Thanatos and the Writer: Exploring death in fiction
Most people don’t like to think too much about death.
We spend the first part of our lives carefully filtering out the idea of it. If we’re lucky, we can spend quite some time in this space, acknowledging it in quiet moments, watching it from afar, imagining it abstractly if we think about it at all.
Death is always over there happening to someone else until it’s not.
When my dad died ten years ago, it was the first time I experienced death up close. We had a complicated relationship, my father and I. Alike in looks and temperament, we might have been great friends if we weren’t father and daughter. Instead, we were often at odds. In the last week of his life he reflected half-jokingly that we’d probably still be arguing if he wasn’t dying. I laughed and acknowledged he was right.
The grief that followed his passing was as complicated as our relationship. I remember him by two temperatures – the warmth of his hand when I held it during the final weeks of his life, and the coldness of his forehead when I kissed it the morning he died.
Even now, I sometimes hear his voice in my head, making wry comments with the wit that was uniquely his but that I seem to have completely internalized.
Death is far away until suddenly it isn’t.
READING DEATH
As much as we try to avoid death in real life, we crave it in our stories. We seek out stories about death in every colour and form. In murder mysteries, we seek justice for death. In westerns and action stories, we seek justice through death. In horror, we seek to experience the hair-raising attempt to escape inevitable death. In thrillers, we seek the macabre dance with death. In black comedies we seek to laugh at death. In war epics, we seek to understand the cost of death at a mass scale.
And in dramas - literary, speculative, familial or otherwise - we give ourselves permission to imagine the intimacy of death.
As readers and audiences, we gobble it down. We crave a way to experience it that feels safe, a way to process our complicated feelings while still keeping it at a distance. Perhaps it’s because we avoid facing it so much in our lives that in our fiction, we can’t get enough of it. We press our faces against it like we're pressing them against a window, with the morbid curiosity of children.
WRITING DEATH
As storytellers, death is our tool. Often used as a way of upping the stakes, it can be an easy way to provide visceral thrills. It's used so often and so much that as storytellers we can be in danger of depriving it of meaning. And in some genres - like the blockbuster film - violent death is used as a hammer on the scales of justice, dolled out so frequently that killing a human is no more impactful than swatting a fly.
But for those of us who are exploring this theme in more serious, intimate ways, writing about death comes with as much weight as the real thing. It demands the same level of honesty, bravery and vulnerability.
TEARING AWAY THE VEIL
When my dad died, I worried that we'd buried him alive. I'd felt the coldness of his skin. I'd seen his body. I'd watched them come and take him away. I saw and felt the coffin. Yet I woke up in an anxious panic multiple nights in a row, certain that we'd made a terrible mistake.
When death finally came close to me, it ripped away a veil I hadn't realise I'd constructed. Grief, I wrote to someone after my father's passing, is like waiting uselessly at a station for a train to come and take you back to the place you were before, only to realise it is a train that will never arrive.
When I started writing my book - The Bones Beneath - it took me some time to understand that it was going to be, amongst other things, a book about death and grief. To do it justice, I had to willingly tear down that veil once more. I had to look at the raw wounds my dad’s death had left. I had to be prepared to go down to the darkest places. And I had to do it with sensitivity, aware always of the line between authenticity and gratuitousness. Most of all, I had to let myself grieve for my dad.
The way to understand Bonnie’s grief, and Lilith’s and that of any character whose fictional life I was ending or impacting, was to first grapple with my dad’s death and the fear of my own mortality.
Death is always over there it seems, but not for us writers.
For us, death must always be close. It has to be because we bring it there on purpose, so that we can write honestly about life and our shared humanity.