From the first sentences, Tyrese L. Coleman’s essay “How to Mourn” turns a somersault, becomes a Möbius strip, an Escher: “If you read my fiction, you will find a character named Grandma. In real life, she is dead. This is the story of her death.”
A true story, then, about the death of a fictional character. But it is even more complicated. In the sentence that follows, Coleman introduces her “main character—T—,” who began drafting the essay we are reading “the moment she knew Grandma was not long for this earth.”
Fiction, nonfiction, first person, third—the writer breaks the fourth wall, acknowledges the act of writing the story even as it unfolds in detailed, anxious scenes: “Muffled click-clacking shoes on black-flecked white tile, voices hushed, drowned by the roar of insufficient air-conditioning, and surreality, this facility is a prop or a set—fiction. Real life for T feels like fiction, especially in difficult times like this that day.”
It feels like fiction, but of course it is not. “T” is Tyrese, her grandmother has died in a nursing home, and the sensory disconnection Coleman shares—“the sensation of watching yourself from outside your own body, when everything feels unreal, like living in a dream . . . like living in a story”—is also the dissociation of grief.
The underlying story in “How to Mourn” is common enough—a deathbed, a funeral, the ugly complications of family infighting, adults acting irresponsibly, the children bearing the brunt—but the telling is anything but common, anything but typical. This questioning of fiction versus nonfiction might easily become confusing with a less skillful narrator, but Coleman never loses sight of where she is, where she is headed, even as she heads in the most unexpected directions.
“I thought this essay was about the question of why I write, primarily why I deflect emotions by writing instead of feeling them,” she clarifies in the latter part of the piece. “Oftentimes it takes the ability to detach from a situation before I know how I feel about it.”
Coleman’s essay on the essay is an intriguing exploration of craft, of memoir, of innovation and surprise, and of the reciprocal relationship between author and reader: “When we read a story or essay, never do we consider the narrator is speaking to us. Nor do we recognize our participation in the telling of his story because, even as we watch a story or even as we read a story, we imagine it is being told to the character’s unnamed friend, someone other than ourselves. . . . But, when [the narrator] turns directly to the camera, to those watching, and speaks, we are forced to acknowledge the performance. . . . We are watching a show. And we are part of the show. No more hiding.”
I’ll just give the final words to Coleman’s ideal imaginary reader: “Ain’t that some shit.”
