For many of us, writing is catharsis: a way to process and release difficult emotions. Few things are as emotional as the loss of a friend, family member, personal hero, or pet so it’s no surprise that we read a lot of posts paying tribute to lost loved ones and trying to make sense of the newly-made holes in our lives. Here are five pieces that have moved us over the last few months.
“The Mess You’ll Leave Behind,” Stop the Silence, Speak the Truth
Parents who lost a son to a heroin overdose wrote this open letter, bluntly detailing their pain in an effort to push other addicts toward rehabilitation:
I can tell you for a fact that your Mom will never be the same. Some things she used to do joyfully she will no longer be able to do because they are too painful. Remember how she used to like to surprise you with special treats she bought at the food store? Well now she can’t go food shopping because everywhere she turns in the store she sees something she remembers you liked to eat. Those gardens she was so proud of in the front lawn. They’re forgotten now. The only garden she cares about is the tiny one around your grave that she tends almost every day.
“Grieving a Child Gone Yet Still Here,” Trail to a Texas Trial
Sometimes, those we grieve are still with us. At Trail to a Texas Trial, Melinda Lancaster writes about the sadness that descends on parents when illness robs a child of their chance at a normal future:
And there you are — left to cradle a living child and grieving for all that was now dead to you. Grief gets easier to bear, except when you see children on a playground climbing up a slide and your child can no longer walk; it’s easier to bear until you are holding your daughter or son in bed cuddling…after a seizure; it’s easier to bear until prom comes along and no handsome young man is going to ask your girl to her first dance or your son is not pulling at his necktie nervous as all hell as he knocks on his date’s door; it’s easier to bear until your younger children surpass their older sibling and help feed them, run for diapers, wipe drool from their mouth, have to defend them at school. It’s easier, until so many times it isn’t.
“An Elegy for Your Cat,” The Citron Review
Animals are family members just as surely as human parents or siblings, and their loss can provoke profound grief — as Charles Kaufman realized when his cat Koko passed away:
You buried Koko under those white pines, wrapped in her favorite blanket; you tossed in her worn, forest-green breakaway collar with its small, round, blue metallic tag that reads “Koko” and gives your telephone number. Next to the blanket, you placed her favorite multi-colored felt ball, the one your sister made from laundry lint, and as you filled the tiny grave—those frozen-clay walls so carefully clean and square—you left a tulip bulb near the surface, something that would live again in the spring, something that would mark the grave year after year.
“Fiddler’s Green: RIP Gord Downie,” Matthew Barlow
When an icon dies, the pain may not be as acute as when we lose a loved one, but there’s a hole nonetheless, a hole shared by millions of other people — in this case, the millions of Canadians who loved Gord Downie, lead singer of The Tragically Hip, who passed away last week.
I have been thinking about this since the night of the Hip’s last concert in Kingston, ON, last summer. The CBC broadcast and streamed it around the world. And so we were able to watch it in our living room in the mountains of Tennessee, where we lived at the time. Today, with Downie’s death, I realized what it was that made the Hip so quintessentially Canadian in a way other Canadian artists aren’t: They made us proud to be Canadian. We are not a proud nation, we are rather humble (and occasionally annoyingly smug). We don’t really do patriotism, and when we do, it’s kind of sad and forced. We don’t have the great stories of nation formation other countries have. No ‘Chanson de Roland.’ No King Arthur. No Paul Revere. We just kind of evolved into place. But, in telling us our stories back to us in a way no one ever had, Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip made us proud to be Canadian.
“Goodbye Piper,” Lonely Keyboards
Coming to grips with a death is difficult not just because of a loss, but because of the uncomfortable truths it forces us to confront. When Bruce Jenkins’ mother began her final decline, he struggled with both his detachment and his own possible bleak future:
Could have seen her every other day, easily, little bother. But didn’t. The shame curls my lip and brims my eye. I so wanted to be the kind of man who could leave behind the solitary confinement of each inmate in our family of origin prison; share the autumn garden. Or at least peer over the fence and say, how ya going? And I did, but not often. Not often enough to take satisfaction from the entries on the Family Compassion Ledger just inside the number-coded front door. Frequently enough to feel a chill portent; what if my child will not sit with me either? But no way I could think about losing language myself. A nightmare too far. Her, not me.
Do you use your blog to process emotions or challenging experiences? Share a time when your writing or art helped you heal.
Writing is always my comfort zone. I have seem to figure major life moments out through writing. My motivation will fizzle but writing has never failed me. Now I just started my new blog a week ago. Purely to have an outlet through my grief and hardships. I’m glad to find other blogs that are on the same path I hope to drive towards.
Disorganizedsage.wordpress.com
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I wish I had the courage to be truthful enough to express words with my own grief as you do so well in your post. I lost my real mom when I was five, life without the real mom is something no one should have to do. Dad was a workaholic, and now with both parents in heaven or hell, I am a loss for words.
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thanks for sharing this. Grief does come in so many different shades, and to be able to letting it out via writing…is just a huge way of saying its okay to grief. Because I believe times we stop ourselves from doing just that.
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I feel your pain & respect them much. You and your followers might enjoy my blog, AS CLEAR AS THE BLUE SKY xtradonaire.wordpress.com
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The book that I have written and blogged about here, really began to take form the year my mother died. 2010. For the next 4 years I spent all of my time doing the research. Libraries, museums, reading, searching the web. Hours. I didn’t have a computer at the time so I had to use my cellphone which was extremely slow going. But it gave me something to focus on. My mom was of course helping me before she died, but her illnesses took priority. I have found that I do not feel bad about her not being here to see the finished product as she lived a part of the story (it was about my father’s life and our part in the last five years of his life). Doing the book did keep me from thinking too much about going with her. After all, if I went too, that would have meant a wasted effort on the book. The book also helped me process my father’s death (I was only 3 when he died). I was able to cry for him when I wrote my last lines. http://www.pininthetush.com
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Very well written..writing for me is just a way to express my pain,grief..those days when you are lost and gloomy missing people you have lost..writing down your feelings really heals..
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I agree that writing is very cathartic; it has certainly helped me through the grief of my best friend’s death. https://mrmatthewruddle.com/2017/10/05/ten-years/
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Wow….I thought I was alone in my journey. Thank you for sharing this.
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I lost my fiancee 27 years ago to a car accident. Then 5 years ago my wife suffered a life changing brain injury. I started writing recently. It has helped me tremendously, and it also seems to be helping others too. https://tenthousanddays.blog/
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Writing actually makes writers feel the problem has been solved some way.
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I agree. Somehow I could relate to this. Yet not only grieving but everything that I feel like writing. May it be sad or joyous.
But grief pushed me to make a poem for my late grandpa who passed away when I was nine.
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This was difficult to read, but thank you for posting it. For me, writing (either through blogging, in my personal diary or in a longer work) helps me make sense of the world and my own experience. I think that is quite common for writers. However I think it depends wholly on the way you are feeling when you sit down to write, and I also think it is stragely influenced by whether you are typing on a keyboard or writing with a pen in your hand. Certainly grief makes words take on extra poignancy and words played effectively generate lumps in throats driven by the empathy of the reader.
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Writing is therapeutic for me. It has helped me heal do many times.
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I have seen fire and I have seen rain. My grandson had brain cancer at the age of two and beat it with chemo and stem cell work. Two years later his mother, our daughter-in-law died of cancer. I could not blog about this for many months. Then I did but to no avail. Now we lost my wife’s cousin to cancer and writing about it is still painful. So for me writing is not a panacea for the losses we have incurred.
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I literally just finished writing about my dad’s death. He died two months ago. It took three days to write a handful of paragraphs. I felt I needed to get it down in writing, before I forget. Not sure yet, if it helped process anything. https://thismortalexperience.wordpress.com
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I came to terms with my feelings through writing my blog, I think after grieving I become motivated and felt empowered https://poojbhxvsar.wordpress.com/
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To me, writing empowers you but at the same makes you unapologetic about being vulnerable. I can’t remember the first time I resorted to writing for therapy. I have since continued to do so and dealt with emotional struggles by writing about them and hoping that people who might read them can relate. So that they won’t feel as alone when I felt a certain emotion.
Just like these, death and loss are often the things I write.. but in my diary. People who write about their personal lives are so brave ❤
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Very well written. I started writing as a way to deal with how I was feeling when I felt I couldn’t come out and tell people closest to me. I encourage everyone to do the same to process however they’re feeling. It always helps. Now that I’m beginning the writing process again I’ve started with children’s books, now I hope one day to have the courage to tell a story much closer and harder for me to share with people. http://chassidyramseybooks.wordpress.com
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This was beautiful and gut-wrenching to read, thank you for sharing. When I was sixteen, I met with a road accident that left me disabled. I grieved for my broken limb, but most of all, suffered through the bullying that ensued at school. I wrote about this for an article on another site, thinking of re-publishing it on my personal blog. This post has served as motivation to tell my story again — thank you so much to everyone who contributed to this.
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I write because of unexpected turns in my life. The physical pain and emotional pain are sometimes hard to bear. Letting it out is my way of talking to someone. I won’t make the list here but…
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Thank you for sharing. Writing has always been a form of therapy for me. It really helps me to see things from a different view or level when I write my feeling down. Wow to the writers who shared their experiences of different kinds of loss.
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Writing makes me feel understood. It makes me feel that someone’s always listening.
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Whenever I feel vulnerable, writing helps me feel safe. There are a lot of things that crawl in to my mind now and then but I am scarcely able to talk about them, So I pen down whatever I feel and some days it is the only thing that helps me get up and get going. I feel that when you express your thoughts through art, you grow.
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Writing my blog was/is therapy for me. An added bonus was the response of my loved ones after reading said blog. I wrote my first blog after watching #Unrest. I had a visceral reaction to that movie, and I was compelled to do something- what could I do to share the message? So I wrote my blog, and shared it with family and friends. Not carte Blanche- just with family and friends who responded to my carefully worded FB post that if they wanted to keep in touch, they needed to pm me. It turned into shedding my privacy hangups. My ‘be strong and suck it up no matter what’ mentality. It was life changing for me, and truly cathartic.
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Writing to me is like a person, someone who is always there and never leaves, unlike the reality of our lives where people have to leave at some point or the other, I Guess that’s why I love writing,because I can be real without reality.
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Some people try to minimize my grief, and it makes it seem like something is wrong with me because “it was just an animal.” Sometimes grief takes away from my productivity.
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Writing is like talking to an old friend who doesn’t judge, interrupt, agree or edit you. Whether about loss, politics (no one really wants to hear that anyway), trying to comprehend the universe, or simply observations made in day-to-day living, it’s cathartic and coalescing to type it out as you think it through.
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I write to help heal the pain of loss, lots of losses but also diagnosis of autism and anxiety, it helps emencly not only me but my children.
I have even written a book soon to be published to help families like ours that is what I want my work. And writing to do. To help so noone feels they have to travel these things alone.
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I appreciate how this post explores the different sides of grief. Every one different but still similar truths and hardship.
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Writing is way of contemplation for me. It’s make me easily process my emotion and say what is hide inside. Sometimes it’s too complicated to be told, that why I write it.
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Writing in grief helped me understand my feelings and process my thoughts in ways nothing else can. Thank you for sharing.
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Writing is also a way of telling myself I want to remember this moment in time. Griefing or not. Thank you for sharing.
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There’s too much pain in the world. One which we sometimes ease put in our words but things become different when with the words we pen down, we can help another from losing themselves from this horror called pain!
Please check out my blog https://pacifyingquotes.wordpress.com/2017/10/29/life/
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This is incredible. I think part of the reason I wanted to blog was to be more vulnerable. I’ve had a fair share of loss in my life, writing has always helped me cope with it whether writing notes to myself or lost loved ones. This is just an extension of this as well. Thank you for these little stories, it makes me feel more normal.
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