A Living Ghost

Death of the Author is supposed to refer to how the author has no say how the readers take their story and grow with it. The author cannot go back and say, “Well, I meant X in this case!” Most of the time, I’m a fan of this approach. A story is only half-finished when the author gives it to their readers. Then it’s up to the reader to take those words and shape them around their life and carry it along.

But when an author actually dies, and their unpublished work remains in the mind of a friend, what then? In this case, I have the reverse: I have her intention, her thoughts, her passions and what she meant to say before she died, but not all of her words. Five hundred thousand words over four years of writing together, and we didn’t finish. At the time, we didn’t really anticipate ever finishing the story. We talked about it once—once—in a conversation that is gone to wherever scraps of forum messages go on dead sites from deleted accounts.

This damn story rears its head every year at the same time. Now, actually. In November, it prods a bit, reminding me that I could continue it for a painful National Novel Writing Month. In January it starts to yell if I don’t let elements of that story leak into anything else.

March—Saint Patrick’s Day, specifically—it drowns everything else out. In the most ironic and poetic meeting of reality and fiction, it was my friend’s favorite holiday, the last setting in which our story took place, and the day she died. The last scene we wrote together took place at a Saint Patrick’s Day parade—until we felt the end of the story come, and we both agreed to write an alternate universe to spend more time with the characters. I remember when I proposed the idea in the first place: 2012 (I’d be shocked if it wasn’t around March), walking to class, typing a message on my phone to relay my experiment to her: “What if X happened, instead? We could use this as an optional break-off. Right now, we have your character in a mental state where she could reflect things like that. And we can explore it, she comes to her realization that she prefers her reality to the one being pushed on her, and we resume the scene.” This triggered another couple hundred thousand words—some of, honestly, my best work I’ve ever done. It all roots from the couple hundred thousand other words we wrote together, and it doesn’t look nearly as great standalone, but a special piece of my writing grew from that thought experiment.

And then cancer came. Surgeries and radiation, and not really speaking to her because she lived across the country and was fighting to live, and not to talk to some Internet friend that obsessed over the same romantic tropes she did.

Then March 19th, I got a message from a mutual friend. “Thought you should know… Courtney died on Saint Patrick’s Day.”

Have you ever mourned someone no one in your life had ever met? Someone whose last name you didn’t know for certain until you read the obituary? It’s a strange thing. I don’t think it’s something that can easily be comforted. Like a parasocial relationship when a celebrity dies, but it’s not one-sided. We were friends and had so many memories, but I’m the only one with them, now. And because of things that happened in the past with other people, I have literally no way to reflect on our conversations together—just what we wrote together, the one thing I have dozens of copies of.

Legally, I can’t do anything with the story. The rights are just as much hers as mine.

My drafts? Sure, I’ve re-written every little bit I could to try and get back to what I felt when we were writing together. But no further. I’m not even positive if I’ve ever actually tried.

I have this story and this message in my head that I need to get out. I just don’t really know how or where to put it. Some days I feel like I can just let it be what it is, an unfinished story. Then there are days like today when I’m alone with my thoughts and I feel it scratching at me to come out.

Death of the author, maybe. Death of the story? Not quite.