Elizabeth Stone
SOMETIMES A REVISION REALLY IS A RE-VISION 

When a former student died of AIDS and left me his diaries, I couldn’t unearth the real story I needed to tell—until I began wondering why my long-dead grandmother made a lengthy appearance and why my elderly mother kept popping up in my first draft.

Granted, much revision is about word choices and graceful sentences, but sometimes a revision really is a RE-vision—a new vision yielding a new story, often retaining the same people, anecdotes, narrative elements, and even original timeline. And RE-vision, rather than revision, was what my editor was asking of me after reading the first draft of my memoir tentatively titled A Boy I Once Knew: The Story of a Teacher and Her Student.

The “boy” was Vincent who, at fourteen, had been in my ninth grade English class at a Brooklyn high school when I was a young new teacher. At 40, eight years after his AIDS diagnosis, Vincent died in San Francisco, and in his will left me all ten years of his diaries. The first volume began as a travel diary in September 1984, and the last ended on February 9, 1995, the day before his death.

Stalin once said that a million deaths is a statistic, but a single death is a tragedy. My idea was to read Vincent’s diaries and write about his life in San Francisco during the years when the city was the AIDS epicenter. The book would also include his co-worker friends in an insurance firm, and his dwindling group of gay friends—especially Ronny who died early on, in 1985, and Eddy Cavello, who died almost 10 years later when Vincent himself was quite ill. The narrative would have two timelines, and I would then toggle between them: one was Vincent’s diary entries, year by year by year, from 1984-1995, with flashbacks to my own life at the time. The other timeline would follow my two-year experience reading his diaries.

Vincent was a faithful diarist, fully chronicling his living and his dying. When he arrived at the hospital knowing he would likely never go home again, he took his 1995 diary along. On February 9, he dictated a letter to be included with his diaries, asking me to write about him. A friend transcribed it and placed it atop the volumes which arrived in a carton six weeks later.

After reading my manuscript, my editor said, “I see Vincent’s story, but where are you? I don’t see your story about his story. What compelled you? Put the manuscript away for a while,” she advised. “You’re so close to it that you can’t see it.”

Her hunch was that my story was already there. “Pay attention to what seem to be tangents,” she said. “That’s you, trying to get your attention.” In parting, she suggested I reconsider the subtitle—The Story of a Teacher and Her Student. She thought it was too vague and might make people think Vincent and I were having an affair. “When you find your story, you’ll find your subtitle.”

I’ll spare taking you on my full discovery route. Instead, I’ll tell you first the tangents in the draft that led me to find my story; next, a change in me prompted by Vincent that I couldn’t have planned and hadn’t recognized. I’ll give you a sense of what I added, which was less than you might suspect.

In the end, on the book jacket, my editor summarized the story I had unearthed this way: “Vincent forces [Stone] to examine her life as well as his. He challenges her feelings and fears about death. And in doing so, she becomes the student, and Vincent the teacher. He proves to her that relationships between two people can deepen even after one of them is gone.”

***

The first tangent was about my grandmother who had died more than thirty years earlier, though what initially brought her to my mind was a coincidence: she and Vincent both died on February 10.  Otherwise, there was no connection. For reasons I didn’t understand at the time, I wrote half a dozen pages about my grandmother’s death, and my experience at her wake, my first: my grandmother looking startlingly alien in a blue dress she never would have chosen, with a lipstick color she never would have worn.

“At night,” I wrote, “I dreamt of her sitting on a bamboo chair, pale, expressionless and unmoving, neither alive nor dead.” Only later in revision did I write that I felt “numbstruck” at the wake, and for a long time after: “Without the right vivid images, I could not find the feelings that went with them.” In fact, it felt like a double loss—the loss of both my grandmother and my feelings for her.

The second tangent involved my elderly mother, then living on her own in Brooklyn. She made a remarkable number of appearances on center stage, although she too had no role in Vincent’s story. Two of the most salient references were to my mother as a diary-keeper. As a teenager, I had found in our basement a diary she’d written when she was a teenager. After I found it, she told me she’d burned it.

I also mentioned how, during a visit to her house decades later, I saw that she had a diary kept in reach on the kitchen counter. She let me leaf through it, telling me it was less about her inner thoughts than to bolster her memory. I was already worried about her, fearing her further deterioration, but that didn’t seem part of Vincent’s story, so I didn’t include it. Except that of course, unconsciously, I had twice presented her as a diary-keeper with me as a reader, tacitly establishing her as a parallel to Vincent.

In reading what I’d written about my mother and my grandmother, I realized my first draft tangents weren’t tangents at all. I’d never put it into words before, but in my revision I did: I knew my mother would die sooner rather than later, and when she did, I was afraid I would once again go numb and suffer a double loss as I had with my grandmother.

I was initially surprised that my editor had not found Vincent’s life as compelling as I had, but as I revised, I understood why. What drew me was that Vincent’s diaries were stories of a community steeped in grief, a clotted and stymied grief. Would I find an answer here to a question I hadn’t known I was asking? A chance to learn about how to grieve? I wondered if a genuine passage through grief might yield a more durable—and living—connection to my grandmother, and, in the future, to my mother.

I had noticed without comment that when Ronny was ill, Vincent tried to do the right thing, but he didn’t know how to feel the right thing. His visits to Ronny in hospice were short or postponed, and after Ronny’s death Vincent wrote that he hadn’t cried, characterized the memorial as “nice,” and then immersed himself in wine and soap operas. In Vincent’s dreams, his connection to Ronny remained elusive—he was somewhere in the background, not where Vincent could connect with him. In the revision, I wrote “Vincent was as inept at grieving a I was.”

Ten years later, when Vincent’s friend, Eddy Cavello, was dying, Vincent had changed! Far from being estranged, he was attentive and involved, even battling hospital bureaucracy to arrange for what would be Eddy’s final joyride including lunch at Eddy’s favorite restaurant. When Eddy died, Vincent lit a candle, and sent a few photos—of Eddy in good health—to Eddy’s family. In my first draft, because Ronny’s and Eddy’s deaths were ten years apart, I hadn’t thought to compare Vincent’s reactions.

But I had noticed. If I had assumed anything, it was that with Vincent increasingly ill, he had accepted his own mortality, and was treating Eddy the way he hoped he would one day be treated. “Soon all I will be is a photograph,” he had written in thinking about the photos he’d sent to Eddy’s father. I understood that somehow Vincent was no longer numb and had become able to grieve.

This insight sent me off on a further search, which I later included, about how people in my own life had mourned and what they got in return. I thought of restorative memorial services I’d attended; through stories, the dead were once again made living and whole for the mourners. I spoke with friends about how they were keeping their dead alive within them. That also became a section I would add to the book.

A friend whose mother had died suddenly said she’d never lost her mother at all. “I hang clothes on the line exactly the way my mother did, and every time I do, I think of her. She’s still with me. I still have conversations with her every day.”

In the final version of the memoir, I included a line I’d heard in a documentary about the LA Coroner’s Office. “There’s an old saying,” said an office employee. “You never lose the one you love, if you love the one you lose.”

I had loved my grandmother, and I loved my mother, too. Absence of feeling wasn’t my problem, but finding it was. Yet somehow Vincent had found that part of himself which allowed him to maintain an emotional connection to those who were dead. Watching him navigate the death of close friends, I realized that though people die, relationships need not, and it was consoling to know that there were strategies that could help.

A fourth element in the step-by-step re-vision process emerged: thanks to Vincent, it turned out that I’d actually found the muscle connecting me to the dead and had used it without recognizing it or naming it. I had seen Vincent only once since he was 14, so for no reason I could explain, I had decided to get to know this dead man I’d never met, solely from his diaries, without any information from his family or friends.

Halfway through the revised manuscript, after a powerful dream about Vincent, I wrote: “Something was happening here… When people I knew died, I had been unable to resurrect them internally… But now a dead man I had never really known had quickened in me—no wooden Pinocchio, and not even the fourteen-year-old I had had known, but someone else, someone new, a real live man.”

A page or two later, referring to the visit where I found my mother’s second diary in her kitchen, I wrote, “Together Vincent and my mother, one gone and the other going, were enabling me to think about memory freshly….”

As my editor had said, when I found my story, I would find my new subtitle: What a Teacher Learned from Her Student.

Only a few details remain to be added. During the time I was revising, my mother broke her hip, and though she survived, she returned home frail. When I shared the revised manuscript with her, she said she was happy that she, too, was being made immortal, and was delighted when she learned that Algonquin would be publishing my book.

My mother did not live to see the book published, but Vincent had taught me a thing or two about mourning. At my mother’s memorial service, I spoke and persuaded family members to read excerpts from her favorite poems. My connection to her continues, and now and then I open her last diary to read a page or two or take one of her letters out of its envelope.

As a last word on craft, I think it’s useful to give readers guidance, so before I submitted my revised manuscript, I divided the book into sections separated by epigraphs that spelled out the stages in my journey. Many were from the brilliant poetry collection The Grove by Rachel Hadas. The first began, “The dead are flat. They stand / Impassively in rows like dominoes / Until they lean and one by one, they fall.” Maybe you can anticipate the one that preceded the section where I realized Vincent had come alive for me? It read in part, “You might expect the dead to shrink to two dimensions, / but no, they thicken, put on bulk and plumpness….”

Elizabeth Stone teaches literature and non-fiction writing, especially memoir, at Fordham University. She is the author of four books including A Boy I Once Knew, (Algonquin Books, 2002). To learn more, visit her website.