Grieving and memoir writing

Jerry,
I experienced a lot of grieving as I wrote my memoir. Mostly, I came to regret the aspects of those I had lost while too self-absorbed to fully appreciate them while they were living. As a child, I hadn't placed much value on the gifts those I had loved contributed to my life. As an adult, before beginning to write, I wasn't aware that I hadn't grieved their deaths or fully embraced their lives. Many of my family members were lost to alcoholism and before I understood their struggles, I was angry with them. My sister's suicide was the hardest. I hadn't realized that she had protected me when we were growing up. At first, I felt guilty, but I have made peace with her death, her life, our relationship, and have come to understand that I wasn't able to do more for her than I did.

There is a peace that comes, post memoir writing, that enhances one's life, but it is a costly emotional journey that twists and turns one's belief system with every step. I learned throughout the process to listen carefully to my physical/emotional/spiritual self and to rest when the feelings seemed overwhelming.

I think that as I recorded my life, I also entered into the private sphere of those who shared their journey with me. Having traveled together through life connected us some, but the knowledge gained from traveling through my story made the connection deeper than I could have imagined possible.

Eventually, for me, the stories that most reveal their character are the ones I cherish the most.

Thanks for reminding me of the gifts that come along with memoir writing.
Cheers,
Red Bird

Well said, Red Bird.

Jerry, I read your blog, and, maybe because I've lost so many, I identified with it. Red Bird is right; there's peace that comes after writing memoir, but it comes at a heavy price, in reliving it and reacting to events all over again. I still cry everytime I edit those chapters.

I'm not sure that writing about it has caused "catch up grief," though. For me, at least, age and perhaps experience, changes the way I deal with it. I was only about 14 when I lost my little sisters, and 29 when I lost a 21-year old brother. Those deaths were traumatic for me, especially the 21-year old. I'd had him longer, and perhaps was more aware than I'd been at 14 at how much I would miss him in the years to come. But as the years went by, I became more reconciled to the inevitability of loss.

But it's a thought-provoking question -- one of those that I'll keep turning over in my mind from time to time.

Here's another for you. Have you ever, when you've lost someone, sat at your computer and blindly typed what you were feeling until you were drained of anything more to say, then saved the file, and never looked at it again? I've done that.

My biggest regret in life is that I was shooting cocane with my brother a week before he died of an overdose. I swore to him that I would never touch cocaine again, and I have not.

Too little too late?

I don't know.

I swore to him that I would live my life with dignity. I've not always done that as well as I should. But I haven't done anything that I hang my head about since.

It's been real hard at times. There have been times when I could have lied and saved myself serious harm, or pushed a little dope to make ends meet.

It's the least I could do after being part of the problem. Part of the reason why he's dead.

Wayne,
After my sister died, I had "survivor guilt." I couldn't grasp why she had died while I had been spared. After all, she was the big sister and her childhood was harder than mine. I did a lot of dope with her, too. My shame is because I got clean 9 months before she died and although I continued to talk to her, I had refused to see her. I feared she would lead me back to drugs. My family still doesn't know that she called me the night before she was found dead and I didn't answer the phone. I was trying to piece my life back together. I believe she would have been an addict with or without my help and I believe she was relieved from her pain in the only way possible for her. Her path and mine turned out differently, but still, we are both free now. It's a horrible disease.

Well, how are the edits going?

Red Bird said:

Well, how are the edits going?

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I'm getting there, thanks for asking.

I wrote my life story on a web site in around 2002, including the death of my 7 year old sister in 1976. I was 15 at the time. I don't think it was actually therapeutic for me to write about her death, but I did get a great email telling me that I could write and if I ever decided to become a writer, that this person would leave their music company to be my agent. lol. I never took up real writing until a few years later though.

The writing didn't help me deal with the grief of my sister dying all those years ago, but I did realise that I had finally let go of it last year. No particular reason for it, but I knew it was over when I couldn't remember what she looked like anymore.

jerrywaxler said:

Do you have an experience of "catch up grief" while trying to organize your life in a story? I'd love to hear.

Jerry

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Hmm. Grieving? I have done all my grieving. The part that bites now are the flashbacks that plague me when I probe deeper for the details.

Thank you Jerry for your comment. I have had severe PTSD for most of my life and while I am by far "healed" "recovered" whatever you want to call it, there are days when writing this stuff that I am more there than here. If I didn't dig around in there for the writing purposes I would be just fine, no nightmares, no flashbacks etc. It is something that I can control now and I accept that there certain things that are going to trigger me so I plan ahead to deal with that stuff.

The problem with PTSD is that it really isn't a Disorder as the name mistakenly says. It is the brain's way of holding important life saving information that has yet to be processed. The trouble comes in the complex nature of human beings. There is no one step cure all because it is dependant on a multitude of unique and organically complicated processes in the individual brain.

Oops, I feel a rant coming on.
I have done a lot of work in this area and I feel very passionately about it as you may have begun to notice. LOL

Jerry the book I'm writing I've named "Thelma's Tears"

Here is the gist of the ending:

Thelma and I had seperated Nov. 2005. for 2 and half years we never saw each other or spoke to each other. I had accepted that we would never be together again. I figured as long as she was alive and well I would be happy with that. But during the whole 2 and a half years I wanted to look her up and make ammends for all the times I made her cry. But I was too scared to look her up. I wanted to sing and record the song, "All I've got" by the beatles. they sing, "Whenever I want to kiss you all I've got to do is call and you'll come running home... And the same goes for me,If you ever want me at all, all you've got to do is call and I'll come running home." I wanted to record that and send it to her to let her know I would always be there for her.

After 2 and a half years I was at the library and I suddenly got a feeling she wasn't doing well. The feeling was so strong I said to myself, "Thelma's going to die".

For two weeks I was still scared to look her up, but then I looked up her sister and she told me that 2 weeks earlier she had a heart attack and was in the ICU. Thelma's spirit called me.

She was pretty much in a coma. The doctors were trying to talk her son Michael into pulling the plug. They told him that when she squeezed your hand it was probably involuntary. they said that when she looked at you she probably didn't know who she was looking at. They said that when she was asked to move her eyebrows or toes she didn't respond.She had a breating tube in her mouth. She wouldn't be able to speak even if she was lucid.

I went into her room alone and tearfully poured out my heart to her. For 2 and a half hours I poured out my heart like I had never done to anyone before. Her tears rolled down her face. I asked her to wiggle her toes and eyebrows and she did so.
After seeing her I left to go back to work a 3 hour distance from the hospital. she continued to get more and more lucid. they were able to take out the breathing tube and she was able to speak to her sister, children and mother. She got to hold her seven week old granddaughter. then she died.
After she died I felt a tremendous weight of guilt. For a year I cried night and day. Then I had a dream of her. She was briskly walking away from me. I kept telling her I wanted to talk to her and she just kept walking not even acknowledging I was there. I woke up and the sheets where my head was laying was wet from me crying in my sleep.
I told my counselor of the dream and she gave me 9 possible meanings of it. I knew none of those meanings were correct. So all day I pondered the meaning of it.

Eventually while I was at starbucks I suddenly realized that the whole reason I was crying night and day for a year was because I couldn't forgive my self. I realized I wasn't crying for her. I realized I was crying for myself. A starbucks worker noticed that I was just about ready to bawl and she introduced herself to me. I told her I just realized that I had been crying all that time because I couldn't forgive myself. She told me that I would problably never forgive myself until I realized I was a better person because of her. Immediatly I knew that was the answer.

I went home and just sat for hours looking at Thelma's picture. Then suddenly I started to wail. I kept saying over and over, "Oh Thelma". It was the first time I cried for her.
I checked myself into the psyche ward at the hospital. I'm an insulin dependant diabetic. When I get that depressed I forget to take my insulin. I needed to be hospitalized so that they could make sure I took my insulin.

While in there they gave me info about grief. The info said that guilt was one of the stages of grief. After 3 days I had another dream. she approached me and kissed and hugged me. I woke up and knew the dream meant I was starting to forgive myself.

It was then that I realized I did make ammends with. I made ammends when I poured out my heart to her at the hospital. And she told me she loved me. She told me she loved me the only way she could. Thelma's Tears told me she loved me.

And that's the ending of my book. It's why I call it Thelma's Tears.

I still have a long way to happiness. But I've overcome the major obsticle of guilt. I now no longer cry for myself. I cry for her.

wizzy,

sometimes we hold on to an emotion because we don't want to let the person go. even anger, held on, gives us a feeling of remaining connected to the one who has angered us.

many people never experience love, so those who have can sometimes just be overwhelmed knowing what's it's like to love so deeply.

i hope you have a great day : )

Recently I've been transcribing letters that my ex-boyfriend wrote me after I left him in the summer of 1995. I left him not so much because he was an alcoholic as because he was an abusive alcoholic. I loved him, but was also traumatized by him on and off for 6 years. In his letters he is writing me from a rehab in Pennsylvania and he is almost begging me to give him one more chance. At the time, I just shut him out, but now 14 and 1/2 years later, I am realizing that he was actually in a good place to begin to recover, if I had listened to him.

Less than a year later he had not only returned to drinking, but delved into heroin use; he had a car accident one night after he left a party where he had imbibed alcohol and used heroin. No seat belt either and he drove off a cliff. A police officer rescued him, but the damage had been done: he became paraplegic. He lasted about 3 years after that, but then committed suicide. We had kept in touch, but the year he died I became acutely psychotic and couldn't spend much time with him. A few days before he checked out he called me to demand that we become lovers again. I told him that that might only be possible if we became really good friends first, but really I was just too sick to be there for him. He hung up on me. When the phone rang a few minutes later, I didn't pick up. Soon after that his sister called me to tell me he was dead.

Reading his letters again I felt a surge of regret and some guilt, but I also felt tenderness. I, too, cried and kept saying his name out loud, wanting to reconnect with his spirit. My feeling is it's better late than never to reawaken my heart to those I loved, lost and let down, even if I dip into some disturbing unchartered territory. Since I began working on my memoir, my memories have been resurfacing and I feel gratitude to the powers that be for this. Due to the trauma of my illness, I lost a lot of memories and became a bit numb emotionally, but now enough time has passed and I'm far enough into my recovery that I can safely reawaken the past.

Balanced with life affirming attitudes and actions, I think grief and regret have an important place in the memoir writing practice.

Kate

Jerry have you ever written before your brother died?

I'm really moved by everyone's stories here. Timely topic for me because I'm trying to write about a sudden tragic event and am finding I just remember the sadness, and am having difficulties remembering details other than that. How do you get past the sad, or push it aside for a second, to tell a story? Any ideas?

Mardi,
There wasn't any way for me to side-step the pain and anger that showed up in the first draft of my memoir. I learned that the more distant the memories were, the better my writing was because I wasn't as emotionally attached to the events. The more recent events required more revisions. So, first go around I bled on the page and returned to it with a focus on craft issues.

After I got through the traumatic events, I remembered other, more joyful, experiences.

Cheers,
Red Bird

Thanks, Red Bird. I tried focusing on sounds and other concrete details, leaving out emotions for the moment, and that at least has gotten me some words on the page.

I think everybody handles this in their own way. I waited until late at night, put a box of kleenex on my desk, and just kept hammering away at the keyboard, reliving it as I wrote. I worked my way through the entire story before I quit and went to bed in the wee hours of the morning, totally drained. I knew I'd have a lot of editing.

The strange thing is, I didn't. The chapter required less editing than anything I've ever written. And the chapter is powerful. People have called me, telling me they're still trying to pull themselves together after reading it.

This is such a personal choice, I think it's impossible for anybody to tell you how to write yours. It may have as much to do with our own personalities as the subject matter. I'm a "plunge in and get it done" sort of person, and maybe that's why this worked for me.

Good luck with it, however you find your way through it. Once it's done, the writing gets easier.

Mardi said:

I'm really moved by everyone's stories here. Timely topic for me because I'm trying to write about a sudden tragic event and am finding I just remember the sadness, and am having difficulties remembering details other than that. How do you get past the sad, or push it aside for a second, to tell a story? Any ideas?

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I'm wondering if you really should get past or push aside the sad just yet. Maybe just try writing out all the sad, that way all those feelings aren't getting in the way and causing a bottleneck. The good feelings will come but not before you let out the tough painful ones. I think Chrisla makes a very good point with her own experience. Sometimes what we really need to do is just dump all that pain out onto the page and not pre edit. Let it pour out onto the page just how it feels. Use all the adjectives and adverbs you want, blow off the punctuation etc. just get the raw emotion out. It'll be powerfull and more truthfully raw than anything else you could do. You can always go back later, after the icecream is all gone and the kleenex box is empty and polish that puppy up.

Thanks, Bluegate. I'm reading a book titled Your Life as Story by Tristine Rainer and she calls this "flooding" and says pretty much the same thing. That you'll drown until you deal with it. Kleenex? I need paper towel but I'm ready. I hope.

I've read that book, Mardi. It was assigned to me in graduate school, so I suspect many writers follow her advice.

The process can be painful, but not as bad as living some of the stuff we lived. I learned to pull back and practice self-care during the process.

Cheers to you,
Red

Ok, so I had to write a table of contents to be included in my memoir proposal, and I managed to write a half page on my "grief event." The memoir is about the year after my divorce when my "hobby" farm had to sustain my sons and me. It's mostly funny, with this big bomb of sorrow in the center. The proposal ended up being 43 pages (too long? I don't know) and that one half page was definitely the hardest to write. But, I did it!

Hi Mardi, I would like to congratulate you on getting that hard part written. You should be very proud of yourself. That's a hard thing to do.

I'm a little confused here. I thought that a proposal was for non fiction idea that you have not started but that memoir went the route of typical fiction with a query letter, synopsis etc. I am nowhere near that stage of things so I really am just curious. As I understand it a synopsis is going to be 5 to 10 pages with 5 pages being the most commonly requested. I don't know about proposals but it would sure seem that 43 pages is extravagantly long. I'm probably just not understanding what you doing.