Most every cliché usually carries at least a small amount of fact or truth. Many of them address the human experience which in a way absolves them from having to be right all the time. As my sweetheart Trisha has reminded me on occasion: when it comes to the personal, one size fits one.
And what could be more personal than birth and death. The cliché here is that like bookends, they match. We all go out of this world exactly the way we came in: alone in a room.
Certainly it’s going to be an unfamiliar setting for that front end, leaving luck and circumstance to determine whether your last breaths are taken in a room that knows you well. Asleep in your own bed, if you’re extremely fortunate.
The ideal room to create in is nearly that personal. A room of one’s own, Virginia Woolf called it. A door you can close, whatever tools you need right at hand, one size fits one. Another wonderful writer, Flannery O’Connor, sat squarely in the middle of her room, the desk with her typewriter pushed right up against the back of a large wooden wardrobe. This provided less distraction within her immediate environment and a more secure connection with the fictional world she was trying to illuminate.
Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys started out playing accordion until his family invested in an old upright piano, pushed into a small room within their modest home. If Brian was staring at anything, it would be his hands on all those keys. One room, together with one person. Of course he wrote a love song about them.
