Broken Hallelujah

I'm delighted, and slightly snockered, to share the news that my essay on my mother’s work as an artist and her struggle with dementia, “Broken Hallelujah,” was published by the Chautauqua Literary Journal this month. It also won the journal’s Editor’s Prize and will be nominated for a Pushcart Prize later this year.

Unfortunately, the essay isn't available online. However, you can order a copy of the physical journal at the following link. Specify that you want the 2019 issue: 

https://chq.org/season/literary-arts/readers/literary-journal

Thanks, 

Mark

Being Creative with Grief

After being batted around by grief for a time, many of us want to take this raw energy, and our new clarity about reality, and be creative with it. We want to regain a measure of control over a force that has been tossing us around for months. I don’t play a musical instrument, paint, dance, weave, or create sculptures, but I do write, and I wrote down every memory, image, insight, and story of my life with Evelyn, and shaped some of them into essays and poems.

 

We take the remnants that grief leaves us, and sew them together in a patchwork quilt with the sinews of our heart. 

 

Breaking Point

Sharing our grief is hard, no matter the cause. It could be the death of a parent, spouse, pet, or child. The death of a long-term, committed relationship can be just as devastating.

It’s made more difficult when we are sharing with someone who has never experienced a severe loss. We are trying to describe what’s going on inside, and there is nothing physical that we can hold up to show them. And if neither of us has grieved before, then we don’t know the landscape we are trying to describe. It’s like being dropped in a foreign land and trying to describe it to someone over the phone.