Writing - Grief

 I come from a family that does not do grief very well. Stiff upper lips, gritted teeth, and saying death takes one away from the pain of life to a better world are our usual responses. My father once said the problem with people choosing direct cremations is that they avoid paying for a funeral, only to pay for mental health counseling. My father had more sense than he allowed for himself, more than that granted him by my mother.

Writer's Digest published a piece, The Importance of Grief and Loss in Fiction. If writers are to address humanity, it seems to me that we need to deal with death - physical, emotional, spiritual - and from the above I question my ability to write about it. 

In addition, they are characters who want to make sense of the world. They are all testing one world order against a new. Their journeys form the psychological gristle of their stories. Their reactions to these losses drive them—whether the losses happened before the story starts or along the way.

Put another way, static stories are not stories. Readers want upheaval. They want adversity. Your protagonist can’t smoothly climb a mountain. Ropes must break. Winds must howl. Fellow climbers might perish.

And our main characters must process as they go. They process life, death, and change. They process crises large and small.

I think my answer came here:

If there was a set, known, definitive, cure-all prescription for healing from grief we would all follow the steps and we’d be back to level ground with that torturous blip (whatever it was) fully in our past. But no such remedy or treatment exists, other than the mucky mess of the human struggle and acknowledging (unless your main character is a sociopath) that it’s very possible your life will lead to hurting someone else. Or that you might be hurt by another’s.

Then, of course, when the grieving for what’s lost is over, we want our main characters to test the limits of what they thought was possible and, maybe, redefine themselves. And see a new world at their feet. And in that process, as James Baldwin points out, help others.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” said James Baldwin. “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive

This blog exists for several reasons. One is to show people what happens when does not deal with their mental health issues by showing what I have learned from my own issues. Another is to warn others what will happen to you if you pursue criminality. The third is my advocacy for using one's creativity as a means for working out the first two. Writing is therapy for me. It is me playing the witness to what I have seen, and some of what I have seen is ugly and bitter and even cruel. Put all those together, and you have the dark matter of life, what we hide away even as it follows us and colors our life. I seek not to glorify such things, or to justify their existence, but only to say these things happened, this is how they were handled, and you should take the lessons to heart so to avoid repeating the errors of others. You will make your own errors, you will hurt yourself and others, and you will find a way to atone for those errors and the damage done. It is, as you can tell by reading my notes here, a lot of work.

sch 1/9/23