“And then there’s Helen Knightly, the 49-year-old narrator of Alice Sebold’s new novel ‘The Almost Moon,’ who has been caring for her difficult, 88-year-old mother seemingly forever. Then she stops. Abruptly.

‘When all is said and done,’ the novel begins, ‘killing my mother came easily. Dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it. My mother’s core was rotten like the brackish water at the bottom of a weeks-old vase of flowers.'”

Here’s an article in the Times about how American writers, and their audience, are aging. And the characters and themes of fiction are aging with them. And the size of typeface as well. I picked that section of it to quote, just because it stood out. I mean, don’t you wish you’d written that? Siebold, you may remember, is the author of The Lovely Bones. [Link.]

It’s interesting. I’ve had older characters and themes in my stuff for years. For example, my vignette Winter Angel is about an older couple. The novel I’m writing is framed by the decline and death of the progtagonists’ grandfather. And the vignette I’m writing now is about the end of life as well. But it’s not necessarily because of my age. I’m 46.

It’s not because of the age of my possible eventual readers that I write about these things. Though I suppose such themes presuppose a sensitivity to the long terms of human life and the big picture; a sensitivity that informs my need to write such stuff in the first place.

Aging and dying are the common ground and denominator that we all share, if we don’t die young. We are all, if we are self-aware, spelunkers of the same dark, dank cave; thus, writers and poets have a duty to envision it, in an effort to light the way. That, in my opinion, is the real job of a creative writer – of any artist: to try to make sense of and express universal experience.

I disagree with Siebold’s premise that “dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it.” I have some sad experience here, and I would say that dementia unmasks only pain. It creates a new mask of suffering, bearing little resemblance to the wearer. No one is at fault.

Maybe life is a circus parade, mon ami. As it moves through town, we take turns as jugglers, acrobats, soothsayers, lion tamers, and the guys with the push brooms that follow behind. Some people just insist on playing the ringmaster most of the time. I am frequently the indolent pachyderm of prodigious memory, sometimes the trainer of the dog and pony show. Occasionally, the yapping terrier with harness and bells.

Regardless of the part you play, the parade is heading to the same place for everyone: A dusty plot of hard ground, trampled weeds and blown dust, on the edge of town. And it’s the poet and writer’s job to scramble to the top of the tallest wagon and try to scout the road ahead.