“If you tell yourself like a story, it doesn’t seem so bad.” I wish I were the author of these words, but they come from Jeanette Winterson’s novel “Lighthousekeeping.” They express an essential truth. In 2000, when my younger daughter, then 8, was diagnosed with cancer, I wrote in my journal with unusual regularity. And after her treatment and through the years of her survival, I wrote and wrote, until I came to understand those years, could put them in a context, and see how I had been transformed. The result was the publication of a memoir, “Motherhood Exaggerated,” because the other truth I know is that our stories, once written, must be heard by others.
There are any number of studies that quantify the benefits of writing — respiration and heart rate slow, blood pressure drops, anxiety decreases. But I do not write with a blood pressure cuff strapped on my arm, nor do I take the vital signs of those I teach. Effectiveness is measured by the tears that flow, the laughs that burst from a heart that has been opened, the moment when the surprised writer says, “I didn’t know I felt that.”
When I write, I feel as if I am standing next to myself. This slight remove, which I can never achieve when I am speaking my story, allows me to go deeper into my feelings. Even the hardest emotions are easier for me to face. In my writing I can use metaphor or personification, I can speak from the third-person perspective, I can set small scenes rather than taking on the whole arc. I set the pace; I can approach on tiptoe, with two steps forward and one back, in a zigzag or a spiral.
When my father began a not so gradual decline from Alzheimer’s disease, my notebooks were never far from my side. I had what I thought was an atypical response to hospice, which I wrote about in my book “The Write Prescription: Telling Your Story to Live With and Beyond Illness.” We hear so much about what a “good death” is and how hospice provides the dying with dignity, but for me, it was also a mask for the wrenching away of life that all death is.
That was over 10 years ago, and there is now no longer a generational buffer between me and my own mortality. The losses I have experienced have been of friends and community members. This grief is different. As I mourn, I also become consoler to those family members who have lost their loved one. I hug surviving children while I crave the embrace of my friend. When a central figure in my synagogue’s congregation died, I mourn not just among friends but among those to whom I am connected only through our shared sense of loss. I write through these deaths not just to examine my relationship with that person and what their absence means to me, but to examine the meaning of friendship, how community both bolsters and obligates, as I move deeper into my seventies, how the loss of peers makes it impossible to ignore my own mortality.
My goal is to help birth more stories of illness, survival, death, grief. I hope the following writing prompts will be helpful to you.
Writing Prompts
- Write about your experiences with dying — whether you were at a loved one’s bedside or a distance away. How did what happened support or contradict preconceived notions of how you hoped that person would die? Set the scene. Where were you? Who else was there? What sounds did you hear? What did people say? Was it calm or hectic? Could you describe it as a good death?
- Write about what it means to be both mourner and consoler.
- In “A Grief Observed,” C.S. Lewis writes of mourning the loss of his wife, “I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only [friends who visit] would talk to one another and not to me.” Write about a time of mourning — did you welcome the attention of others, or did you prefer a more private grief?