Writing Our Grief Out

            All sorrows can be borne if they’re put into a story, Isak Dinesen said. Writing about our grief unties its knots, and unhooks death’s claws from our flesh. 

 

            Start a writing routine. Every day, sit down at the same time, and write about your grief. Record all of your thoughts, feelings, memories, and questions. Write about everything that seems connected until you can’t think of anything else to say. If something else shows up later, make a note to explore it. Writing helps, as does walking in nature and having a community of support.

 

            Writing helped me get me through each day after my wife Evelyn died, because the one person I knew who could help me with grief was gone. I wasn’t good at dealing with emotions, and because my friends were also young, they didn’t know how to help. So, every evening before bed, I sat down and detailed what grief had done that day. I wanted to understand what was going on, and I needed to see signs that I was making progress.

 

            If you can’t think of another place to start, visualize a rock in the middle of your cascading river of grief, and focus on that. What is that rock for you today? Then write. Don’t think about what you’re writing. Turn your inner editor off. No one will ever read your words, unless you choose to share with them. If some phrase or thought or image keeps showing up on the page, it’s probably something that you need to pay attention to. Reflect on that, and let your thoughts and feelings deepen.

 

            By writing about our grief, we face up to the trauma of death and deal with its attendant side issues. Finding the right words helps us identify our feelings, puts sorrow into context, and opens us to insights. Until we face grief, it will continue to rumble under our surface like a thousand tiny earthquakes that grow stronger. As the movement of grief’s tectonic plates continue to push against each other, the fault lines give way, pent-up tensions release, and emotions go flying like dinner plates against the walls.

 

            Writing about our grief is therapeutic.

 

            If we don’t deal with grief, we will be in danger of closing our emotions down, putting barriers around us, and not letting anyone get close. Turning away from love is a steep price to pay. By writing, we take grief out of our bodies and place it on paper where it can live instead of it moping around inside us where it keeps jabbing us with spears and knocking over the furniture.

 

            Writing allows us to step back from sorrow for a moment and breathe. It opens space up for something new to happen. By being creative with grief, we take back control of our narrative from death, and we move from being victims to being survivors.

 

            We can take the raw material of grief and be creative by writing stories, essays and poems, or by painting, composing music, and making pottery. We become artists of grief, interpreting its turmoil in physical ways that others can see and understand. By expressing the human reality of our brokenness, we help others face their own.

 

            Grief brings you a story. Write it as well as you can. Because, later on. you will want to look back on this time of sorrow that brought you to your knees, and remember how you found the courage and strength to go on.