I was talking with classmates in the professional course I’m taking through the Creative Grief Studio, telling them about the book I wrote about my sister. She died in 2019 at the age of 58, from lung cancer that wasn’t detected early enough and had spread to her bones. I had known she was not well for nearly a year before her diagnosis, and though I tried to believe the doctors when they said it wasn’t serious, I lived with anxiety crouching at the back of my mind, ready to spring in all its dark glory.
(Sisters—I’m in the sunglasses)
When she was diagnosed, nine months before she died, all I could do was write, and everything I wrote was about her. I wrote poems and I tried to write creative nonfiction pieces, but those pieces often got to about 500 words and then just—stopped. I couldn’t write full-length essays because the grief was just so exhausting. As I lived with my anticipatory grief and then acute grief and then ongoing grief—which, of course, is still with me—I became a set of wind chimes with broken strings. I could still make music, but it was different, taking more effort to call forth those notes.
I’m a writer and I have writer friends who ask each other what we’re working on now, encouraging each other to get our voices out into the world. Writing is hard no matter your topic, and publishing is harder, and promoting your published books or poems is the hardest of all. And most of my writer friends are women, who face the same sexism in our low-money literary field as women do in business or medicine or advertising or any other field (ok, maybe not as intensely as women in the hard sciences…). It is mostly unconscious sexism, and some of it is internalized, but it does affect us from idea to book. Anyway, those friends asked me long enough what I was working on that I finally said, “A book about my sister.”
It took yet another writer friend—yes, another woman—to help me see that my unfinished bits and pieces could work together as a sort of collage. Isn’t the experience of grief fragmented and unfinished by its very nature? So I just kept going, writing what I could, sometimes crying, sometimes creating little nature altars in my back yard from feathers and leaves and stones, always knowing that no matter what I wrote, it could not capture everything about the person my sister was to me.
Just over three years after her death, I was able to put together all these pieces into a manuscript that’s sort of a memoir, sort of a collection of flash essays, sort of a collage creative nonfiction book. I turned the poems into prose by removing the line breaks because I know writers with graduate degrees in creative writing (fiction) who still don’t understand line breaks and feel closer to those readers who were told in high school that every poem has a deeper meaning and have avoided poetry ever since. The physical layout itself makes some readers feel alienated from the content, and I don’t want to shut the door on anyone.
My classmates and I agreed that, while we wanted to see our experiences in other people’s words when we were first grieving, none of us (readers all) could face a 250+ page memoir. We could, however, read a couple of pages at a time. So maybe the approach that helped me as a writer was one that could help readers. Grief can be so overwhelming, morphing from an alligator with snapping jaws to a couch-sized baby that cries constantly to a squishy furry monster that slowly crushes you into your bed. It’s a whole job in and of itself. Maybe the kind of creating—and reading—that provides meaning but doesn’t overwhelm can be just right.
So if you’re dealing with grief, whether the loss is a pre-chronic-illness body or a beloved pet or the environment or a person or a pet or a career or a marriage, consider doing a bit of writing. Don’t ask yourself to commit to pages and pages. Let your friends support you, whether you decide to show them your writing or not. I believe creating art is how we understand ourselves, our lives, and the world; it is a bit of magic we have as humans, magic that transforms as well as expresses. I plan to offer writing workshops focusing on grief and loss in the new year, and I hope you’ll consider working with me, whether or not you consider yourself a “writer.” Don’t worry; we’ll start small.