Dark Night of the Soul's "Whiff Of Death"

I've had two dreams lately about my mother dying - one literally and one figuratively.

The first dream happened in a ranch-style home. The blinds were drawn and I was shepherding my mom around her new home because she couldn't see very well. We'd managed to patch up our relationship and it was going quite well but as I tilted the blinds to let light in, the thought struck me, "Is God just doing this because He's going to take her away and wants me to get closure?" I started weeping then because I knew what was coming.

The next dream took place back in our old log cabin (the first one - in Cosby). My sister and I were upstairs packing. I was telling her about a story idea I'd had, about an Indian mother and daughter. They had moved here to start a fashion/style business and the daughter was very good at it. She was doing well and going above and beyond, but her mother could never let her be and always double-checked behind her. She got her daughter to order a vehicle to transport some fashion for a show but she couldn't bear the thought that her daughter might mess that up, so she went on foot to check on it and the daughter accidentally hit her while backing up.

"You see, it's a metaphor," I explained to my sister, who didn't like the story very much. "She always second-guessed the daughter and came up behind her to check on her work, but in the end it killed her."

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There's a beat in movies called "Dark Night of the Soul" (as explained in the incredibly helpful Save The Cat! book by Blake Snyder). It's headed toward the third act of the movie, when everything has gone wrong. The hero sits and contemplates their failure, sure that they are doomed. Every good film has the 'whiff of death' element, the seeming certainty of the end looming near (even, Blake points out, stories like Elf).

I've been thinking about that a lot as I prepare to write yet another draft of this story I've been working on for the last six years. What is my character's Dark Night of the Soul?

This of course leads me to reflect on my own life. I, on the one hand, know that my story isn't a straight, linear narrative. It can't be. Life isn't cut and dry like that. It has a beginning and an end, but the middle parts are all jumbled up and it's a miracle if people even make sense of a piece of that and figure out how they want to spend part of their lives and who they want to spend it with.

I have had many Dark Nights of the Soul. Most recently, everything in me caved when I got really ill and stayed alone for several days. I finally reached the bottom and thought, "Why am I still here?"

I didn't become a phoenix, reborn out of the ashes. I didn't experience an epiphany. I merely kept breathing.

Life isn't a story (which disappoints me greatly). Life is a wreck. You've got to keep treading or drown. People get tired. People die. They can't keep moving.

I don't know what this means for me or how it will impact how I tell stories.

I'm still muddling through it.

But I am curious about how my brain chose to work through something like this in multiple dreams this week.