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When Death Brought Me to My Knees

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Posted 07-19-2011 at 10:48 AM by Drew Keaton
Updated 07-19-2011 at 10:52 AM by Drew Keaton (addition)

This is a brilliant blog from one of my favorite authors... I needed to share this...


When Death Brought Me to My Knees, and How a Moment of Synchronicity with Dave Navarro Helped Me Up Again

Posted by B.E.Scully


The first time that death stepped forward and introduced itself on a first-name basis, it delivered a follow-through that knocked me to my knees and left me struggling for every breath. It had come quick, with a phone call on an otherwise ordinary afternoon—my father had suffered a massive heart-attack, and just-like-that my world would never be the same.

He was cremated with no funeral services and no grave; he had wanted to go out of this world the same way that he had lived in it—fast and furious and without ceremony. My family spread his ashes in a sacred place in Sedona, Arizona, but in the weeks following his death, the lack of a gravestone felt like a loss. When the dead still seemed more alive to me than the living, I needed to be in a place for and about them.

For no reason but proximity, I ended up at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, in West Los Angeles. When I encountered the first cluster of tourists snapping pictures of the final resting places of the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin, and Rodney Dangerfield, I almost turned around and left. But something pushed me passed the crowds into the quieter sections of the cemetery. I was wandering around, not looking for any particular grave site, when the bronze-colored plaque caught my eye:

CONNIE HOPKINS NAVARRO
1941-1983
WE ALL LOVED YOU

I paused and knelt down at the grave site. I had been a fan of Dave Navarro for many years, and I remembered reading about how his mother and her friend Susan Jory had been murdered by a jealous ex-boyfriend, who years later was arrested after being featured on America's Most Wanted, and then convicted and sentenced to death in 1994. I thought about Dave Navarro’s art and music, his struggles against the edge of the abyss that always tempts you to take one step too many over the line…about the kind of loss that breaks you, and leaves something forever broken inside…but how that same loss can also help to restore you--how that same broken something means that you will never love any less.

I stood up and walked out of the cemetery, but this time I didn’t notice the tourists. I was thinking of the kind of person who survives Death’s hardest punches, who has looked into the abyss and seen it look back…about what that kind of a person must struggle against, and how he or she could find a way to navigate the spaces between the abyss and more solid ground. And years later, when I was ready to work it all out through words, all of this returned to me in the character of Elle Bramasol, the protagonist of my book Verland: The Transformation, who also must navigate the spaces in-between, and who, like Dave Navarro, ultimately finds the pathway forward.

For more musing... here is the full blog...
http://bescully.blogspot.com/
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  1. Old Comment
    Thank you for the amazing read, it is really informative and interesting.


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