Grief and Longing in a Small Town
The unanswered question that keeps love alive.
As Stephen King wrote and as the titular character of the video game Alan Wake narrates in a cinematic opening:
‘In a horror story, the victim keeps asking ‘why?’ But there is no explanation and there shouldn’t be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest.’
While I classify ‘Westville’ as a supernatural thriller, there are undeniable horror influences and undercurrents within the trappings of the story, and perhaps most notably in theme.
And theme isn’t really something you can force.
At least that’s what I’ve found.
It needs to bleed into the story as it’s written, a product of past or present life occurrences or the future longings and worries of the writer.
This couldn’t be more true of Book 1 ‘Welcome to Westville’.
My experience with grief—the real close and deep cutting kind—was relatively shallow up until this past year.
I’d lost grandparents and been near to people who’ve lost sons, daughters and parents, but it wasn’t until I watched by father wither away from cancer that I had my true initiation.
This came as I was in the midst of drafting the book, and it’s surreal some days even now to look at things I wrote that I don’t remember writing. Deep feelings that came in waves and ran in circles, and worked themselves onto the pages and into the arcs of characters by osmosis.
Death is so incredibly hard to face because it wrenches all control away from us.
Suddenly, violently, and with cruel indiscretion.
Just like in the aforementioned horror story, we ask ‘why?’
That’s one of the first questions that rises from the churning depths. But just like in a horror story, there is often no explanation, and maybe there shouldn’t or can’t be one.
Not in this world anyway.
The ‘stages’ of grief are well known, starting with denial and ending in acceptance. They are seen as a linear progression.
What I’ve learned is that maybe they grief isn’t on rails or a part of some trackable graph. Maybe it exists on a circle, and in cycles. Similar to the divide between linear, systematic Roman logic and interconnected experiential based Hebrew thinking.
Just days ago a therapist friend of mine gave me the analogy that grief is like the old Window’s logo screensaver, bouncing aimlessly over a void of black, until every so often it hits a corner just perfectly. And it does, there is acute pain of grief that returns, like the metal prongs in shaky hands during a game of Operation.
A sudden spike returning from a long absence, a dull ache, or for those in the immediate throes of loss, calling up a rageful fit of sorrow.
As for the other part of this King quote, I believe that it is true that unanswered mystery does stay with us the longest.
Both because it’s painful and frustrating to not understand, but also because it keeps the memories alive. We don’t know where our loved ones go after they leave us. Sure, we all have our beliefs, but we don’t and can’t comprehend what it is fully like, and can’t completely know how exactly they continue to exist beyond the physical.
But we know it and we feel it. They remain somehow, if worlds apart.
We can at least, hold on to the time we were given, and hope for a future that allows us to move on. That is, to hold grief and gratitude in strange tension.
Then there’s the strange creeper of guilt. The kind that comes from simply surviving. Believing that you could have done something. That you should have said something. That you could have changed things.
The truth is at any given moment there are 150,000 people that do not have a tomorrow. That means there are also at the very least, 1,000,000 that will be in the throes of grieving the loss of one of those 150,000, account for an average of 3 - 4 people who deeply cared for them.
There is a strange comfort in not being alone in that stunning and sorrowful statistic.
In other words, you are not completely isolated in grief, like so many protagonists in aforementioned horror stories.
But to acknowledge that these kinds of losses are indeed ‘horrific’ is to acknowledge your humanity.
It is to face the unfathomable, and come out on the other side, changed—in ways both painful and emboldening.
That’s the crux of the theme that ended up crystallizing in ‘Welcome to Westville’.
We don’t get to decide who leaves and when. But we do get to decide how we live with them now, and how to eventually face a world without them.
I hope if you read ‘Welcome to Westville’ you might feel some sense that you too are not alone in this. I hope the same even reading this post today.
That it helps you some small way, to live in the midst of unanswered mystery.
- Ryder
What is grief, if not love persevering?
- Vision
Wandavision
