How Hard it is to Turn the Page: Dealing with Grief & Writing What You Know · 12:29am Jan 9th, 2018
I didn't really realize what I was writing about when I wrote In the Dark of the Wood. I wanted to write something before the year was officially over, and for some reason I had an Applejack itch. I started looking through the impressive gallery of NCMares, an artist who I knew was A) one of my favorites and B) did a lot of Applejack, knowing I'd hit my inspiration when I saw it. I hit on the cover art for the piece, and in the terrifying, only semi-consensual way that my brain works, the entire plot was written. In my time zone, I got it out in 2017. For the past week, that was the only important thing.
Then it came time to blog about it, and I read it again, and when I started crying, I realized the reason it came so easily to me was because this is a very old story for me.
The first time I encountered death was a pair of rabbits, but it didn't really have an impact. I'd seen Disney movies, and I was Christian. I was intimately acquainted with both forms of death that are acceptable to expose to children. I'd even been to one or two funerals, old great-grand-relatives that I hadn't known before their deathbed and so didn't hit me any harder. But all the rabbits of Watership Down couldn't have prepared me for when my grandmother died.
I have an unpleasantly vivid memory of seeing her dead. In the way of a child fascinated with questions and unsure how to ask them, I reached out to her to try and comfort her. I patted her on the forehead, and I still remember what that felt like. I was struck, not horrified or amazed but definitely affected, by the realization that she didn't feel like she had when she was alive. There are so many things about the human body we don't notice until it stops ticking. But more than that, I knew that her skin was puffier than it had been, that her head felt dense. I asked why.
I was, in the quiet way of a kid at a funeral, amazed and overjoyed that my grandmother had been embalmed. I had always been a nerd, and I had devoured every fact of ancient Egypt a very long time before. I could probably have named every step of the ancient embalming process in order. To me, it was unspeakably awesome that my grandmother would be preserved in a way even tangentially related to the burial methods of kings. She deserved it, I told myself. This is such a cool thing to do for her. She couldn't be buried any other way.
Maybe it's that experience that left me with such a distaste for cremation, so sanitized and distant. Like most folks who find cremation distasteful but don't want to waste space and earth and money on an expensive coffin, I fantasize about a Viking funeral, with a good proper boat and maybe a flaming arrow and a big roaring party on the beach while it's still burning because I despise the entire concept of crying when you're sad.
In any case, where does this connect to Applejack?
"How did they die?" "Was it painless?" "Tell me it was over quickly." "Who did this to you?" "Who is to blame?" "What will I do without you?" "WHO DID THIS TO YOU?"
...
I'm a very angry person. I don't get afraid, because the only way that I was able to survive the things that scared me was to get angry at them. When I learn that I'm not doing good enough, I try to be better. I get angry at myself for not being good enough. I fight harder. I look for something or someone to fight.
You can't fight cancer. You can't fight heart disease. You can't fight old age. You can't fight a burst gas pipe that's slowly poisoning your apartment. You can't fight the reaper.
I feel powerless when people die. I can't do anything to stop it, can't save them, and worst of all there's no opponent to get closure from beating up.
If my parents died from an avalanche, I would climb that mountain. I would spend my life training to climb it. I would hammer my pick into every crevice, a part of me hoping that I will tear away the rock face of my parents' killer. With every step up that path, I would tell the mountain about my parents. With every swing of my pick, I would scream at the mountain for taking them away from me. And when I reached the summit, I would bring my foot down on that peak and scream at the heavens, and in that moment I would believe that my parents could rest in peace.
As for if I really could put a face to death... fill in the blanks yourselves.
I've looked into a lot of coffins as they were lowered into the ground. I've wanted to drag them back out. And all I can do is wish for them back, because you can't punch a failing heart in the face after it's killed someone.
The Apple parents are dead. The mechanisms of how they died are usually not important, as what matters is that they are dead. But Granny Smith is walking proof that death from old age is so far from in the cards for earth ponies it doesn't even come in the pre-con deck, and the Apple parents don't seem the type for mountain-climbing. That means the most likely cause of death is timberwolves. That means the most likely cause of death has a face.
I wrote this story so that Applejack could punch death in the face, and get closure for her parents' death. I wrote this story so that Applejack could have what I can't. Because there's a special kind of nightmare that none of Luna's tricks can chase away, and now I've written a story where Applejack doesn't have to have that nightmare.
Death doesn't scare me, and I'm not really sure why. Seeing people voice/write their thoughts about death or even fictional representations of the fear are almost insightful, but also alienating. I think I've written, once or twice, a character showing the fear in some form, but it always ended up being one of the oddest things to communicate - I had to write what the character wanted, thought, and felt, and let them tell a fear I didn't understand.
But things like this always stick out.