Rebecca's Gift: A New Charity I Hope You'll Donate To.
I’m gonna tell you about a new charity, but first I have to tell you an ugly truth about kids fighting terminal illnesses:
Sometimes they die.
And when they die, sometimes the whole family goes terminal in their wake.
Which is to say that losing a child is a terrible math – you had three kids, once. Now you have two. Even answering an innocuous question like, “So how many kids do you have?” becomes an awkward thing, because by saying “Two” you’re quietly burying the memory of your dead child, but by saying “Three” you’re making things awkward in otherwise-light conversation, and Jesus how do you define your life?
Your family’s rhythm is broken. You buy lollipops out of habit, before remembering the only person who liked lollipops is now gone. Your kids, traumatized by having all their time scheduled in between the sick child’s treatments, now have too much free time, and the three-kid dynamic is now different and they’re not sure how to play with each other without Her in between to play peacemaker.
And all those places you used to go to heal as a family are now saturated with the wrong kinds of memories. That ice cream shop you’d treat the kids to when they were good? Now you look at the wall, see her favorite flavor, realize she’ll never eat it again. You want to go out with your old family friends, but sometimes they freak out at death and you actually lose support after the death, crappy as that is.
And your spouse, well, when you lose a kid it’s harder to look at the person you love. There’s a feeling of failure saturating this household, that sense that somebody should have done something, and it’s not fair but you want to blame someone. Maybe you blame yourself, withdraw from your spouse, self-destruct. Maybe you blame them, snap at them, because God’s too far away to yell at and you’re exhausted from constantly fighting your kid’s disease for a year, two years, five years.
I’ve heard that the divorce rate skyrockets after you lose a child. I believe it. Sometimes that death punches a hole in your family, and you flywheel apart because you don’t know how to redefine yourself as a unit without them. Because you’re in your house, with a family that has to redefine itself, surrounded by all the things that used to bring you happiness but now feel like anchors to old memories.
You need to get out to somewhere new to find joy.
Rebecca’s Gift wants to help. By giving families like these a vacation.
Because when my blessed goddaughter Rebecca died, I watched the Meyers struggle – and what helped them the most to regain their footing as a family was going down to New Jersey and forming some newer and happier memories. To remember that even in the wake of this grief, there were still good times to be had.
To go somewhere new, as a family, and explore who they were now.
And I think of poorer families, who can’t move and can’t go anywhere, and think of how Rebecca’s Gift is going to help them.
Look. After the child dies, the official assistance often dissolves. It’s sexy for charities to go, “This kid’s on the brink! They might live if you chip in! Donate now!” But after? All of that assistance packs up and leaves – if you’re lucky, you get a grief counsellor to spackle over the cracks – and yet there you are, with children who are ripped open from watching their sister or brother die before them, and no assistance to be found.
Grief is its own disease. And so I ask, if you have a few bucks to spare or a platform to mention Rebecca’s Gift on, give a dollar and/or donate your retweets and reblogs.
There are surviving children, surviving parents, who might just be able to support each other if they can remember the joys of being a family again. Rebecca’s Gift is going to do its damndest to help ensure that these families make it together. And anything you can do to lend a hand, I assure you, would be a mitzvah.
Thanks for doing what you can.
Cognitive Dissonance
I always get weirded out when someone discusses draconic behavior with the confidence of someone discussing a real animal: “Well, you know, dragons aren’t pack animals, but they do get lonely and seek comfort.” What the fuck? Dragons don’t exist, motherfucker!
But my friends discussing the best ways to kill a zombie, with the confidence of hardened apocalypse survivalists who’ve put a thousand walkers back in the grave? Sure, man, that’s what we do.
Remember, kids, it’s pretty fucked up to discuss unicorns like they existed. But if you wanna talk about how to avoid Cthulhu? Shit, sit in my living room and opine.
Your Life Is Not A Story, And You Will Not Get Closure.
We all know how the murder mystery ends: the clever detective corners the perp, having solved the crime, and peppers him with pointed questions until the villain cracks.
“All right, I did it!” the villain cries. “I was bad and wrong and evil, and I’ll acknowledge what a murderous scumbag I was, before even so much as a trial!”
Often, the villain fills in the details the detective missed. Because fictional villains are helpful like that.
But in real life, the cunning villain remains silent. He knows he’s got a trial coming up. There’s long years of court battles, legal tricks, friends he’ll lose if he confesses now. He’s gone to a lot of effort to plan this crime, and he’ll go to equal efforts to wriggle out of punishment for it.
In real life, the villain’s answers are less satisfying: “So?” “No, that didn’t happen.” “I want to talk to my lawyer.”
And there often never is a full understanding of what happened. The only person who could explain their rationale has all the incentive in the world to stay silent, to lie, to tell mixed truths, whatever will best muddy the waters in their favor.
All good people can do is interview people, get fragments. But the evidence never fits together like a jigsaw puzzle: it’s messy, overlapping, incomplete and contradictory.
There’s no certainty. No explanation. Just someone who probably did something awful – and you don’t even have 100% certainty on that, just a lot of evidence that points in their direction.
Yet if you’re not careful, you treat your bad breakups like they were fictional crimes, not real ones. You’ll go back to that partner who cheated on you, demanding explanations, never satisfied until they crack and acknowledge that yes, they saw themselves as evil when they were fucking you over, that they both knew and understood that they were Satan incarnate, and that they carry a deep loss and sorrow over playing the villain in your story.
Strangely, they don’t. They make excuses. They wrangle for sympathy. They feel justified in their abuse, and you will never wring the confession out of them that you need to feel whole.
But you’re not a goddamned story in a book.
You need to leave this need for closure behind.
They were jerks to you. They will probably be jerks to someone else. I’m sorry that you’re not important enough to function as the climax to their story, because that sucks, but the truth is that your requirement to be the star in everyone’s life – including your own – is a toxic thing.
Because you can waste years of your life trying to get this closure. You’ll keep going back and talking to them and getting upset because they sound so convincing when they tell you their story, and why don’t these facts neatly line up? If you’re really unlucky, you’ll fall for their bullshit all over again and get back with them, and discover that “sweet words” do not equal “righteous actions.”
Truth is, some asshole hurt you. You may never know the reasons. You may never see them punished for it. You may never hear them admit why. I’m sorry, because that random pain is deeply, deeply unsatisfying.
But you know what’s less satisfying? Wasting valuable time you could be using to make your life more awesome, and draining that by endlessly piecing together messy snippets of real life to try to shape a nice plot out of nothing.
They were jerks. And consider this: you may have even helped them be jerks to you by wanting so badly to believe in a narrative that you bought into their narrative of them-as-hero, quietly eliding the facts that didn’t fit into this glorious story of You Together, Forever. That’s not always the case, because some jerkdoms spring out of nowhere, but it’s not always not the case.
Rather than seeking a narrative structure, can you instead assemble a profile of jerky behavior, in order to avoid falling into the same trap again? We do not need to understand the origins of gravity to know that leaping into chasms will cause large amounts of harm.
Then also contemplate this: good detectives don’t need a confession to make a case. They assemble evidence, make judgements, and convict in the absence of nice bright narrative structures. And most of them still sleep well at night.
I encourage you to do the same.
"Trust Fall!"
He sags backwards, boneless, so beautifully certain you will catch him before he hits the floor. And when he falls into your arms, it feels like fate; you are strong for catching him, he is brave for trusting you completely, how could the two of you not be together?
That’s the beauty of the trust fall. Someone you love going limp, allowing the universe to brutalize them, knowing that only you will interpose yourself between them and the the skull-splintering hardness of the cement floor.
And when it is done, you have been forced into a hug so intimate it feels like no other will do. His smile, so grateful. Your body, bearing weights you didn’t think possible.
You used to be helpless and weak. Now you are the rescuer.
How could this be anything but love?
You stay together, and still the trust falls continue. Aren’t you taking your medications? Trust fall. Shouldn’t you be looking for work? Trust fall. Where did you go last night, can you just tell me who you were with? Trust fall.
Every time they tumble backwards, blissful in the comfort of your catch, always so certain you’ll snatch them up before their staunch passivity smashes them into that cold, hard cement.
They keep falling backwards, and you come to realize: it’s not you they’re trusting, it’s the universe. You find them flopping into someone else’s arms, anyone’s arms, and realize the intimacy you thought belonged to you and you alone is just transactional. You lecture them on the need to stand up, to build their own strength, and –
Trust fall.
You catch them before they break themselves in hospitals, in the hands of angry police, in the hands of owed bankers. And you come to realize that what you’re doing is not strength, not really; it’s being held hostage by all your most protective instincts. You can’t bear to see anyone hurt, because you got destroyed so thoroughly by the malicious work of bastards and you have vowed inside you’ll never let anyone endure that again.
Yet you know there’s a difference. You got hurt because of what others did to you. He’s getting hurt because of what he’s doing to himself. And you make excuses, listing all the reasons he can’t help himself, but fall after fall he doesn’t take the slightest effort to better his own situation, he’s a crash-test dummy flung down a flight of stairs with you flinging yourself after him, and –
Trust fall.
Is it strength you have now? Would strength maybe, possibly, be walking away? You’re weakening now, missing work to help him, forever paying bills, losing the social support you desperately need because your friends can’t pretend he’s good for you any more. And even his gratitude at you catching him is thin, now – he yells at you for daring to ask anything of him that might make your life easier, he doesn’t have *time* for that bullshit, don’t you understand his life is –
Trust fall.
Every fall is in slow motion. You can see him tumbling down. You can practically hear his spine snapping as you imagine his head hitting the pavement. You have plenty of time to envision how horrible this will be if you don’t catch him.
He’s going to hurt himself badly. So badly.
You have so much time to walk away.
Authors! Four Rules To Read Your Story So People Buy Your Damn Book.
I have been lulled to sleep by many an author-friend. I show up at their readings because they kept me up until two o’clock in the morning, laughing at their wild anecdotes, listening to their observations…
Then they start reading their story, and this vibrant personality becomes the world’s dullest newsreader, rattling off the words in monotone fury like they had a train to catch.
So this is the first rule of Reading A Story: The audience did not come to hear your story. They came to meet you.
Now, if you’re good at improvising in front of crowds, then you can do what Matthew Dicks did, and just turn your event into a meet-and-greet where you take questions from the audience. But note that Matthew is a sixteen-time poetry-slam winner, so he’s a performer. (Me? I’m super-good in front of crowds because I emceed the Rocky Horror Picture Show for three years, which gives me the side-benefit of being super-comfortable in fishnets and high heels.)
Yet conventions usually won’t give an unknown author a slot on the schedule for “Author does random shit.” It’s easier to sell them on “Give me an hour to read this story.” And if you’re not comfortable in front of crowds, then having Something To Do is a good shield in case you don’t feel like vamping for an hour. So reading a story is a good thing, for beginning authors.
So rule two: You are not reading them your story. You are telling them what you liked about your story.
“But didn’t you just tell me to read my story?” Yes, I did. But “reading your story” is not transcribing the words with your lips.
With every paragraph, you’re telling them why you kept this paragraph in the story.
Did you keep it in because it was exciting? Then read it like you were excited. Did you keep it in because it was snarky? Read it in a snarky tone of voice. Is this the slow, lyrical section? Read it slow and lyrically.
(Or if you’re understated, be understated. My friend and fabulous author Kelly Link thinks she’s not good at reading, because she’s low-key. But her stories are dry and understated, just as she is often dry and understated, so when she reads it’s actually perfectly suited to her personality.)
Think about the reasons you loved this paragraph enough to keep it in, then find a way to convey that audially.
And note that you’re telling them what you liked about your story, which involves telling it in your way. The audience came to get a sense of you, so don’t try to read your talelike some bad imitation of your favorite actor. (Unless your personality is a bad imitation of your favorite actor – an embarrassing amount of my life is a terrible Bruce Campbell ripoff.)
If you’re snarky, be snarky in the way that you are when you’re bitching to your buddies. If you’re reading dialogue, try to give it the rhythms that you have when you speak. This is the Whitman’s Sampler of Who You Are, and people will be grateful to see that.
Which leads me to rule three: Slow down and give the audience time to process.
You know every word in this story. The audience doesn’t. In the excitement of the performance you may well barf out the entire tale in one breathless lung-emptier, but then nobody will know what happened.
If you read your entire story and nobody can tell, audially, where your paragraphs are, then you have not conveyed rhythm.
So slow down. Speak about 30% slower than you think you need to (and about 50% louder). When you have delivered a chunk of meaningful information, give the audience a second to process what that information means.
And don’t step on your own punchlines. When I first started reading, I was afraid of silence, so I’d read something funny and then fill that gap with more words before the audience realized I’d made a joke. I’ve since come to realize that a joke is a gift you make to a crowd – and like any gift, you don’t give it and then walk away (or worse, give it and then eye them anxiously until they provide the obligatory squeeing). You hand them time to savor it, and hopefully they’ll laugh. Sometimes they won’t. Crowds differ.
I give the audience my punchlines like the sampler lady giving out little sausages at CostCo. I put it out, give the audience a moment to recognize it’s there, let them pick up the funny if it’s to their taste. Some people don’t want it; that’s fine. Move on. But if they crowd in and start to laugh, let the laugh build until it’s done.
So how do I know all of these places to stop and swell?
Practice and time. Practice and time.
I read every story I write out loud at least twice. That’s good advice for any author. “Reading out loud” will pick out awkward phrasings in your story like you wouldn’t believe, and is usually my final step before story submission.
But before an author reading, I read my story out loud three more times, with a timer handy. Charlie Jane Anders gave me some great advice that a story can hold your audience for about fifteen minutes, and you should never go over twenty. (I have gone past my time, and it’s gone well, but I like edgeplay.) You should know precisely how long your story takes to read, which means you get to read about 2,000-2,500 words before you’re done.
(What if 2,500 words isn’t enough? Cut. I have stories I have slashed to ribbons to make them convention-readable, with black lines gashed through whole paragraphs. Or maybe start halfway through the story; better to have an exciting fifteen-minute reading with a two-minute explanatory introduction than it is to have a forty-minute reading that exhausts the audience’s attention span.)
And when you read it, that’s when you think about why you liked this paragraph. Which each reading, figure out ways to emphasize that paragraph-love better, get at ease with the story so you’re not reading words, but instead channelling the essence of you that you put into this tale. Each reading tells you the rhythm of this story – where you trip up so you need to slow down, where you realize this makes you sad so you need to speak as though it is a sad thing you’re discussing.
Is that a lot of work for a single reading? Yes. But it’s a lot better than boring an audience. And knowing your precise run-time convenient for multiple-author readings, so you won’t step over someone else’s time and piss off another author.
(My reading from my novel Flex requires three minutes of explanatory setup, and eighteen minutes of very exciting magical drug-making. A little over, but when you’ve got two characters trying to figure out how to condense dangerous magic into crystallized, snortable form, people are forgiving.)
You’re going to be nervous. Crowds do that. But you should not be nervous about translating your story into tongue-compressed waves of air, and reading it in advance burns off the nervousness of Can I do this? and changes it to the slightly-more-manageable Can I do this in front of all these people?
You damn well can. Good luck.