GOOD GRIEF
I've reached a point in the novel where my main character, who does lots of odd jobs, is asked to help out at the local funeral home. I know relatively little about the inner workings of a funeral home, but I have been to more than a few funerals.
I grew up in a large family and I was also an altar boy in the local Catholic Church, so I spent a fair amount of time at funerals, mostly trying to get a buzz off of the incense. Later, I would meet other adults who had NEVER been to a viewing, who had never seen a dead body lying in a casket.
Maybe I'm weird, but I think that it was a good thing as a kid to get used to the idea that people died and you mourned and then you ate a lot of food and got on with the rest of your life.
In the book, the funeral is that of a man named Archer Meadows, someone who my character encountered many years earlier in circumstances that ... well, you will just have to wait to find that out. The funeral sets off a series of events that result in the past and the present becoming entangled in ways that profoundly affect the futures of several people.
The interaction of past and present is a constant theme both in fiction and in our lives. I guess that's why it works so well as a storytelling device. As William Faulkner said: "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past." Or to quote Jake Gittes in the movie The Two Jakes: "One thing about the past. There's plenty more where that came from."
January 4, 2010
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