Mark Liebenow - Grief (formerly Widowers Grief)
We need the words. How are we going to talk about grief without the words?
It’s difficult to talk about grief when the language we know comes from the back of a cereal box. We stumble around, find a few words that seem to fit, find other words that fit better, and our vocabulary begins to expand.
We tell our story of grief over and over because we want to understand this thing that has taken our loved one away and rerouted our lives. As we live through the months and years, new insights and details we've forgotten show up, so we revise our story and tell it again.
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.
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.
Poetry and dying go together because when we’re facing the end of our life, our senses sharpen and our ocean of words distill into a surging river of images and metaphors.
Many of us would not want to take time away from living our last months to sit at a desk and deliberate over the right words to describe our dying. We would prefer to do some of the remaining items on our bucket list, or simply to enjoy each day free of everyone’s expectations.
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.
