The Things I Give My Characters to Hold
My father has no grave. My uncle has no grave. A friend I lost years ago has no grave.
When someone dies without a marker, without ritual, there is a strangeness to it. The world keeps moving, and you keep existing alongside the absence. There is no place to go, no closure that arrives in the form of a funeral, a stone, or a name carved somewhere. Just a surreal continuation.
It's odd how one learns to live with it. Grief doesn't need ceremony to be real, but absence without any marking of it becomes something else. A mausoleum you carry with you.
I write stories, but I don't want my readers to think about me while reading them. I want them immersed in the world, in the lives of my characters. But those characters exist because I understand something about absence, about continuation, about attachment despite impermanence. They're real because what made them came from me.
I recently drafted a scene for chapter five of my current novel in progress, How Long Things Hold. It includes my character Eîra, alone for a thousand years, who has built a life out of small attachments knowing they will not last. And Sâel, someone who meets her and has to confront what it means to have never allowed yourself to grieve.
After a moment he looked back at her over his shoulder. “What else do you do here?”
“I like to roast potatoes at night, and sometimes Erwin comes and lets me cuddle him,” Eîra said quietly.
She has built a life here. She has been alone since long before my cultivation, and she is offering me the things that make her days bearable.
“I have never roasted a potato.” Sâel looked up at her. “Erwin. That is one of the foxes you named, yes? He still answers to it?”
“Yes. He is red with some silver now. He’s about nine years old, but he still answers to it,” Eîra said, a small smile on her lips, her eyes distant.
She has attached to something that will die soon. And then she will do it again. I name nothing. I document what I see and move on. She watches things grow old and calls them by name and feeds them and then lets them go—
“You tracked a family. But Erwin was the one who stayed.” He looked at her carefully. “Does he have a favourite place to be touched? Or does he simply tolerate you?”
“He likes to be scratched behind the ears. His grandfather, Tobias, liked the same. Tobias is over there...” Eîra pointed towards a field. Dotting it were hundreds of small stakes, each one carved with a name in the Dyn script.
Sâel followed her gesture and saw the stakes, his eyes widening. He slowly walked towards the edge of the patch and stopped, looking out. “I do not have graves for the things I have lost,” he whispered.
I do not have graves for the things I have lost.
That line came from somewhere in me I didn't know was there until Sâel said it. Because fiction does exactly that. It lets you understand yourself through people who aren't you.
My hope is that my readers will feel what Sâel feels without needing to know about my loss, that they will recognise the shape of it, and that in some way, I will be recognised too.
Perhaps that is why we tell stories at all. To leave something marked.
My father has no grave. My uncle has no grave. A friend I lost years ago has no grave. But somewhere in a field of carved stakes, in a story I wrote, they do.
