CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Judith Shapiro

Rappahannock Review Nonfiction Editors: A lot of your writing involves themes of loss and love, which comes across in the scent imagery of this piece. From the very beginning, you set the scene saying, “I’d awaken in the middle of the night to the smell of cigarettes and coffee.” Do you find that while writing about loss, you tend to use scent imagery subconsciously, or is it something you use intentionally because of that conscious link we have to smell and memory?

Judith Shapiro: Of course there is always some level of intentionality in my writing, but at the start I try to limit any agenda, and be open to whatever comes up. In early drafts that means exploring all that arises, the multitude of feelings, senses, and an unknown, hidden universe that I invite myself to explore. Unbounded imagery, all manner of memories, nothing is off limits. A lot will end up on the cutting room floor, to be swept up, saved for another time and place. In this instance, the memory of the smell of cigarettes and coffee was visceral at the time, remains visceral and alive to this day.

RR: Another thing I particularly enjoyed about this piece is how your relationships with material objects develop to signify your grief. At first, you talk about going to little shops and picking up random trinkets to bring home. You write, “Little things, tiny tokens, not meant to take up too much space in our lives or our hearts.” Later, you talk about how you cherish these small objects, hoping to find hidden secrets within them. Could you explain how this developed and what you hope readers take away from this relationship?

JS: A common notion, a personal directive of sorts, that informs my writing, and in fact, is a measure in all that I read, is make me care. I am keenly aware that I have little control over how any reader will respond to my words, but my hope is that when I expose my own humanity, something in our shared experience will resonate with others. Doing this through objects, yearning to find secrets, any tangible connection to a lost loved one, is not meant to be an intentional device, a trick, or a hook, but my own, authentic experience.

Objects played a large role in both A’s and Helen’s lives. Long before Helen got sick, when death was on a far-off horizon, she started marking objects around the house for who would get them after she died. Pick up a lamp and turn it over; there’d be a name on a tiny piece of yellow paper taped to the bottom. It was weird, it was gruesome, it was funny. And A collected old stuff, never met a thrift store she didn’t like. Heirlooms from her own life, and odd items she treasured from the lives of strangers, lived on in her home.

When I purchase the gifts in this piece, the description of each tender one is what moves me. I could simply have said that I bought old ashtrays, but picturing them specifically, now that’s where the feeling lives for me.

RR: In this piece, we see you transform seemingly ordinary moments into ones of immense emotional depth and intimacy. What literary devices did you lean on while writing intimacy into mundane moments?

JS: I love the ordinary, the mundane. In the same sense that I appreciate ordinary objects as evidenced by the specific gifts, our lives are made up of these ordinary moments—bending over to tie our shoes, patting the dog on the head, looking out the window. The big moments, highs and lows, calamities and times of extraordinary joy and awe, are the outliers. Even though they may loom largest, can be pivotal and have lasting effects, the ordinary, when noticed and valued, contain emotional depth.

I appreciate literary devices in others’ writing, and I particularly delight in adept use of metaphor and simile. In my own writing, attention to small details and specificity are what interest me, and I hope to inform the reader’s experience. The writer, Natalie Goldberg, would say we don’t picnic under a tree, we sit under a maple; it’s not a big flower in the window, it’s a gardenia. Attention to detail is the device.

RR: A portion of this piece ponders and delves into hypothetical/rhetorical questions. You say, “Did they warn us it could kill you? Did they give us odds? Did we weigh them—3 percent, 10 percent, 20 percent, of what? Would we have believed them anyhow? What choice did we have?” In your opinion, how do these questions help to establish this overall theme of loss, and in which ways does it connect to the need to seek out secrets?

JS: I think there is a real art to effectively utilizing questions in literary prose to convey other, complex emotions. I rarely use questions in my own writing, more comfortable overtly expressing the actual issue, what it’s about, rather than covertly circling it. In this case, I felt this string of unanswered questions served to represent how frantic we were. Desperate, in retrospect, to find answers; questions representing the difficult, and often futile options those with terminal illness face. I hoped they would land. My list of questions, meaningful or perhaps meaningless percentages, what ifs, and choices, were not actually about saving her life, as it was a life that ultimately could not be saved. We wanted odds. We wanted right choices, absolutes, guaranteed solutions we could count on, all of which were clearly unattainable.

RR: Do you think forming questions is an important part of the grieving process? If you had to choose, which question out of all the ones you listed is most important to the overall piece or to you personally? Are there questions you still wonder about?

JS: For me, there are always questions and what-ifs that border on magical thinking, as if one could turn back time and change the course of events. Yet in the finality of death, there is no turning back, irrespective of the choices, conscious and unconscious, made along the way. The questions in this piece, in addition to evidencing how frantic we can be, are meant to overtly point to our lack of control. Two questions that stand out to me. The first—and quote; “Did they warn us it could kill you?” I will always wonder, did they? And the second, “What choice did we have?” answers itself. We had none. To quote from my own essay, What Happens, “We’re all essentially dying once we’re born, death always on the horizon, but for some more imminent than others.”

RR: In this piece, you show two primary examples of death and others’ reactions to it. The two deaths serve an important part in the essay. Did you intentionally try to establish the differences in each of the deaths? If so, what led you to make that choice? Would you say that the two deaths serve as parallels or foils for each other?

JS: The two deaths are a mother and a daughter, both experienced from my perspective, and theirs as I see them. The first, A’s mother, however temporarily, could be saved. A, her daughter, could not. Implicit in the comparison is that in A’s death, there was no reprieve, no time for a few precious months together. In my professional experience managing hospice years ago, death was a daily presence, and patients and their families who arrived as strangers often became close friends. Some died with loved ones by their sidekeeping a twenty-four-hour vigil, adult daughters, sisters, taking turns in bed with their mom. Others with loved ones standing at a distance on the other side of the room, or families on the other side of the country, imagine a false vision of hospice workers holding hands. No two deaths are alike any more than any two lives are the same.

RR: What is one misconception about grief that you try to address in this piece or in your other pieces about love and loss?

JS: I am fortunate to publish work that allows me to explore my own grief around the loss of many loved ones. I feel as though grief can be like a creature that inhabits us. One that we cannot rein in, control, or turn off. Yes, it lessens over time, changes, recedes into the distance, but it never fully goes away. It becomes part of us. Grief can emerge unexpectedly, days, weeks, years later, in a whiff of smoke, the sound of a footstep, the sight of a dandelion poof floating by.