(Parts of this post are modified from a recent post on my new blog, Casa de Cass, which can be read here)

Yes, “On Death”.  That simple, that plain.  Though, I’m not going to necessarily tackle to topic of Death itself (something for a later post, I think).  This post is kind of how I dealt with Death recently.  Because it’s been coming at me from every direction, and as a result, plans to blitz through tons of writing these past few weeks stalled out and my initiative and motivation were squashed.

A recent event has of shaken me deeply and profoundly.  To put it short and simple, a friend of mine was lured to the home of a former friend of hers, who brutally murdered her on my birthday (July 23rd) this year.  Her name was Marcelle Elliott, and she was a fellow writer; she shared the same passion for writing that I have.  She loved writing, she loved to help others write well, and she encouraged me in my own writing.  We discussed literature outside the Humanities building here at The University of West Georgia, we hung out at the University Campus Center for lunch or dinner, we went to Wal-Mart at weird hours and she helped me confront a homophobic guy who harassed me on Facebook.  She was a dear friend.

She went missing for nearly a week, and then the news hit about her death and who had confessed to planning out and executing her murder– someone she’d cared about, a woman she only referred to as “Casper”, but I now know is named Farrah.  I don’t feel it’s necessary or even appropriate to discuss the details of what happened here.  If I ever do a blog just on crime or law, I might post a rather detailed and pointed analysis of the case that I wrote up just for friends of mine who wanted to know my opinion of the likely adjudication of the case.

It should suffice to simply say that an annual day of celebration has now been forever tainted by an evil act by a dark and likely mentally ill person against one of the kindest people I’ve ever had the honor and blessing to have met and known.  She was someone who I loved and respected, whose opinions mattered to me in a deep and affecting way, and whose presence alone was enough to ease my pain or frustration.  She was a rare person who I felt understood a great deal about me and the things I care about.  And I think (but do not know) that she may have enjoyed writing for the same reason I do:  a love for things beautiful and magical, as writing is one of the oldest forms of magic known to mankind.

Now, she’s elsewhere.  I still talk to her some nights when I go out to look at the stars alone on the bench in front of my complex, as if she were sitting next to me like she would often times.  I don’t know for sure if she can really hear me, or if it’s only just a way for me to sort out my mind by thinking about what she might say to me.  Either way, I feel it helps– even if she’s not there to hear me, it’s still another way she even now helps me, and still encourages me to better and greater things.  Despite this, I found myself to be paralyzed by her death, in a writing sense.  It wasn’t writer’s block– I could think of a billion ideas and subjects to write about and a hundred things each that I could write on each of them.  No, what it was, was that I simply lost all motivation to creative action.

I’d planned to use the 21 days I had off from classes between the summer and fall semesters, to get some work done on the blog and novel… to “write my heart out,” as I’d told one friend.  Unfortunately, my heart got TORN out by this nightmarish turn of events.  And when I say nightmarish, I mean that for a good couple days I didn’t sleep– in one interview I did with local news reporters, it showed on camera pretty clearly.  I kept expecting to “wake up” from the horrible reality that my friend had suffered such a fate.  I’d wander campus without a purpose or reason, and I kept looking off at the Humanities building, hoping I’d see her sitting there waiting.  It sounds so cliché, but the cliché comes about from the reality of how grief can hit– this is one of those tropes that comes from something that’s pretty common in the real world, so it’s common in the literary world as well.

If I was too mentally incapable of pushing myself to sleep, then I definitely couldn’t force myself to write!  So, I absorbed myself in watching TV, playing video games, and finding diversions from reality that prevented me from confronting the cold hard reality.  I’d talk about it with friends and counselors and even with the Residence Life staff, but I was too scared to have an inner dialogue about it.  Someone I’m close to, who also knew my friend, kept bringing up excruciating details about it all which were deeply painful to hear– but because she was in mourning too, I couldn’t tell her to stop, since that was her way of handling it.  I didn’t want to tell her that her grieving was “wrong”, because it wasn’t; it just wasn’t what I needed.  So, I developed a wall of dissociation between myself and those details; I knew them rationally, but I just didn’t allow myself to connect it to any emotional component– I just accepted it as I heard it without any interpretation or judgement, like I was just trying to keep the other person talking and the actual content didn’t necessarily matter.

A few days later, though, another friend of mine started asking me pointed questions about the legal ramifications of certain aspects of the case.  As a Criminologist with an interest in how law works, I took to answering the questions in a surprisingly easy fashion.  I quickly found that I could “handle” even the most frank and disturbing aspects of the case with little trouble, as long as I considered it all from the point of view of a completely unattached Criminological researcher or legal commentator.  So, after one conversation about the legalities of the “Insanity Defense”, I wrote a piece which went into detail about why I didn’t believe the suspect in my friend’s murder would be able to successfully use it.

I wrote.  Writing, by itself, helped heal me.  In this case, again, the subject matter didn’t quite hold relevance over the fact that I had thought deeply and wrote out several pages of argument, discussion, and interaction with a subject I’m interested in.  Now, I can’t stop writing.  I have to keep writing, and that’s how I always want it to be– I’m addicted to writing, I think.  Just the other day, I talked to a friend about my schedule– how much I write, how much time I spend in classes, how much I visit friends and do other things like sit on committees and work as an officer of different clubs; she asked me, “When do you have any time for yourself?”  And my response was simply, “Writing IS my ‘me time’.”

I think, though, in my own case, that writing specifically is helping me because it was something I love, and something my late friend loved.  She also loved a lot of other things, but the thing we both cared about just as much was writing and literature.  For my friends who were also friends with her, they are working through it by connecting closer to her by connecting closer to the interests they shared with her.  And so it is for me and writing.  I feel like if I keep writing, then I connect closer to her memory by doing that thing that we both enjoyed immensely.  The only downside is now I feel just a bit like I have this extra weight on me when I write, a responsibility to be even more vigilant against grammatical mistakes, since those mistakes were a pet peeve of hers.  Again, I guess she just keeps encouraging me to greater things– in this case, the need to honor her memory drives me to ensure I write clearly and correctly.

“On Death” may have been a simple title, but it may have also been a bit too grandiose in the scope of it all.  However, I feel like I have beaten Death just this once.  I can’t say I won’t cry if or when it will happen again; I’m still an emotional person who feels love for my friends and family very deeply.  But now, I think I can at least know I’ll be able to be stronger in the future, because even if Death takes those I love, I don’t have to let them go.  I can refuse to pay Death’s thefts any mind, and carry my loved ones with me as I do my best to make them proud and do those things I know they’d have me do.  Again, it might sound cliché, but it’s the truth from my own lived experience; it’s one truth I’m sure I’m not the only person to have learned personally.

But, from now on, I realize the ultimate destiny of my personal motto, “I do what I can, it’s all I can do,” is to be extended further another line, “And I will do all I can, for the people who can’t.”  My friend can’t write any more for the people who are still living here, but I can– and I will.

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