Saying goodbye

Is it easier to write an emotional charged scene when you are still caught up in the feeling or when you have recovered somewhat and are, in theory, strong enough to handle it? Understandably when we are in the midst of an emotional grip we can clearly express what is happening to us. We can state with certainly the way our dart races, our breath catches in our throat. We can experience the sweat breaking out on our brow and share the cluttered thought jumbling in our brains.

Yet after a time that we can recover then we can look back and when she describe the shaky breathing we won't necessarily have to go through it again. Panic won't set in when we talk about the beating of our heart and the sweat pouring down is just a memory. We are disconnected making the scatter of thoughts more easily collected and organized. There are pros and cons to either time.

In dealing with a personal trauma I wish I could have written back when I was going through the drama because it may have given me an outlet that would have helped significantly instead of burying the feelings tormenting me day and night. I may have recovered more quickly and the potential strength it may have provided could have meant escaping long before things turned as physical as they did.

I am now looking back. I am writing a few stories involving a situation I went through and while I am taken back to the place and time that everything occurred I know I am not living it again and that I am safe. I have found a way to try and deal with it by acknowledging the pain and attempting through my own creations to right a wrong. It is in this matter though I am not sure if I am succeeding or failing.

I have not hidden in any way that in one of my current projects Sharing Strength that not all of my characters survive the book. I never announced who it is that is gone by the end but it is known throughout that one or more do not make it. This is my concern. There are several characters in the book and a number of them are based on me or close friends and family that have struggled with this affliction.

Because I know them inside and out it tears me apart to know I have to kill a character. I am correcting what went wrong for others but in a sense I know these characters in a real and fictional way making it in a sense killing myself regardless of who the character is actually based upon.  For this I am hurting. I ache with a pain and frustration I cannot explain because it is something I have never experienced before.

I have killed off secondary characters in previous stories, at times in gruesome fashion. But I have never taken a character so developed and essential to the plot and destroyed them. It is my sheer hope that what they represent both in life and in death with translate allowing their message to live on in their absence and making it a life given instead of taken.

They deserve so much, I simply hope to do them justice.