Life Is For Living

“How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it.” ~ Judy Blume

Tiger eye stones are said to symbolize increased personal power and ambition. For years I’ve kept one on my dresser and in my pocket during tough times when I feel I need a reminder of my strength. 

I read Judy Blume’s “Tiger Eyes” when I was in middle school, shortly after my parents divorced and my family lived through several consecutive traumatic events, including the sudden death of my mother’s father and my brother’s near-fatal aneurysm. Blume’s writing was a lifeline, a guide not only for adolescence and the American way of life (she is a Jersey girl after all), but for navigating the trials I once thought were unique to my family.

The book is about a young girl named Davey who is grieving the murder of her father who was shot while working at their family-owned 7-eleven store in Atlantic City, NJ. After Davey begins experiencing panic attacks, her family temporarily relocates to New Mexico to navigate the loss. Through a circuit of new relationships she begins to heal and find a new way of living. 

Blume’s books (which are gaining new attention in light of a recent documentary and film adaptation) are well known for their unflinching exploration of adolescent internal dialogue and sexuality, but it is striking to me that “Tiger Eyes” was the only book she admits to having self-censored. She says she removed a portion where Davey masturbates while thinking of an older boy named Wolf she meets in New Mexico. She introduced herself to him as Tiger, a first step in claiming her new identity. Perhaps the vulnerability of grief canceled out the need for explicit sexuality. The book was intimate enough.

I also read “Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret”” and “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing” and “Blubber,” amongst many more, but it is “Tiger Eyes” I will always have close to my heart. The sexuality of her other books was less shocking to me than an author admitting that many families silently suffer trauma and dysfunction, and the idea that it’s OK, healthy even, to put it out in the open. The book was one of the first I’d ever read where a young person lived through family drama that felt reminiscent of my own. My father hadn’t died, but I felt I had lost him. My family didn’t relocate to the desert, but I felt the miles that separated us more acutely than ever. 

I even named my first cat after the book title. Tiger Eyes was a swirl of amber, brown and white, like the stone and similar to my hazel eyes when the light hits a certain way. Tiger Eyes is me. When my mother’s partner was murdered just as I was set to enter 10th grade, the same age as the fictional Davey, I returned to the book to try and make sense of the situation. But I could no longer see myself in the character. I now realize she could no longer stand in as a surrogate, I had to go through my own experience of loss.

There are few stories I consume more than ones about trauma and family dysfunction. After Oscar died I read three books about sibling loss and grief. It was the only way I knew how to feel part of, not separate, from everyone else’s experiences. (This may be part of my interest in the show “Succession”, its portrayal of a complicated and unhealthy family and its ambiguous and traumatic grief. The siblings! My god, so much to unpack.) The stories help me feel less alone. If someone could imagine these scenarios in their writing then they must exist out there in some form. 

“Tiger Eyes'' was the first of Blume’s books to make it to the screen, directed by her son. When it came out in 2012, she said she suddenly realized that in telling the story of Davey she had actually been telling the story of losing her own father. Through fiction she was able to access those feelings as a sort of catharsis, and in doing so help others gong through similar pain. It was only in revisiting the story more than 30 years later that she realized it. 

As a writer today I feel called to write about my own difficult experiences, even the death of my mother’s partner in 1989, which I feared sharing more broadly because of shame and concerns about hurting anyone further. The shame was in admitting that yet another traumatic event had occurred for my family, that we are too much; the fear that dredging up the memories would be hard to bear. But I’ve learned over the past few years of new hard experiences that we forever carry these stories—in our hearts, our minds and our bodies. Sharing these stories with care and intention can only lead to healing. 

“Life is for the living,” Blume quotes her father as having repeated in her early life. 

Writing is also for the living. In my life, the most profound moments of living have been at the start and end of life—the birth of my many nephews and nieces, the death of so many loved ones—and writing about these moments has been a way for me to try and capture that essence and hold onto it as proof of that astonishment, that pulse of the world. It goes on and it urges me to live on. My hope is that sharing these stories can do the same for others, like Blume did for me.