It is the one-year anniversary of the day your husband’s body was cremated and you are at the Jefferson Middle School Fall Orchestra Concert. Here’s a fact: The funeral home people don’t normally tell the bereaved when a cremation…
I knew at the time I found myself marking the anniversary of my husband’s cremation while sitting in the auditorium for my sixth-grade son’s fall orchestra concert that I needed to write something beginning with that sentence. But for a long time, I couldn’t figure out how. The whole experience was so visceral and absurd and banal—but nothing actually happened. It was all inside my head.
I took inspiration from Marie Howe’s poem, “What the Living Do.” The way she describes a moment, her observations, and her feelings is precise and immediate. It’s a snapshot of something that only happened once and only to her, but in her telling it feels universal. I connected with her when I read her poem, just as I hope a reader might connect with me.
First-person narration didn’t work. Neither did third-person narration. Both were too removed and required too much scaffolding to establish the identity of the voice. I had been writing through my husband’s death for a while in various forms, including short fiction, memoir, and a one-act play. I had experimented with perspective—in one story I used third-person narration focusing on my son. I wrote the play with myself as the dying spouse communicating with my husband about how he should raise the kids after I died.
Using a second-person narrator, which I have never tried before, eventually hit me as the only way to take this moment and drive it home to the reader without having to inhabit or construct an identity.
I wrote the first draft in fifteen minutes, using just my memory of the moment (and the layered memories within). I liked what I had, but it also felt too raw and plain. I put the paragraphs aside for a few months and then came back to insert the “facts”—scientific observations dropped in as connective tissue. These facts brought in another voice, dispassionate and omniscient, which also moved the piece toward fiction. I’m still not totally sure who that voice is, but I am comforted at the idea of it speaking to the character. I hoped it would both create some distance from the painfulness of the moment and help the character (and the reader) make sense of the events.
It was only after I added these asides that I realized what the “sense” was: the notion that time and space and matter are so much bigger than us, and the whole beautiful ridiculous enterprise of life and parenting and death is all part of a greater universe where everything is connected, and sometimes we just have to keep breathing. Writing this piece was healing. I hope some readers can find some meaning in it.
RIGEL OLIVERI is a law professor who lives in Columbia, Missouri, with her two children and four cats. She writes fictions, essays, and plays. Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review and Streetlight Magazine, and has been performed by the Greenhouse Theater Project. In 2021 her short story, “Totality,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
