While I wait for Charlie No Face to be released, I continue to work on Chimney Bluffs. At the end of the very first chapter the reader will know that a little boy, Danny, has died and that his parents have had a horrific response to the loss. But it isn’t until the end of the twentieth chapter that we learn how Danny died. That is fully 144 pages later. Many other things happen along the way that aren’t directly related to his death, but, in another sense, all roads were leading to this single destination. Until I reached that event, the rest of the story could not be told.
I reached that destination yesterday. I have written three chapters about his illness and dying, but his death is described in merely 430 words. I think that sometimes there is an anticlimactic quality to death when it is expected. I borrowed heavily from my own experience of my father’s death when trying to capture the feeling of this scene. I was with him when he died and we had been waiting for weeks, knowing all along what was coming. I remember having the fantasy that the daily routine surrounding his dying would go one forever and maybe his actual death would never come. I remember counting his elongated breaths on that last morning and feeling briefly triumphant each time he drew another. And then the last breath came and for several seconds I was unsure. Was that it? Did he take his last breath? Or is there another one coming? Or another? And when I was sure that no other breath was on its way, I thought, ‘Maybe he will wake up now and tell me what it was like to die;’ such is the denial of death even when we know it’s coming.
I used this experience to punctuate Danny’s parents’ experience of those final moments, hoping that fewer words would actually say more.
When I was done, I re - read it out loud so I could hear the sound of this ending. Then I saved it and stopped writing. I felt very tired.