Writing about our grief is like wading into a mosh pit. There’s a lot of jumping and shoving going on, and it’s hard to describe everything we’re experiencing.
Writing in a journal each day helps us figure out what is going on, and keeps us working with grief. Isak Dinesen said that when we can put our trauma on paper, then it can live there instead of inside us.
It’s also important that we share our grief with someone on a regular basis, whether we do this through writing or by talking with a friend or counselor over coffee. It’s hard enough to find the words that express our feelings to ourselves. It’s a different matter to recast our words into what will share our experiences with others. But if they have never experienced grief, it’s like trying to push a spatula through a brick wall.
Most of the deaths we will experience in our life will be ordinary in the eyes of the world. even though we are left devastated. And when we tell our narrative of grief, many of us will do so chronologically, going from the dying to the death and on through grief to where we are now.
Amy Monticello, in her fascinating essay “How to Tell the Story of an Ordinary Death,” tries something different. Her 8000-word essay could be subtitled “How to Write About Writing About Grief.” She tells the story of her father dying of kidney cancer when he was in his 60s, which makes it an ordinary death, but she includes the writing prompts that helped her deepen her story and make it live.
You probably haven’t read many ordinary death memoirs because most of the grief memoirs that get published are about the famous or uncommon deaths because publishers want to sell a lot of books quickly without having to work too hard on the marketing.
Death memoirs by famous people are like headline acts that get all the glitz. They’re thrilling on the outside because the people who are grieving talk about flying here and there around the world, being consoled by famous person X, then famous person Y, eating exotic foods, and taking months off to grieve. In many of them, there often isn’t much practical encouragement or guidance to help the rest of us with our grief. Grief for ordinary people doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We are already struggling with other serious matters, and this new loss threatens to pull us down. My wife Evelyn and I were living from paycheck to paycheck when she died unexpectedly in her 40s.
I treasure the memoirs of uncommon deaths—the stillbirths, children dying of genetic defects, a wife dying in her 20s, a man dying after years of medical training just as he was about to put his skills into practice, of despair and hope, because these are real people who are speaking from the heart. They talk about dreams and yearning, and they open my awareness to the particular edges of their grief. They also remind me of the sobering reality that people die all the time, at all ages, and from a wide variety of causes.
Monticello was taught that the death in any story is the least interesting part, and that it’s what comes before and after that matters. I agree. What I want from a grief memoir is to learn about the life of the person who died so that I know who’s been lost, and I want to know about the life of the writer who is exploring this arena of human experience. I don’t read death books to be entertained. I read for the stories of human interactions, of struggles, of being broken and weary, and somehow finding enough reasons to stand back up and go on.
These are some of the prompts that helped Amy tell her story, and you can use them to tell your story better: find where the story begins, make intrinsic connections, broaden the context, include associative leaps, develop the characters, mention the plot twists, backstory, and speculations, and add in your reflection on the events.
Amy also uses insights from Jacques Derrida to explore how language conveys meaning, and says that our understanding of any event keeps changing because the text (story) is living tissue. As we age, gain perspective, and experience additional deaths, we revisit the deaths in our past and see them in a different light. It’s like holding up a multifaceted crystal and turning it in the light.
She writes about how she felt in the immediacy of her father’s death, and then moves forward and back on her timeline as she continues to process all that his death means in the different aspects of her life. “My father has been dead nine years, but I resurrect him so he can die again and again. Now he has died in a pandemic. When will he die next?”
If you lose a child, every couple of years you will stop and wonder what they would be like now, what they would be doing, how their dreams might have blossomed, and you will grieve their death again.
Back into the mosh pit. Derrida says that the text (story) has no meaning without context, and that it’s the reader who supplies this, not the author, so the text changes with the context of who is interpreting it. Those who have grieved understand the landmarks we write about right away, but others who have never lost anyone hear the spatula tapping on the other side of the wall and wonder what is going on. They may remember a retired uncle who lost a wife after 60 years of marriage and think that his feelings of grief are the same that a young mother feels who has lost a child. They aren’t.
If you want to share your grief writings with others, the challenge is to find the place where understanding in your readers begins, and guide them into understanding more.
You can read Amy’s essay at:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-to-tell-the-story-of-an-ordinary-death
Related Links
Using a daily journal can help you process your grief.
https://widowersgrief.blogspot.com/2021/02/writing-our-grief-out.html
Being creative in your expression of grief.
https://widowersgrief.blogspot.com/2019/06/being-creative-with-grief.html
Writing poetry while dying.
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