I’m launching into the rewrite (overhaul!) of my master’s thesis about my experience teaching HAMLET to high school students when, and since, my father died.
It’s a dream scenario: I have the support and guidance of a hip, funny, brilliant editor. I have a great space to write–a stand-up and a sit down desk right next to each other–on the third floor of my suburban Philadelphia home, looking out over a still-green back yard. I’m done grad school.
I’ve storyboarded, character-charted, dug deep into ancillary research, started a blog, got a twitter account, made pages of notes, and outlined the first scene. I got totally excited.
Then came four mornings in a row of dreams/visitations from dead dear ones, followed by days of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. And beating myself up for not getting down to the actual writing sooner. Oh, maybe that’s what my editor meant when she said it was going to be hard.
It was glorious having finished the manuscript the first time around. People commented it was brave, it was honest, it must have been cathartic to write.
“Actually,” I’d say, “I don’t think it was all that cathartic.”
It was great to be on a very strict graduation-based deadline and get it all down while it was relatively fresh. To “go there” once in awhile, but to also have no choice but to snap myself out of it and get back to my normal life and teaching responsibilities.
What I realize now is that in the five months since I handed in the final print and walked across the stage, I’ve been holding at a comfortable arm’s length the fact that my dad (oh, and my grandmother, two very dear friends, an 18-year old dream) is dead.
I think it never really felt cathartic to write the first time, because I knew there was still so much there to process–that I had only scratched the surface of how deep the sorrow goes.
No wonder I’ve been scurrying like one of our many chipmunks around the crumbling edge of this scary black hole. What if I fall down so deeply I can’t get out?
#teachinghamlet #writinggrief #grief #deaddadstories #dadsdontdie