The tragic events at Virginia Tech yesterday make it impossible for me to be flip or sarcastic today. The grief there is unimaginable. I wish I knew something smart and helpful to say. I don’t, so I’ll fall back on the insights of others.

Back in 1988 I was a student at Syracuse University when Pan Am 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland killing 270 people, including 35 students from SU. Pain, anger, sadness and confusion raced through campus. It was unrelenting. I remember being in the Carrier Dome, the place where I sat to cheer on our football and basketball teams, but this time the agenda was a mass memorial service. All these years later I still remember certain comments from the speech by the then student government president. He said (and I paraphrase): Who would ever have thought that on a campus of 16,000 the loss of 35 students would be felt so deeply. The thought seems fitting for Virginia Tech.

This horrible event also reminded me of an article I recently read in Romance Writers Report (RWR), the RWA magazine. Author Eileen Putnam interviewed fellow author Cathy Maxwell. Maxwell talked about writing through adversity and of continuing to be creative after the loss of her husband. She said:

I have a dear friend whose daughter ran away for a year. I asked her how she could write during this time - and she said she had no choice. Her life was chaos, but the writing was one thing she could control.

When Kevin died, I grabbed hold of those words of insight. I was concerned about my children, frightened of the future, and lost in grief for this wonderful man - but the one thing I could control was the writing, so I wrote.
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Nor is death the only thing that can derail writers. Divorce is a form of death, the death of something we’d valued, and requires tremendous energy to survive. We also have writers caring for sick loved ones and writers who have children with challenging special needs. There are writers coping with their own disabilities and illnesses. Life-threatening illnesses, and still they write.

Maybe it is because the writing is the one thing they can control. Maybe it is because they have something to say and must get those words on paper while they still have a chance.

Different types of tragedy, but like the events at Virginia Tech these comments help to shift the daily annoyances of life back into perspective.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 7:08 am and is filed under About Authors, About Me, About Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.