B0047Y173Y EBOK by Roach Smith Marion

Author:Roach Smith, Marion
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

LIBELING THE DEAD, AND OTHER FEARS

Being afraid in the autopsy suite helped me write the first essay I read on NPR. Entitled “My First Autopsy,” it’s the section you just read, beginning three paragraphs after that previous subhead, “Counterphobia.” It starts with “I went to my first autopsy...” and ends with the line that begins “But God knows...”

The day after the autopsy, while transcribing my notes, thinking they would be used solely for the book I was contracted to write, I discovered the material for that essay. Though I wore a wintergreen-oiled surgical mask in the cooler, my senses were actually heightened to the point where I was scribbling about faith and fear; I had seen and felt more there than on any other reporting experience—and it was alive in the notebook, the language itself heightened in the scribbling.

Fear is with us all the time. Afraid of making bad parenting mistakes, scared of blurting out the single thing that might damage my marriage, fear of what might be said every time the topic of our mother comes up with my sister and me—all of those make really good subjects. We’re all afraid at the margins of our main roles, which makes it a great place to write from.

And while a fear of death is a good topic, as are the dead themselves, many students in my classes confess their fear of writing about dead relatives, afraid of the response they might get from the living. There are so many better reasons not to write; each of us possesses an endless stream of them, though perhaps the most word-stopping one I hear is what the family—whether living or dead—might think.

Write the piece—revisions, edits, the whole shebang—and then let’s see what we have. Worrying what someone will say before you even write it makes about as much sense as shopping now for what you’ll wear on the Today show. Write it. And if we must, later we’ll take the family pulse. And then we’ll shop.

Who knows—the person you’re writing about may have died by the time you’re done, leaving you free and clear to publish your tale, since legally you can’t libel the dead. Still alive? Okay, too, since the truth is the best defense, and you are telling the truth, your version of it, chanting the soothing phrase “This is the way I remember it” or “The way it seemed to me” or “In my version of the tale,” and writing on.

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