Myth One: The Biggest Myth About Grief Is That We "Get Over" It

Okay, Day One and I am off to a respectable start: 1700 words. I could have gone on, but found that I wasn't up to writing the blistering scene in which the main character Reggie tears the funeral director a new one for charging what is called a 'convenience fee'. This will not be the last time that she directs her rage (which is both significant and perhaps justifiable) at him. He really doesn't deserve it. he inherited the family business. What he really wanted to be is a race car driver. He looks like Nate from Six Feet Under (see photo).
What I find really shocking about Day One is that nothing really happened in this first part, but my novel is really different this year. So much of it is revealing things that have already happened, getting the subtext and the complicated relationships laid out. Tim O'Sullivan has not even been mentioned, yet, but he will soon... as will the reason why Reggie is particularly pissed at her mother just now.
Here is a brief excerpt.
Reggie looks back at the funeral director, and wonders briefly, what does he make of her? Here she sits, sullen, slumped in her chair, not paying attention to what she should surely be paying attention to. They are here to make the arrangements for her father’s funeral. She should care more about this, she knows, but she is having a hard time summoning the will to care. Not about him, not about him dying, but about the manner in which he will be laid to rest. Reggie, who doesn’t remember her brother’s funeral, knows very well that her father will not be laid to rest in two days time. In fact, she scoffs at the funeral director when he uses the term. Nothing is laid to rest. Reggie knows this, and tells him so. He continues to look mildly alarmed. Her mother sighs softly.
“Mother, can I have a Xanax?” Reggie asks, more to annoy and embarrass her mother than because she wants a sedative, though Reggie is never one to turn her nose up at a good sedative. What is it about our parents that makes us behave so badly? In her other life, the one without a mother in it, Reggie is a respected professional, sought out for advice and direction. A real grown-up, in other words. But in the presence of her mother, she regresses to adolescence, she sulks, she pouts, she says things intended to shock. Not that she ever does. Shock her mother, that is. Armageddon itself would likely just draw another of her mother’s long-suffering sighs.
Her mother looks over at her, back to the funeral director, and if she were a different woman, she probably would have smiled in embarrassment. But she does not smile. She simply says “Regina dear, you know very well that I do not have any Xanax.” Reggie snorts at this, what she knows very well is that her mother’s purse is a fucking pharmacy. But she’ll let her mother have this one. For now.
She looks back at the funeral director, who looks very much as though he wishes that Reggie would take a Xanax, in fact, he looks as though he wouldn’t mind having one himself.