Writing Lessons: Writing Memoir in The Present Tense

WRITING MEMOIR IN PRESENT TENSE suits grief in ways that the past tense simply cannot provide. Think about it for a moment and you may agree. Or better yet, read Amy Biancolli on writing her new book, Figuring Sh!t Out: Love, Laughter, Suicide and Survival, and see if the case she makes for the immediacy of the tense does not change how you feel on this. It did for me.

Remembering the Past in the Present Tense

By Amy Biancolli

Months before I set to work on a book recalling grief in the wake of my husband’s suicide, I started writing it. It wasn’t my intention. I had no plans to write a memoir — in fact, I actively planned not to — and I certainly wasn’t dwelling on the assorted stylistic approaches one might take in recalling traumatic loss. But the unconscious has a way of making decisions without our input.

It all began as an innocent email to my old friend Bob. I had just returned with my two younger kids from visiting my oldest on a gap year in Ecuador, and I was bursting to call him up and spit out some of our wackier adventures. But he was traveling and short on time, and so he asked me to email him. What came out was a full-blown yarn, written in a crazy, breezy, irreverent voice, present tense all the way. I wound up sending that email, plus three more in the same style, to a big bunch of family and close friends.

I had no idea where this nutty voice had come from, or why it whooshed out in the present tense. Several weeks later I felt compelled to write another story, also in the present tense, but it was darker and pocked with the hardest grief. On an impulse I had visited the roof of the parking garage where Chris had jumped, and I had to make sense of it in words. This wasn’t for mass consumption; I only wrote it because I needed to. Until then, outside of my eulogy, I hadn’t written any kind of essay exploring my grief over my late husband. But then this same friend Bob talked me into writing a book, and I realized that I’d actually already banged out rough drafts of five chapters: four from Ecuador, one from the roof.

I knew from the start that I had to continue in that voice. It felt less like a choice than an imperative — and as I moved along, tracking back to Chris’s death and that first week of mourning, I realized just how critical the present tense was in telling these stories. For one thing, I was still in the middle of living it: at the time I started writing, I was only nine months away from his suicide. But it was more than just a matter of chronology. The past, for me, was NOW. The loss was immediate. This is how grief manifests itself — eternally, stubbornly here, always pressing hard against us as we inch toward whatever the future might be. I was still living that first moment when the doorbell rang, and I found the cops at my front steps, and in some sense I always will be. A death is never entirely in the past, because it permanently alters the present.

I didn’t know any of this when I wrote that first Ecuador story. But the voice I adopted had a mind of its own and a very loud mouth, and I’m just glad I listened.

Figuring Sh!t Out, an excerpt

22 We Three Rings

I need the guidebook. Where is it? It must be here somewhere! You know, that thick wedge of a tome listing everything every widow needs to sort through her grief, spruce up her psyche and, while she’s at it, conform to all those weighty, if unspoken, societal expectations? That one. I can’t find the fookin’ thing. I know it’s here somewhere. Grrrrrgh.

Oh, heck! I forgot! There isn’t one! All I have to guide me, from now on, is the drift and druthers of my own personal needs. Which aren’t all that reliable. The fact is, I am utterly discombobulated and unsure of what to do next, or when to do it, or even whether to do it. When should I refer to my husband as “my husband,” and when should I refer to him as “my late husband”? When should I remove his name from the checks? How soon is too soon to attend a party? How should I respond when a stranger makes some passing comment that assumes I’m married? And what on earth should I do about Chris’s Facebook page? Shut it down? Keep it up forever as a memorial? Talk about Figuring Shit Out.

The thorniest issue, for me, is determining how long to wear my rings. I knew what to do with Chris’s ring: put it on a chain, hang it in my closet. After the wake, the funeral directors asked whether I wanted to have it buried with his ashes. No thanks, I said. I want that ring. I gave him that ring. I slipped that ring on his hand. That ring remained there for two decades, softening and molding to the shape of his finger. I plan to keep that ring for evermore, or at least until I give it to my son.

As for my own rings, I’ll give them to my daughters someday: the slim gold wedding band, purchased from a shop off the Boston Common; and the engagement ring, its two small diamonds flanking a ruby. Chris bought it from a Manhattan jeweler named Bobby (not lying) Satin, and he presented it to me about a month after he’d popped the question while cross-country skiing in New Hampshire. It was, and I dare you to challenge me on this point, the best proposal ever: He released the binding on one ski, dropped to his knee, said, “Will you marry me?” and then, when I shrieked my affirmative, double checked, “Really?!?” Then apologized for not having a ring. As though I cared.

The ring came later, at a restaurant in Hudson, New York, where the lovebirds gazed ceaselessly, meltingly, into one another’s eyes, and the gentleman told his affianced that she deserved something better than a diamond. “I decided you’re a ruby,” he said. “Because rubies are rarer.”

This ring and its unembellished marital companion remain on my left hand. How long should they stay there? Six months? A year? Two years? Once again, I have nooooo idea. In the first couple of weeks or so it was a non-issue: I still felt married. Of course I wore them. But now, as the icky-sticky reality of life without Chris continues to gum up my world, it is hard to believe that I’m anything but alone. He is so not here. I am so not married.

I raise this issue with the grief counselor. What should I do about the rings? I ask her.

“That’s a good question,” she says. “What should you do about the rings?”

Beats me. How long should I wear them?

“That’s a good question,” she says. “How long should you wear them?”

I have this feeling that I’m expected to wear them for a year.

“Why a year?” she asks.

Why a year? I dunno. I guess I’m thinking of the yahrzeit, I tell her. You know, the Jewish tradition that marks the first year of mourning. There’s just something about twelve months. It seems like the expected length of time. And I don’t want to seem like I’m being disrespectful and failing to honor Chris’s memory, especially with his family. I don’t want to hurt people.

The grief counselor gives me a look of frank assessment. She’s a smart lady.

“You know,” she says. “You know, when you lose a spouse at a young age, you’re dealing with the grief. You’re dealing with the reality of being a single parent. And you’re dealing with everyone else’s idea of widowhood—and how widows should behave. But only you can know what you’re going through. Only you can know what feels right.”

What am I going through? Everything.

What feels right? Nothing.

Back in high school, I auditioned for a role in The House of Bernarda Alba, Federico García Lorca’s incredibly depressing play about grieving women in Andalusia. The audition required me to pair off with another student for an improv, and we were told to act out a scene in a hospital as though awaiting news of a friend in a coma. All I did was stare at the ground and rub some dirt across the palm of my hand, but I made the drama teacher cry. She didn’t give me a part, though. Instead I was assigned to run the sound effects with my mother and, even more exciting, appear onstage as an extra during a funeral scene. For this I wore a long black dress with a heavy black hooded cloak and stood with other similarly dressed girls, all of us clutching rosary beads and weeping. Afterwards, Dan went up to Mama and said, “Amy looks awful in black.”

Such was my intro to mourning and widowhood. This black-on-black perception of things stuck with me for a dozen or so years until I became an actual mourner, and I then I realized that the grief of our popular imagining is not the same as the reality-based grief that manifests itself in so many kaleidoscopic and wacky forms. I hadn’t realized, for instance, that it’s possible to laugh at a wake until tinkly keyboard Muzak was piped into the funeral home gathering for my sister Lucy, a classical pianist who whipped off Brahms like nobody’s business. The ironic merriment this caused was almost worth the injury to our ears. Almost. In truth I nearly wound up grabbing the mortician by the shoulders, screaming STOP THE MADNESS!! and then spraying bullets into the stereo with my Kalashnikov. There were no such moments that I can recall in The House of Bernarda Alba.

But the rings.

What to do? Keep them on my left hand? Move them to my right hand? That would require some adjustment in size, which I’d rather not make (to either the rings or my fingers). Online widows support groups where I occasionally lurk feature long discussion threads on matters of ringdom. Some widows still wear them after five years. Some take ‘em off and stick ‘em in a drawer. Some wear them on necklaces. Some have them melted them down with their spouse’s ring into some significant new piece of jewelry. Once again the message is: Do What Feels Right.

I’m not sure What Feels Right. I’m not sure anything, from this point on, will ever Feel Right. But after a few more months of wrestling with this issue, I have determined What Feels Wrong: the rings. The precious metal on my left hand has assumed the weight of a lie, a gargantuan lie, and it presses and burns and mocks me. My husband is dead; I need to acknowledge that to myself and the world, just as I stood before the world and swapped vows and rings with Chris. To pretend otherwise is to diminish the gravity and eternity of this loss. He’s not wearing the ring. He’s not married any longer. There may not be a guidebook for clarification, but if you crack open the Gospels, you’ll find that little tale of the Sadducees trying to trap Jesus on this point—remember that question about the wife who cranked through seven brothers? They want to know which bro would be her proper husband at the Resurrection, and Jesus’ response is, basically: Get a real question, Sadducees! There is no marriage after death! This is me rolling my eyes!

So off they come, the rings. Onto a pretty gold chain they go. Sometimes I wear them around my neck. Sometimes I hang them in my closet, where they dangle and mingle with Chris’s, the three of them clacking softly whenever I swing the door.

The weight on my hand has lifted, now. The lie is gone. In its place is a lightness, sad but not unbearable, that I sense with relief and reckon as a mercy. My hand feels naked, but at least it tells the truth.

38 The Checkout Line Jollies, Part II

The more I travel through this zany land of widowhood, the less predictable I become. New Amy sometimes shocks me with her behavior, exhibiting traits that seem to spring from heretofore unseen depths of eccentricity, audacity, and all-around unhinged loose-lippedness. She really does say anything to anyone at any time, and she really doesn’t care how anyone reacts.

I don’t know what to make of it. It’s liberating, I guess. It’s also a little freakish. Picture yourself owning a body part that operates without your say-so, like that movie about the pothead kid whose hand just independently goes around killing people. Except in my case, it’s my mouth. And as far as I know, it’s not killing people.

The story of Amy’s Mouth begins with a photo frame. All I need is a photo frame. Not an expensive one, either; a cheap one will do. I simply want to collect some loose family pictures into one modest frame for my bedroom. It’s a pleasant enough day, and the dollar store is only a ten-minute walk.

As soon as I enter, I sense something brewing at checkout. The proprietor, a hulking sort with flashing eyes, is staring down a young man at the counter. Walking past them, I hear something about rudeness. Something about money. And then it begins.

“YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT. YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT,” shouts the proprietor.

“Fuck you,” the young man says with peculiar calm. “Fuck you.”

“GET OUT OF MY STORE, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT, AND NEVER COME BACK.”

The young man doesn’t move.

“YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT! YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!”

Nope. Not moving.

“I SAID GET OUT OF MY STORE, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!!” the proprietor shouts again at the customer, and at this sixth reference to fucking shit pieces, I decide I need to remove myself from their proximity. But leaving the store would require me to elbow past the shouter and shoutee, which doesn’t strike me as wise. I am not sure whether this scene is about to erupt into violence, and I have no interest in getting killed by crossfire at this stage of my life. So instead, I bolt straight to the back of the store and hide among the foam plates and toothpicks.

“YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT, GET OUT OF MY STORE, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT,” I hear again. The man needs a thesaurus. You’d think he could shake things up with an ASSHOLE or two, but no.

I ponder calling 911. At what point should I do so? Before or after an altercation begins? Preferably before—we’d all be better off if love and gentleness reigned through the land, or at least the dollar store—but I don’t want to incur the wrath of Mr. Fucking Shit Pieces. On the other hand, if I wait until a fight breaks out, someone might wind up hurt. Or even dead. And that is untenable.

There are two other men hovering in the store, and I consider them. Will one of them call? Or intervene, maybe? No, I think. Of course they won’t. No one calls or intervenes. That was the lesson of Kitty Genovese, the Queens woman murdered before her neighbors’ eyes in 1964. Dan told me about that one, in a criminal law class he used to teach at Wykeham. The fact that this has even crossed my mind gives me pause. I must do something about this shouting match, I decide. As soon as possible. Before things get out of hand. And I know what this something should be.

But first, I must select a cheapo frame from this lovely selection over here by the mechanical pencils.

“YOU FUCKING FUCKING PIECE OF FUCKING SHIT! YOU PIECE OF SHIT!”

There. Poy-fect. Frame selection complete. And now, on to my civic and Christian duty.

I shuffle over toward the cleaning-fluid aisle. There I have a clear view of the front of the shop, where Mr. Fucking Shit Pieces is still maxing out his vocabulary at the intractable young man, who is now standing at the door and hurling obscenities back. They are inching closer to each other. The tension and volume are ramping up. It’s time for New Amy’s Mouth to make its move. I poke my head out.

HEY, MAN! JUST LEAVE!

This is me. I yell this at the non-budging customer.

JUST GET OUT OF HERE, OK?! GET OUT OF HERE!!

He looks over, temporarily thrown by this unexpected intrusion from an outside presence, especially an outside female presence pushing fifty in the household products aisle. Mr. Fucking Shit Pieces, ignoring me, continues his rant. My Loud Mouth screams right through him.

WALK AWAY! IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO’S RIGHT AT THIS POINT! DO US ALL A FAVOR, MAN! GO!

The customer stares. This is the second time I’ve referred to him as “Man.” I idly wonder why. (Mouth? Hello, can you hear me, Mouth? What motivates you?) Maybe I’m reliving all those hours logged watching Room 222 as a child.

GO! GO! I repeat, and this time, I make a shoo-shooing motion with my hands, which, like the limb of the pothead teen, have suddenly turned as autonomous as my Mouth.

“FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT,” opines the proprietor. But the piece of shit ain’t moving.

Things are getting serious, I think. It’s time for my deathblow. My coup de grâce. My clincher. New Amy and Her Sovereign Mouth again spring into action.

GOD LOVES YOU!!!

I shout this. And for a moment, Mr. Fucking Shit Pieces stops his harangue.

The young man gives me a wide smile, bewildered and off his guard. He can’t believe what he just heard. I can’t believe that I just said it. (Are you serious, Mouth?) For a second or two, our shared disbelief unites us across the dollar store aisle. Apparently, no one expects a woman of a certain age to start proselytizing in the midst of a quickly escalating urban fracas. Especially the woman. Even if she’s a widow. And once considered joining a convent. And stopped shaving her legs for a while. Even then.

NOW GET OUT OF HERE, MAN!! the Mouth yells one last time, wedging in one last “Man” and a few more shooing motions. Wonder of wonders, he takes my advice and leaves.

Clutching my cheap plastic frame, I emerge from my spot beside the bleach and glass cleaner. Mr. Fucking Shit Pieces rings me up at the counter, venting.

“He was so rude! And he told me I was rude! But he was rude! He opened the bag of chips before I handed him his change!”

Inwardly I say: Waiiiiit a second. This about potato chips? Are you serious, Mr. Fucking Shit Pieces??

Outwardly I say: Hunh.

“So rude,” he says again. To illustrate the point, he picks up the criminal bag of chips—which the young man left behind in the kerfuffle.

But guess what, my people! It isn’t even a bag of chips! It’s a bag of bugles! Which are gross! And hateful! And definitely not worth dying for! These two dimwits almost came to blows OVER A BAG OF CORN BUGLES!

Mr. Fucking Shit Pieces hands me my change. Gives me a pained grin. Says something about having a nice day.

And you have a peaceful day, I reply.

The Mouth smiles and leaves.

Author’s bio

Amy Biancolli is the author of Figuring Shit Out: Love, Laughter, Suicide, and Survival (Behler Publications), a memoir of life after the death of her husband, writer Christopher D. Ringwald.

Currently an arts reporter and columnist for the Albany Times Union, she previously served as film critic for the Houston Chronicle. Amy is also the author of Fritz Kreisler: Love’s Sorrow, Love’s Joy (1998 Amadeus Press) and House of Holy Fools: A Family Portrait in Six Cracked Parts (2004 Lulu Press), which earned her Albany (NY) Author of the Year. She has three children and lives in Albany.

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I hope you enjoy Writing Lessons. Featuring well-published writers of our favorite genre, each weekly installment takes on one short topic addressing how to write memoir.

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