Dear Friends,
When I was reading my poems at a poetry reading event, early on in my grief journey, a woman asked during the Q & A, “Does it get better?”
She had recently lost her twenty-three-year-old son to a drug overdose.
“Do you ever feel like writing poems about your dead son just keeps dredging up the loss and pain? Do you write poems about getting through it?”
The event also featured two other women who had also lost children. We had each given a brief introduction about our loss and how writing had helped us heal. Then we read our poems in a round-robin style.
I remember looking around the church at unfamiliar faces, heads leaning in, awaiting my answer, as if I were a minister. The woman wore no make-up, and a face-baring ponytail, naked to stares, to the glare of a reality she never imagined. The same look of pain on her face that I saw on mine in the mirror, soon after Riley’s death.
It startled me the first time—the cemented, shell-shocked expression. She reminded me of the way I felt those first months—the desperation to pull myself out of a vortex, like the way I felt giving birth, looking for something to hold onto, something to save me from suffering I never imagined.
I wonder if at the time, I could already see dimly a future version of me overlaying my face in the mirror back then, a ghost of who I would be—and the ghost of who I was—tandem flickering images, while the present me felt like a burnt-out filament trapped in glass.
I answered that it does get better. That writing poetry had saved me and mumbled some other words that probably didn’t make sense. I wanted to dive into the turbulent waters of her grief and save her. I didn’t want her to experience the pain I have endured.
One of the poets whose son died from cancer blurted, “No.” The other poet whose son died by suicide replied, “No, but it gets different.”
Her question stayed with me. On the drive home from the reading with my friend, Alexis, one of the women who had read with me, we talked about it. I met Alexis in Jack Grapes’ writing class. She was there when I returned to class and told the group that Riley had died. She shared the loss of her son, Josh, to a rare cancer. She was the first person I met after Riley died who had also lost a child. We went to lunch. And over time, became close.
We talked about how it was such a loaded question. How saying, yes, may infer that you are over it, and have recovered. We talked about how the grief is always there, like the location of a past accident you drive by daily, but you learn to manage it. You learn to stop yourself, as she says, from going to that bad neighborhood in your brain.
I didn’t answer the woman’s other questions at the time. “Do you ever feel like writing poems about your dead son just keeps dredging up the loss and pain? Do you write poems about getting through it?”
What I would tell her now, all these years later, is that writing poems about my dead son doesn’t resurface the loss and pain. It shines light on him and his beautiful life. I write poems to get through it.
|
|
Journal Prompts
#1 Think of a loss you experienced years ago. This could be the loss of a person or another type of loss like the loss of a pet or the end of a relationship. Is there a piece of dialogue that has stayed with you from this loss? I remember when my first boyfriend broke up with me, he said, “Nothing lasts forever.” Or are there objects or images you remember when you think of this loss? I remember the touch tone phone on my bed, white bedspread and my tanned legs while he ended it with me on the phone. Write about your moment of loss using the dialogue and/or images.
#2 How would you answer the woman’s question, “Does it get better?” Write about how you would respond if asked this question about your grief. Maybe you’ve been asked this question or a variation of it before, and it was triggering. How did you respond? Do you wish you had responded differently? How?
#3 Can you think of a simile to describe your grief like the one my friend and I discussed...the grief is always there, like the location of a past accident you drive by daily, but you learn to stop yourself from going to that bad neighborhood in your brain. Write about your grief as this other thing. What are some characteristics of it? Write about how you manage and navigate your way through it. Or maybe how you don’t. Maybe you walk aimlessly through that bad neighborhood.
|
Shared Grief Journal is a place to heal and connect authentically through the act of writing and reading.
|
|
|
Warmly,
Chanel
