Sometimes it's Too Much

What I wrote today was difficult to relive.
Oftentimes I write from my life experience, and life is not always fulfilling.
I think that's why so many broken people are writers.

But then again, aren't we all broken in some way?

Five years ago, I lost my grandfather.  It was a difficult four months as he was dying, a difficult four months filled with hurtful revelations, broken promises, unrealistic expectations, unbearable pressure, and unanswered questions.  It was a time when everything I thought I knew about a man who had been such a central part of my life was proven to be a lie.  Everything.

I've been waiting for the right time to write about it, and early on I realized that there would never be a "right time".  There would be a "right project".

There's something Faulknerian about my experience losing this man who had been my hero and my father, something about seeing clearly for the first time that he was someone I never really knew.  And when I stood in that booth at the country fair, holding the photographs that sparked this project, I knew that this was the time. 

Reliance is the project.

I've been so excited to begin this manuscript; the words have been saturating my mind for weeks.  But if I'm being honest, I've also been wary, because I knew that this day of writing would come.

We didn't have a funeral for my grandfather.  Truth be told, if we had, the funeral should have been held weeks before he died in body, for that was long after he died to me.

But perhaps it's more fitting that in memorial I bury him in these pages, in these words I've put to paper today.  His life was fiction, and so there he shall remain.

Sometimes writing is too difficult.
Sometimes it's too much.