Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss

Introduction

TRANSFORMED BY LOSS

You may be holding this book because you have been changed by experiencing a great loss. Perhaps you’re browsing these pages because you’ve been thinking that you want to write about what’s happened to you, and you’re wondering how to start. Perhaps you want to write about the ways that grief came into your life and what has happened in its aftermath, or you want to commemorate a loved one or way of life that’s gone. After you’ve survived the death of a loved one, an illness, a broken romance, the loss of a home, country, or even a social structure, the story of who you are changes. In writing about what’s changed, you want to make sense of the impact of your loss, or record life-altering events for yourself and for family and friends, including those not yet born. You already know that you’re not alone in experiencing loss. You’re also not alone in wanting to write about it. You may not know this yet, but you’re also searching for a way to write about yourself as the memory keeper: the survivor of loss.

Like you, I’m someone with a personal story of loss and of struggling to understand who I became after grief changed me. Years before I knew I would write my memoir Invisible Sisters, I searched for books that would help me find a way to write about my experience of loss. As far as I knew, how-to books about grief writing didn’t exist: I would have to teach myself by following others’ examples. I wanted honest, interesting memoirs about grieving, and approachable, welcoming books written from the perspective of the seriously ill person and her family, expressing the intimacies, paradoxes, and anger that come with living in a changed body and in a changed life. I was desperate for good books that proved that I wasn’t alone in the journey my family and I had made: a journey that left me as the surviving sister of three.

How did other writers construct their stories, I wondered. What did they deem too personal, too technical, too distracting? What were the stellar details that made their writing exceptional? I was searching for a roadmap to understanding my grief, and eventually, how to write well about it.

My mother wanted books like these, too. She found inadequate reflection of her experience parenting two terminally ill children—my younger sisters—in medical narratives accessible to the layperson. She read Eleven Blue Men by Berton Roueché, and The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas. I dipped into those books, but as a preteen, the writing style and word choices sometimes wavered in front of me, fascinating, terrifying, true—and intellectually and emotionally out of my reach. I read The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, and was haunted by Anne’s authentic teenage life, with its romantic crushes and keen self-inquiry even in the closest of quarters. My trials were not like hers, but I read that famous diary searching for clues to how to make a record of life lived in shadow.

I was an adult before I felt ready to write my family’s story in earnest, and by then there were bright signposts for my journey: Lucy Grealy’s memoir of growing up disfigured as a result of a facial tumor, Autobiography of a Face, and Joan Didion’s memoir of her first year after the sudden death of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking. I read Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill and C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. Each of these books told a compelling story, welcomed me into a portion of the author’s life, and showed me the strength and clarity I would need in order to write well about my love for and loss of my two sisters, and about the life I learned to live after their deaths.

At first I didn’t recognize the amount of writing I had already done. I’d begun writing my way into my story years earlier, in the journals I began in elementary school and continue to this day. On those pages I recorded the quotidian moments of my life and my sisters’ lives, small details that kept them forever as people: flawed, funny, and beloved. Other parts of our family’s chronicle existed in the photographs, report cards, and letters that my mother kept. But the crux of the story was almost too painful to write. I had survived, but my sisters and our family as a unit had not.

Searching for guidance in others’ stories of loss, I looked for writing lessons and I sought encouragement. Telling my story was the right thing to do for me and for my family, but before I could do that, I wanted proof that others had accomplished the daunting task of writing through their grief. Writing about truly painful subjects, like death, illness, divorce, war—anything that deeply changes your life—is as brave as holding a hand over a flame that’s already burned you once. I knew it would hurt, but in order to write clearly about what happened and understand what my losses meant to me, I had to examine my story closely. If I could feel the good and bad moments again, maybe I could find an unforgettable way to describe that fire and how I came away from it.

I often speak to survivors’ groups and writing clubs about my own experience of writing through grief. The attendees are eager to know how to capture on paper the stories that their loved ones can no longer tell, or to understand how to shape their own stories. They know that they possess that important reason to write, but they don’t yet know if they have the courage.

Once, when I spoke to a bereavement group about my family’s story, a man from the audience stayed close by me during the reception. He was elegantly dressed, and I could see by how he hung his head and the tentative way he approached me that he was haunted by his grief. His shoulders were bent as if he carried a tangible burden, and he seemed to have a well of questions he couldn’t begin to ask. He told me his teenaged son had recently been killed in an accident. His wife, he said, was getting along better than he was—he gestured toward a vivacious woman talking with friends across the room—but he wasn’t sure where to begin.

I knew what he wanted to ask me. How do I get past this, he would have asked. How can I be who I am now: a father who has buried his son?

You start by writing it down, is my answer to him here. Don’t expect beautiful prose yet, to undo the terrible thing that has happened to bring you here, or even a million-dollar book deal. Simply tell your story and your son’s story, and you will begin to build a bridge that connects who you were then with who you have become.

No story of loss is a simple one. The feelings that come with grief can be hard to pin down with a pen or put in order with a keyboard. As you write, you encounter strong emotions, memories, often a wealth of family stories, differing opinions, and facts. This is why writing about grief in steps helps you build that bridge.

Many people are aware that grieving can be seen as a series of stages, which is why I’ve drawn a parallel between writing about grief and one of the most well-recognized studies of grieving, the Five Stages of Grief by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

The Five Stages of Grief were introduced to the American public in 1969 with the publication of On Death and Dying. This short book by Dr. Kübler-Ross surveyed the results of her experiences discussing the end of life with terminally ill patients. From her study, she developed a five-stage model that she believed described the ways that the dying face their own grief and loss. She named the stages Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. Over time, her model was adapted to address the ways that survivors cope, recognizing that the order of the stages may differ for each person, and that some people may not experience every stage. I’m one of many who don’t believe that these stages always occur in a linear, rigid order, but I do believe that as a survivor of loss, I moved naturally through phases in an order that made sense for me. As a writer and as a person affected by grief, I haven’t spent a lot of time in Denial, but I’ve repeated Depression more than once.

Kübler-Ross wasn’t the only person to study how we grieve. Some say that we experience grief in waves. Another theory proposes that living with grief requires of the survivor a series of tasks acknowledging their pain, and helping to form a new way of living without the loved one’s presence. Religious practices also provide guidance in how to grieve: Roman Catholics anoint the sick toward the end of their lives, Jews sit shiva, Muslims place the deceased in their graves facing Mecca. Each of these are in their own way part of the story of surviving a loss.

But grief is never over. No matter how we grieve, we don’t arrive at a neatly categorized, comfortably furnished place that some people like to call closure. There isn’t closure, really. We don’t want to forget or be forgotten. We want to develop the ability to celebrate what we love as we move forward, even if that dear person, place, or thing is no longer actively in our lives. This is why I’ve added a sixth stage of my own to the five stages of grief. In that sixth stage, Renewal, you have written that essential story that led you to pick up this book. You’ve built the bridge between who you were and who you have become.

Many writers have gone across that bridge before you. Their experiences and the ways in which they chose to write about their loss shine a light on your path. In this book, we’ll examine techniques from well-regarded memoirs, and read insights from critically acclaimed authors who have written honestly and memorably about their own losses. At the end of each chapter, you’ll find a section called The Next Step, with craft exercises designed specifically for the writer of a memoir about grief or loss.

Moving through the stages in this book, we will examine the style and feeling with which Nick Flynn writes of his father’s alcoholism and homelessness in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. We’ll look at the techniques Robin Hemley uses to write about immersing himself in second chances in Do-Over! We will consider how Janisse Ray expresses the importance of the natural world in two of her memoirs, Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. How does a writer examine the way that their own or someone else’s behavior creates grief? A look at Neil White’s memoir of his time in prison, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, and Sue William Silverman’s exploration of childhood sexual abuse in Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You will help illuminate the answers to that question. We’ll discuss the ways that a journalistic approach helped Ethan Gilsdorf shape his memoir Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, and how United States poet laureate Natasha Trethewey found a place for facts and speculation in her memoir, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I’ve interviewed many of these authors about how and why they wrote their books. Their insights are shared in these pages.

These are just a few of the authors we’ll examine who write nonfiction about loss, a subject addressed throughout history by greats like Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Primo Levi, and Elie Wiesel. You are already part of a community of writers who have navigated their paths through loss, going back through the ages. Not all of the memoirs we’ll examine on these pages are purely about grief or loss, although loss plays a part in almost everyone’s story. I include some works here purely out of admiration for the author’s beautiful language, captivating writing, or bracing approach to difficulty.

You are invited to use this book in any way that’s helpful to you. You’re welcome to see this as a guide to recognizing your feelings of grief and the ways they may have changed over time. Acknowledging a loss and its effect is often what inspires a writer to begin a memoir of grief. Your memoir may be done or nearly done, and you’re simply interested in how to craft the best ending you can, or how to present a character at their idiosyncratic best. On the other hand, perhaps you’re in the pre-writing stage and are just now examining how and why you want to write your story. No matter where you are in your writing journey, these chapters can be read as a linear, step-by-step guide to writing through grief, or as pages that you can dip in and out of to learn about other writers’ experiences and examine some of their work. The tips and exercises are here for you to use as you like.

This book won’t tell you how to get an agent, how to plan your book tour, or what kind of pencil to use when you scribble your ideas for your next book. What I hope is that this book will help you write your way through your grief and into renewal. Consider this book a guide to finding your way through the very personal journey of writing a true story that’s hard to tell and impossible to forget.

MY STORY:

By the time I was thirty-two years old, I was the only one of three sisters still alive. This is the simplest way to explain my own story of grief. But there’s so much more to say: that my sister Susie, eight years old when I was ten, died of leukemia and that my sister Sarah, four at the time, lived another twenty-three years with a rare and fatal blood disorder, knowing that she would die young, too. Our lives were normal, middle-class American kids’ lives, except for those times when they weren’t. At nine, I identified myself to doctors as the well sibling. I had already formed an identity shaped by impending loss.

When Sarah was a young adult, she spoke casually for the first time about something we had never said aloud: that after her death, I would be the only one left. It would be up to me to remember my sisters and our lives together.

Of course I would not forget her; she was my little sister. But telling her story after she was gone seemed too daunting a task. And telling my own story as the survivor? I didn’t yet understand how I would approach that. First, I would have to understand who I became when I was, in her words, the only one left of three sisters. Time would wear away our connections to friends and extended family, and some day, no one would know who my sisters had been. The responsibility was clear. Capturing our lives and holding them for myself, our friends, family, and perhaps people who never knew us would fall to me.

Sarah wanted to be remembered. I know this because she told me. Susie would have said the same thing. But when I wrote my memoir, Invisible Sisters, it was more than a memento mori, a reminder of mortality. I wrote it to tell my family’s story, the good parts and the bad: to capture my youthful terror in waking late at night and hearing my father bundle Susie out of bed and rush her to the hospital for what would be the last time, or my joy in giggling with Sarah over our teenaged secrets. I also wrote Invisible Sisters to help myself understand the girl I had been and the woman I became. Writing was my search to remember myself as much as it was to remember my sisters.

My grief is bigger than a single event. Yours may be, too. It wasn’t until after Sarah died that I decided I was ready to visit Susie’s grave. I hadn’t seen it in more than two decades, and this second death had to come before I felt ready to confront the first. Grief had spread across our family like ripples on a pond: our father had never fully recovered from Susie’s death, our parents’ marriage broke apart, and before I was out of my teens, I left home. I fought my jagged memories of the day Susie was buried, but I knew that if I was going to move forward, I would have to confront what I’d left behind.

Time had surrounded the cemetery with strip malls and a freeway. I walked the still-beautiful, green, manicured grounds, heading to the gentle slope where long ago I had sat in a folding chair at Susie’s funeral. But when I got to the spot, there was no marker at all, just a mossy patch in the grass: one more heartbreak. The cemetery director told me that no marker had ever been purchased. Because I was by then older than my father had been the day he bought this grave, I understood that he had been too stunned to buy a marker that day or on the one-year anniversary of her death, traditionally the date in Judaism for placing a gravestone. My mother, too, had been consumed by the loss, and poured her energy into keeping the remaining family’s lives moving forward.

So I did what they were unable to do. I bought a gravestone. Susie’s grave now has a bronze plate with her name, her birth and death dates, and a Jewish blessing. With time, I had come to see that while my sister’s unmarked grave was tragic in its own way, it was the story of this neglected grave that fascinated me. I wanted to know more about this family—my family—who had lost one child and knew they would lose another, and couldn’t permit themselves to look backward for fear of never going forward again.

Looking back, I began to see that my parents’ inability to face their grief and complete their middle daughter’s memorial was similar to the first stage in Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous Five Stages of Grief, Denial.

Loss transforms the stories that we expected of our lives. We are no longer who we used to be, and our lives no longer work entirely as planned. Two weeks after my friends Genevieve and Ari’s third child was born, their oldest child, Michaela, five years old and disabled since birth, died unexpectedly in her sleep. They were bereft, and one of the many challenges they faced after Michaela’s death was learning to see themselves as the parents of two beloved typical children. Their lives were suddenly absent the requirements of their special-needs daughter, who first shaped their identities as parents. Genevieve, a journalist, changed her computer password to reflect her dead daughter’s name. Writing her name and seeing it in print is proof of her existence, she told me.

Almost all memoirs are ultimately about identity: who we once were, and who we have become. For author and editor Dinty W. Moore, a key question for a memoir writer to ask herself is who is she now after her identity changed as a result of the fire ignited by her grief? His use of fire as an image surprised me when we talked, because it’s exactly how I think of change, too. Grief is a fire that’s burned you once, maybe even more than once. In order to write about it, though, you have to hold your hand over that fire again. Our characters—and in memoir, they are us—are looking for a way to become who they must be now.

What surprised me, Genevieve remembers about her daughter’s death, was how quickly the world went from real to unreal. Everything seemed like I was looking through fractured glass.

What strikes me most about Genevieve’s metaphor of fractured glass is the idea that what we can see through those shards are the small moments, the details that don’t at first seem to fit together to form a whole. But it’s those details, even as broken pieces, that you put together to create a story that’s about your unique experience of loss. Anyone can tell you that they’re heartbroken or sad, and they would be telling the truth. But what if that fractured glass meant writing about getting the leash down from the hook by the back door and walking your dog for the last time, or the way your mother’s car keys feel in your pocket the day you told her she could no longer drive? These are the small details that demonstrate great emotions. A remarkable example is the way in which Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, his extraordinary memoir of almost total paralysis after a stroke that resulted in locked-in syndrome. Unable to speak or move, he painstakingly dictated the realities of living in his frozen body with a still-vital mind by blinking his eye as a physical therapist pointed at a letter board. He wrote his entire memoir that way, letter by letter. The well-chosen details on the page in Bauby’s story reflect this method: his words are precise, his memories are lush and exact. No word is wasted in his uncompromising