Maile discloses new life-changing routines. Shawn admits to a certain shopping mall food court obsession. They reveal the creativity book of the month they’ll be discussing over at their Patreon page. And Maile has all the connections.
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Today, Jen writes to me of new years, of hope, and the beauty that can be found even in what feels like ordinary work:
“It’s the art of hope as you called it: believing that the unfinished things have all the possibility for becoming something lovely. I’ll just need to stand stirring a little while longer: waiting for the custard to firm, the roux to brown, the book to conclude, the marriage to deepen, the child to grow tall and wise. Of course it’s not a passive waiting but a very active one, a process that draws me into prayer and participation.”
It’s rather hard to believe this our 20th letter, which means I guess we’ve been doing this now for what? Four months? Five months? That’s one thing about life that always surprises me, no matter how many times I experience it—faithful, consistent work always adds up to something. It’s been that way for me in writing, marriage, raising children, and all sorts of other areas.
But it’s so unglamorous, isn’t it? The everyday work, done behind closed doors, not drawing attention to itself? It’s the handwritten note, the gentle, passing kiss of a spouse, the reading of a book to a child, the 1,000 daily words. These are the things that make up a beautiful life—not the awards or the prestige or the starred reviews. It’s the simple things. Would that I always remembered that.
I love the image you described of the woman who was moved to tears at the orchestra. The older I get, the more I love tears—to me, they signify that something important is happening. I have been known to cry when I laugh hard and long, and those moments are always sweet. We wept hard over my friend’s son and my grandmother, but there were moments when I would lock eyes with someone else who was crying, and it was like I saw that person for the first time. Shared grief is actually an intimate, wholesome thing. We avoid tears in our culture at our peril.
I turn 43 today, which means I am in the liminal space you were talking about, that middle ground, that waiting. I wait to see how my children’s lives will turn out, wait to see if anything will come of these books I’m writing, wait to see what will become of this physical body I inhabit. And I am increasingly content with this reality. I am glad to be in my 40s—my 20s were passionate and tempestuous, my 30s just plain hard. I feel I am finally settling into life, settling into myself.
On the other hand, dwelling in the liminal space of fiction has been my greatest challenge and most difficult discipline to learn. It is perhaps the most crucial skill of a storyteller—allow the tension to exist, tease it out, let it linger, and then, just as everything seems twisted into knots, pull the right string, and the story slips into place. I have always been one to resolve the conflict and tension in my real life as quickly as possible. It makes me uncomfortable to create a character and then make their story difficult. But I think it’s in that difficulty, it’s in that unpredictability and tension, where we learn the most wonderful things about life. And, as you have written, “In this life, there is pain, so much of it unresolved, and we find ourselves waiting, nurturing the faintest hope that surely we haven’t gotten to the end.”
Maybe that’s what writing fiction is teaching me. The art of hope.
And yes, the new year is right around the corner. I do tend to become rather reflective during these last few weeks of the year. While I don’t often do official “resolutions” anymore—I do like your desire to root hurry from your life—I am finding this year that I need to reevaluate my commitments. My co-writing work is busier than ever, the fiction I write is becoming more and more mentally and emotionally demanding (which I love), and our responsibility as parents spans from the new driver to the toddler. Some things must go, and so I’m sifting through my life, picking out the excess, the expendable, laying it aside.
Do you have any resolutions for 2020? How are you feeling about the book you’re working on and the ever-approaching due date? And what are some practical examples of what rooting hurry from your life looks like?
I guess the next time it’s my turn to write, we’ll be in this new year. I hope it is a wonderful one for you and your lovely family.
Merry Christmas, Jen.
Shawn
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What began as a Twitter conversation between two writers has become an exchange of letters. Here’s where Postmarked began.
Shawn and Maile reflect on the darkness of this particular Advent season and the death of Shawn’s grandmother. They wonder if the way she lived her life might serve as a model for living a good creative life.
It’s the final episode of Season One! They explore what the next season might look like for the podcast and reveal one fun element coming in Season Two.
This week, Jen Michel and I continue our correspondence. Here is an excerpt of her letter to me:
* * * * *
You’re right to say that patience is required to live this life and bear its losses. To live well is to learn the art of waiting. As Christians, we wait for the day when death wrecks no more, when everything wrecked is repaired, when Glory itself returns to reign. It’s what the dark season of Advent is all about, the paradox of all that’s bound up with the expectation that this world will finally be set to rights: the loss and the longing, the grief and the great hope.
I remember learning how the Christian writers known as the Inklings emerged from the Great War with hope beating in their breast. Just when the world was reckoning with the fact that progress was dead and that humanity was capable of far great sins than thought possible, Christians were writing fairytales. A great irony, isn’t it?
What began as a Twitter conversation between two writers on creative work and family life has become an exchange of letters. Here is where Postmarked began:
My cousin and my uncle, filling in my grandmother’s grave.
Five cousins and I bore the weight of my grandmother’s body, trying to keep our footing as we meandered the short distance from the hearse to the gaping hole in the cemetery ground. Like death and grief, carrying her was heavier and more awkward than I had expected. In the movies, the pallbearers maintain a certain appearance of stoic removal, gliding right along, but there in that small countryside graveyard, I found myself stumbling, breathing hard, trying to find my footing, especially when we got to the grave and had to skirt the sides of the hole, holding the coffin out in front of us. It was a relief, setting her down on the boards and straps that we would soon use to lower her into the ground.
There is something very tangible about death when you feel the weight of it. It’s one thing to view from the distance: the closed coffin, the shiny hearse, the green grass of the cemetery. It’s another thing entirely to wobble under the burden of it, to grip it with your own two hands, to carry your own grandmother to her final resting place.
* * * * *
Weeks before my grandmother died, we sat with her at my parents’ house, asking her about her life. As was usual, she answered our questions quietly and to the point. From where I sat, she looked as she always had: pretty, healthy, happy. But on the other side of her face, the side I couldn’t see from where I sat, a tumor grew. It had spread over most of the side of her head, along her ear, stuck out a few inches at her temple, and crept down her jaw, making it difficult for her to chew.
Even though that side of my grandmother’s face looked disfigured, my mom would often touch it, run her fingers along it. There is a kind of intimacy in that touching, a kind of love almost foreign to our world. What unfathomable grace, to stroke the black cancer where it breaks through the skin, to remember that beneath it is the one who bore you.
When we left my parents’ house that day I walked over to where my grandmother sat and kissed her forehead, told her to enjoy Florida. She would head south in a few days to Sarasota, where she always spent the winter. I had a feeling it would be the last time I saw her. It was a strange sadness.
* * * * *
My son Leo served as comic relief at the funeral. When a long, drawn out line of people walked from the church to the cemetery across the street, he remarked in a loud voice, “It’s kind of like a parade without all the fun stuff.”
* * * * *
My family has Amish roots, and the Amish have long-held traditions when it comes to funerals and burials. The grave is hand dug, the coffin is lowered manually into the ground using straps, and the hole is filled in by the deceased’s loved ones. My family wanted to maintain some of those traditions.
The six of us cousins gripped the straps and eased my grandmother’s coffin into the ground. After it was situated in the plastic container at the bottom of the grave, we lowered a second lid on top of it. Then, I took a shovel from the ground. I bit into the dirt with it, picked up a few clods of earth. But just before I dropped it in, I glanced over at the row of my grandmother’s children–my mom, my two uncles, my aunt. I felt a kind of remorse for what I was about to do.
I tilted the shovel and the clods of dirt fell onto the container surrounding my grandmother’s coffin. The sound of the dirt was hard and stark in the graveside silence. My cousins followed suit. It was a quiet, sunny day, and it felt oddly comforting, the work of digging, of filling. The cold gripped us, and a gentle breeze swept through the stones, out into the cornfield. Wispy white clouds drifted over the countryside, this place where my grandmother had been born, where my ancestors have lived for 250 years. Thirteen generations living on this dirt.
And in all of that space, all of those years, all of that silence, the only sound was that very dirt thudding onto my grandmother’s coffin. The sound muffled as the hole filled.
* * * * *
Leo walked over very close to the grave, watched as the dirt begin to fill up the hole. When he spoke, it was in a wistful voice full of genuine longing.
“I wish I could lay down there with grandma and go to heaven,” he said, looking up at me with big brown eyes.
I ran my hand through his hair, pushed it out of his eyes, and leaned my forehead onto Maile’s shoulder. And I wept.
