in the
movie, or we can send kind old ladies to boost the crowd in the funeral home,
to honor people who often lived without honor in their lives. Such power to change
the outcome of painful stories of reality and ease the world’s pain with
imagination and words.