Category: Grief/Loss
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Beyond Kubler-Ross, memoir as a new language for grief
Her enhanced ability to express her feelings pulled her out of the darkness and opened her toward other people. Like a spelunker lost in a cave, she sensed that by following the fresh air offered by letter-writing, she might find her way back to the surface.
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Unwrapping the gift of birth somewhere toward the end
If she shares the sorrow of her situation in some places, even misery, I’m okay with that. Because I expect her to follow the genre’s premise: that as she strives to cope with her situation, she will find kernels of truth, and even joy.
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Tragedy and courage in memoirs
After all these years of reading memoirs, I’m deepening my understanding of the grieving subgenre, and seeing how the horror of loss leads to the wisdom of acceptance. In Losing Malcolm by Carol Henderson, the author almost goes mad. To compensate me for accompanying her to the depths, she lets me climb with her to…
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Wisdom Born in One Memoir Inspires a Second
Memoirs often crush me with human suffering and then, in that fallen state, I accompany the protagonist, trying to find the lessons that will help us survive. In fact, the very nature of storytelling lends itself to the search for answers. In the beginning of every story, the protagonist sets off on a journey to…
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Make sense of loss: Grieving in Memoirs
To turn this sequence into a continuous narrative, we look for lessons from other authors who have done the same thing. Here are several examples of memoirs that describe the journey of grief. Each book demonstrates how to collect the upheavals of life into the container of a story.
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Revealing Death and Other Courageous Acts of Life
Then it was my job to turn the audience’s attention back to their own goals. I realized there wasn’t enough time to conduct a real workshop, but in the small amount of time available, I wanted to convince everyone that the problems of writing a memoir are solvable. “When you look back through your memories,…
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Courage to Write, Passion to Read
Before I even purchased the book, I knew from the blurb that the author was an English Literature professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. I knew that “Courage to Walk,” was about the crippling and potentially deadly illness of a second son, and I knew about the death of Robert and Linda’s oldest…
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A memoir of mourning helps make sense of loss
Now I realize after reading “Losing Jonathan” that I loved the Waxlers’ memoir for similar reasons. Like Kate Braestrup they were on a quest to wrest their sanity back from the abyss. At first they were thirsty for support from their community. Then, after five years, Linda suggested, “We should try to write a book.…
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Catch-up grief: how visiting my brother helped me grow
As I write my memoir, these 32 years later, I discover the gaping hole his death created, as if I was postponing my grief until I was mature enough to better understand what happened. I now watch our relationship unfold in slow motion, and this time I intend to learn as much as possible about…
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