Writing A Refuge

It’s always surprising when you find a new beginning in the middle of an ending, especially one as tragic as the loss of a child. Maybe it’s because we put so much weight on the what was that it’s hard to imagine a new what can be. In the summer of 2019, I attended a writing workshop in the southern California desert with other mothers of loss. The focus was on writing in and though the grief of child loss. My focus was on exploring and developing the grief narrative in my personal writing. What I wasn’t expecting to find there was a band of grieving sisters. This four-day workshop was hosted by an author and creative writing professor, who is also a long-time friend of mine. She’s one who stood by me throughout my daughter’s diagnosis of the terminal genetic illness, Tay-Sachs disease, in the ugly early days after her death when I was out to sea in my grief, and who, by this time had been a mother of loss for many years herself. No quicker can a group of complete strangers become as close as lifelong friends than when you have a shared, first-hand and intimate understanding of a life event that surmounts any and all other experiences you’ve had put together. In our case this was child loss.

We found, as we shared our interpersonal lives, that our narratives varied in circumstance, from illness to accident, stillbirth, and suicide, but the outcome for each of our children had been the same. Child loss, in many ways ostracizes one from their known realms of society and we sought out a more authentic connection to those with knowing hearts. We felt it imperative, not only to cultivate our writing skills, but to share in our grief openly with those who wouldn’t look away. We eight mothers came together around a patio table that first evening surrounded by bottles of wine and platters of cheese in an old Hollywood mansion. Stories were shared as each woman, a safe harbor and port in the storm of grief absorbed them all and took them in with fervent conviction to listen, to hear, and to see this intense pain, recognizing it ultimately for what it truly was: unyielding love.

In what was a first for many of us, the raw emotion poured effortlessly from our mouths and hearts during our short time together without fear of misinterpretation or rejection. While we may not sit as easily in PTO meetings or mommy groups as we once had before death had drawn a line in the sand separating us from the other mothers, here the only line was a protective circle around us all. I remember so clearly in the midst of the bonds that were forming, hearing the words, “The first rule of Grief Club, is you talk about Grief Club”. It was freeing. The long-held breath in my chest was released and felt my body begin to relax, possibly for the first time since my daughter had died of a rare terminal genetic illness seven years prior. This was it. We were here to rewrite the rules on grief; each one of us, for ourselves, and for our children. To tell their stories. To tell our stories. To create a platform where every parent of loss could feel connected and supported enough to do the same. Where those parents didn’t have to live a life in the shadows or feel they were on the fringes of society, marked by their unfortunate circumstance.

Here we were together in a fortress of support. A place none of us had to hear the distance creating and unhelpful phrases like, I can’t imagine, or shockingly and actually uttered to one of us, “I would die if I were you.” No, here our agency over our own narratives solidified. No topic was off the table. No paltry platitudes peppered the condolences. These weren’t just barely surviving women and their dead children to feel sorry for. These were human beings to get to know. One’s with nuanced feelings beyond the sadness that often overshadows loss. There was anger, longing, purpose, and of course an abundance of love melding together in this grief. As there is in all grief, though the sudden, unexpected, unnatural and untimeliness of child loss is a compounding issue to reckon with. Connection is the rising tide that lifts all boats.

Throughout the next several days of our time together we let our stories unfold organically. We worked through various writing prompts and began to craft our narratives into something more solid, then we followed them like our personal roadmap. During one prompt, our instructor tasked us with various writing exercises to help us decipher and connect to our innermost feelings of grief. We poured our hearts into our work, digging down into the recesses of our minds to conjure up the feelings we had lived with through our children’s lives and deaths. One of the exercises she laid out for us was to have us write our own City of Grief. We were directed to envision our grief as both a tangible place, and one with tangible elements. She wanted us to transport to our grief city within our own minds, and then, without too much forethought, to begin cataloging where we were.

She asked us to venture off to a place in the house where we were holding our workshop to find a comfortable area to sit, either here at the dining table, on the welcoming overstuffed sofa in the living room where a coffee table book featured the very house we were in, or maybe outside on the sun blanched veranda next to the glistening pool. She then instructed us to settle in and write, unencumbered for the next ten minutes about what we saw, heard, smelled, and tasted in our city. She directed us to envision it all as a living, breathing place we inhabited, rather than merely the grief inhabiting us. She coaxed us to explain who was there, what state the city was in, and how we felt walking through it. We were to take the perceptions and emotions of grief and translate them into our conceptualized city to serve as a guidebook for others to walk though; should we choose to invite them in. And, as a relic for us to examine at a later time. The scenes we penned were as varied as our experiences themselves, but connected, too in the way loss weaves its own tapestry of sorrow and longing. Witnessing each of these mothers bear their grief in ways they were putting to words for the first time was transformative. Our tapestries of grief grew to include each other and our collective losses from that moment on.

What would my grief look like today had I not tethered my boat, once adrift to these grieving mothers? Where would any of us be had we not gathered inside our circle in the sand four years earlier and solidified our bond? Since our first meeting together, while we’ve all attended additional groups, workshops, and even made individual connections, we continue to regularly meet collectively with each other. We write to honor our children’s lives, to tell their stories, to find some humanity in these losses. We write to survive and to help others survive as well. We hold space in our hearts not only for our own loss, but for our lives as mothers of loss, as writers, and women who know the intimate power of connection.

Life is a state of constant change. Over these last four-plus years there have been births, adoptions, moves, divorce, retirement, and even additional losses. We’ve been there with each other through it all as our relationships continue to deepen and grow through the many facets of our lives. When we meet to hold our check ins, we nod and smile, we cry at times, we feel and give the space the be felt, to be seen and heard, and then we get down to the business of workshopping our writing together. Our text thread is a continual stream of encouragement. It’s our connective tissue. We celebrate the wins each time one of us has a piece of work published just as we bemoan the rejections, and we do so as a collective unit.

The love I have for these women is unparalleled. I am my most authentic self around them. It doesn’t matter our age, religion, social status, geographic location, or any other diversifying factors, of which there are many. What matters is that we see into each other’s hearts and make space in our own for the realities of our experiences, over and over again. When I unfold the roadmap of my grief and take a moment to consider what my City of Grief would look like today, I know there would be a home for each of these women in it.

Eggshell Heart

I Could Write of Ghosts as Dead Things