Tag Archives: loss

Tragedy and courage in memoirs

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by Jerry Waxler, author of Memoir Revolution: Write Your Story, Change the World

Recently I read a terrifying memoir about a mother’s loss of her baby, Losing Malcolm by Carol Henderson. The book takes me on a journey of primal fear.

First, I ride her wave of unbridled hope for the new life growing within her, culminating in the otherworldly surge of love when the baby is born. The wave crashes when he is diagnosed with a life threatening birth defect. The surgeons lift her spirits from the depths of despair by offering hope for a rare risky neonatal open heart surgery.Losing Malcolm Carol Henderson

Long ago, I stopped exposing myself to fictional horror. Stopping monsters just isn’t worth the emotional turmoil. Now I ask myself why am I willing to accompany an author on her real life horror. To answer that question, I compare the two types of emotional journeys.

In both forms of storytelling, the evil is too great to be stopped by ordinary people. Additional help must be recruited. For example, when aliens from another galaxy invade earth, the military mobilizes. Eventually the military wins, the killing stops, and order is restored.

In the tragic memoir, Losing Malcolm, the “villain” at first is death. If the baby’s defective heart cannot be repaired, all hope is lost. The specially-trained heroes are called in. But when the risky heart surgery fails and the baby dies, the enemy instantly shifts. Death is no longer the enemy.

Now, the antagonist in the story is despair. Despair threatens to destroy the main character’s sanity, and disrupt her grip on the very meaning of life. The psychological horror of despair threatens to unravel everything. To defeat despair the hero must journey back to wholeness.

Perhaps reading a grieving memoir is a learned skill. When I started reading memoirs, years ago, I sometimes ran away from a book with too raw and painful a topic. But over the years, as I have grown more acclimated to the genre, I no longer slow down to ask myself “why should I put myself through that experience?”

By now, I have read many grieving memoirs. Throughout each one, I keep turning pages, accepting the hero’s pain as the price I pay for the generous, uplifting ending. The victory at the end of Losing Malcolm is the psychological realignment of the hero’s attitude and direction, so that she is able to absorb that tragedy and move back into a world that once again makes sense. By my willingness to walk hand in hand with an author who has been to the depths, I am also treated to the pleasure of that author leading me back into the light.

The pleasure of reading Losing Malcolm is enhanced by excellent story construction, a compelling writer’s voice, and a sprinkling of powerful inline excerpts from the author’s contemporaneous journals. These passages heighten the sensation of being right there with her. Good writing can’t remove the pain, but it does let the story reach deep into my heart, while I remain safely in my comfortable chair.

Reading memoirs has enhanced my appreciation for the many aspects of being a human being. By learning from each author’s journey, I become a deeper person with a greater range of understanding for the complex experiences my fellow humans must undergo. When I close one of these books, I feel not only wiser about the presence of evil in the world, but also about the uplifting power of courage and hope.

Writing Prompt
What situation in your life brought you so low you felt there was no point in going on, or you didn’t think you had enough sanity to even survive? Write an overview of the situation. Write a scene that shows your despair. Write another that shows your journey back to hope.

Notes

Carol Henderson’s Losing Malcolm page
Amazon link for Losing Malcolm

Other grieving parent memoirs of lost babies:
Angel in my Pocket by Sukey Forbes, Amazon link
Life Touches Life by Lorraine Ash.  Link to my article

Memoirs by grieving parents of young adult children
Leaving the Hall Light On by Madeline Sharples Amazon link
Swimming with Maya by Eleanor Vincent, Link to my article:
Losing Jonathan by Robert Waxler, Link to my article

For brief descriptions and links to other posts on Memory Writers Network, click here.

Immersed in a Memoir about Life, Love and Loss

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by Jerry Waxler

Read how our collective interest in turning life into story is changing the world, one story at a time.

I wrestled with the decision to read Eleanor Vincent’s memoir, Swimming With Maya about losing her college-age daughter. Did I really want to experience so much pain? However, memoirs about suffering also offer the author’s courage and personal growth, two of my favorite features of memoirs. After I previewed the writing style and assured myself of its quality, I dove in. By the end, I felt fulfilled and inspired by the author’s journey through heart-breaking tragedy to find meaning and dignity.

Early in the book, the author’s daughter Maya dies from a freak accident and as a result, the mother can’t face life. Stuck in agony about her lost daughter, she herself is lost. The quest to find herself carries me through the book like a rafter on rapids. On every page, I wonder, “how she is going to learn to live again?”

Jumping into the memoir Swimming with Maya feels like an immersion in love and longing. The author’s love for her lost daughter is nearly overwhelming, larger than life, larger and deeper than everything. Eleanor Vincent spends every waking minute torn between the past and her own need to figure out how to move on.  The love story of a child who is gone forever vibrates with authenticity and power.

During this long period of grief she grabs onto every possible technique to reduce her pain. She attempts to keep her daughter alive by savoring every moment they had together. And since she believes in life after life, she even talks to Maya and feels her presence. In an unusual twist, Maya also lives in the chest of a man who received a heart transplant supplied by the dying girl. Caught by her fixation on her daughter, Eleanor establishes a relationship with this organ recipient and his family.

Eleanor Vincent’s grief is made more complicated by fears that she caused her daughter’s accident. Was she a bad mother? What could she have done differently? She feels trapped by these questions. Her obsessive guilt is yet another way she keeps Maya alive, turning their relationship over and over in her mind. She rips herself apart to get to the bottom of why she raised Maya so poorly.

This period of self-examination reveals many unattractive aspects of her own life. Her impulses to leave men for no particular reason, to betray men, to move on a whim, put me in an awkward position. I feel judgment rise in my throat. I don’t like these choices. She should have provided a more stable environment for her children. At the same time, I admire her for exploring herself, looking for meaning and answers.

This strange bittersweet mix of criticizing her actions and admiring her willingness to examine them provides one of the most profound gifts of reading memoirs. Rather than looking at this clumsy mothering from outside and clucking my tongue in disapproval, I’m inside her mind, with her, trying to figure it all out.

To overcome her obsessive guilt, she talks to her therapist about her own childhood. She grew up in an environment as chaotic as the one she gave Maya. Her own history gives her clues about her own bad mothering decisions. Then she dives one level deeper and pieces together her own mother’s story. Her mother too had a chaotic childhood.

The story of Eleanor Vincent’s inquiry into her past reveals another profound truth about reading and writing the stories of our lives. Behind each of our stories, are more stories, and as we peel them back and watch the layers fold and unfold, we become wiser about the way life works. This is therapy at its best and soul-searching memoir-writing at its best.

The way she peels back the layers of generations  puts her in the same category as Linda Joy Myers, Don’t Call Me Mother. Both memoirs offer insight into the multi-generational cause of family behavior.

Long Middle Gives Room to Grow and Change

During an epic story such as Lord of the Rings the hero must go through many trials and lessons over a long period. The sheer length of this long middle provides the hero with enough time to incorporate lessons into the fiber of his being. By the end of the story, he is essentially a different person than he was at the beginning.

Eleanor Vincent’s journey works in a similar way. She starts out with nothing but the pain and memories of a lost daughter. Then she gradually fills in blanks, while attempting to become a more accepting, wiser person. Her memoir is not only about gathering information. It’s about growing over time. A book with such a profound character arc fills me with hope about the human condition.

Some of my favorite memoirs achieve this goal, of growing over time, deeper and deeper, until the character at the end of the story thinks differently than at the beginning. Many of these are grieving stories, perhaps because grieving forces us to rethink ourselves in such profound ways. *

At the end of Swimming with Maya, I look back across the ground we’ve covered. From gut-wrenching sorrow, the exploration of many bad choices, and the search for new ways of growing, Eleanor Vincent relentlessly, courageously seeks comfort and insight. In gripping page after gripping page, her self-examination raises many intricate responses in my heart and mind. Judgments… compassion… wishing for a better past… working with her toward a better future. Watching her reactions and my own helps me grow wiser about this profound challenge of living gracefully despite death.

Amazon link to Swimming with Maya:

Eleanor Vincent’s Website

* Memoirs about the Long Journey to Maturity and Wisdom
Madeline Sharples, Leaving the Hall Light On about her survival of her son’s gruesome suicide, and many years of effort to move on.

Dawn Novotny, Ragdoll Redeemed about a woman who was sick of being limited by her passive self-image. Living in the shadow of her step-mother-in-law Marilyn Monroe. , She grew psychologically through the course of the book

Susan Richards, Saddled is a fascinating journey of a woman trying to find herself. A horse helped her grow.

Mary Johnson, Unquenchable Thirst showing her long journey into and through Mother Theresa’s religious organization, Missionaries of Charity.

John Robison, Look Me in the Eye shows a deeper understanding of self despite Asperger’s

Slash Coleman, Bohemian Love Diaries is about his attempt to find a deeper self. By the end of the book, he is wiser but reveals that he has not completed the journey.

More memoir writing resources

For brief descriptions and links to all the posts on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order Memoir Revolution about the powerful trend to create, connect, and learn, see the Amazon page for eBook or Paperback.

To order my how-to-get-started guide to write your memoir, click here.

To order my short, step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

Make sense of loss: Grieving in Memoirs

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by Jerry Waxler

Read how our collective interest in turning life into story is changing the world, one story at a time.

After losing a loved one we are hurled into an emotionally pressured period called “grieving.” Words can’t contain the initial shock, so we turn to ritual. After the funeral, our loss moves inside, throbbing as a constant reminder, later surfacing in random moments. Whether we overcome the shock quickly or linger in a demoralized state for years, the world has changed forever, breaking time into parts, before the loss and after. Gradually, we reclaim our strength, but we are not sure if these parts can ever be knitted together.

When we first approach our memoir writing project, we look back across the landscape of our lives. Our research awakens scenes, before, during, and after each great loss. Placing them in order, we revisit the whole sequence, from the joy of companionship, through the tragedy of the loss, and the courage to climb back.

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.

Love letter to the deceased

Gail Caldwell’s memoir, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, is like a love letter to her perfect friend, Caroline Knapp. The book celebrates their friendship and then passionately reveals the journey beyond their friendship. In Gail Caldwell’s beautiful book, death cannot steal such a precious bond.

Losing a child

In the first half of Losing Jonathan by Linda and Robert Waxler, the parents try to drag their son back from the brink of addiction, and then after his death, they must come to terms with their grief. The book offers much wisdom about the role of philosophy, literature, and community support in the journey to cope with loss.

Losing a husband and finding a path

At the beginning of  Here If You Need Me, by Kate Braestrup, a young mother loses her husband in a freak auto accident. Then she must raise her young children, and at the same time make peace with God’s plan. To achieve both goals, she decides to earn a living as a minister.  In seminary, she studies the Bible, delving into it not as the final word but as an inspiring source to help her learn and grow. I love her brand of seeking, a mix of organized religion, faith, and real world observation.

An essayist describes her own grief

At the beginning of Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s husband dies suddenly and she turns her prodigious powers of observation on herself, describing the resulting thoughts and feelings. Unlike other writers in this list, Didion did not reach toward a spiritual system or a belief in the transcendent. The absence of this dimension turns the tragedy into a barren ache that leaves me feeling helpless in the face of mortality.

Grieving and seeking are intimately related

Generally the word “grieving” describes the journey of recovering from the loss of a loved one. Similar emotional repair is often needed after losing anything we love. After the tragedy of 9/11, we realized that normal life could suddenly explode and turn into a nightmare. Our sense of safety was dead, and we had to find our way back.

Dani Shapiro’s memoir Devotion is about her journey to recover from both types of loss, the death of her father years before and her need to make sense of the fragility of life. She explores that sadness, and the need to make sense of it, not only emotionally, but more importantly, to find belief in something greater than herself. In “Devotion” the process of grieving becomes intimately related to the process of seeking a higher truth.

My Family’s Grieving

There is no particular time frame around grieving and in fact the process can be substantially delayed. When my brother died, I was in the middle of a confusing period of my life. I did not process my feelings about him until thirty years later when I saw the whole sequence come to life in the pages of my memoir. By writing, I was able to feel a closer connection to him and deeper understanding of my own feelings.

In the development of my memoir, I also saw how his death shook the family and how each of us came to terms with it in our own way. Decades after my brother’s death, my father still appeared to be shaken. Like other men of his generation, he remained silent about his emotions right up to the end. My mother on the other hand, went on a journey of self discovery. She learned from yogis, rabbis, television preachers, and books. Over the years, I watched her grow. Even as she became wiser, she was never satisfied and continued to learn.

Writing Prompt

What loss have you touched upon in your memoir research? Write a scene before the loss, when you felt an innocent, joyful sense of connection. Write another one soon after the loss, then several more scenes later, as your emotional response evolved. Set these scenes out on a time line, and graph the ups and downs of one of your emotions. Try hope for example, or faith. Fill in additional scenes along the line to offer you and your reader a richer understanding of the evolution of this emotion over time.

More memoir writing resources

For brief descriptions and links to all the posts on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order Memoir Revolution about the powerful trend to create, connect, and learn, see the Amazon page for eBook or Paperback.

Life with a famous parrot, Alex and Me by Irene Pepperberg

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by Jerry Waxler

I first learned about Alex while I was on a spiritual retreat in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. Our host played a video of a talking African Gray parrot named Alex. Alex’s trainer, Dr. Irene Pepperberg held a tray of objects and asked questions. For example, she asked “which square?” and the parrot answered, “green,” because the square object was colored green. She asked “which same?” and Alex correctly said “key” because the keys were all made of cork. He even concocted his own words, for example describing an almond as a “cork-nut,” a word he was never taught.

Tell me more about that parrot

Alex was cute, zany and unpredictable, and while Pepperberg watched him learn, he was teaching her about the mind of a bird. His bobbing head, hyper-alert eyes, and clever voice mesmerized me, making me an instant fan. I was not alone. Everyone who saw Alex fell in love with him. A few years later I heard that the parrot died, a loss that surprised and saddened me. Then I saw the memoir “Alex and Me” by Irene Pepperberg, and thought, “Hey, I know that bird!”

The book starts with Alex’s sudden, unexpected death in 2007, followed by the outpouring of sympathy from around the world. Pepperberg read a sampling of the letters and obituaries from Alex’s many admirers. As each one played upon my heart, I was amazed at how much compassion they stirred. Like a group hug, Alex’s well wishers were drawing me in to Pepperberg’s pain.

Outpouring of compassion creates secondary compassion

I looked for a similar effect in my own life and remembered my mother’s memorial service. Her old friends came up to me and said “You were lucky to have such a great mom” and “I admired her so much,” and “We miss her.” Later, I turned their comments over in my mind, and was awed at the complexity of emotions.

How much were they seeking to support me, and how much were they hoping that somehow my presence could help them relieve their own grief? These moments showed me how intertwined we all are. During our communal grieving, we were each trying to make sense of what just happened, while supporting each other as we moved forward.

Writing Prompt
When in your life did empathy flow towards you? Was it related to the death or illness of a loved one? Or did others reach out to comfort you when you were in the hospital yourself? Describe the scene, keeping in mind that it will give the reader an opening through which they too can feel connected.

Emotional Bonds to Our Companion Animals

Dr. Pepperberg and Alex were close companions and so the book turned out to be a buddy story between human and bird. Sharing genuine emotions with animals has become widely respected, as evidenced by the runaway success of “Marley and Me,” by John Grogan, a memoir about the author’s relationship with a dog.

To make the relationship even deeper, Dr. Pepperberg showed how it evolved over the years. At first, she tried to maintain distance in order to create an objective, scientific perspective. She worked with him closely for years. Then after Alex died, Irene cried and cried, making her and her readers realize how deeply emotionally involved she had become..

Writing prompt
List your pets, and other encounters with critters. When you remember a scene, stop listing and start writing. See if you can string a few scenes together to show how the relationship changed over time.

Structure of a story, beginning, middle, and end

Every memoir writer seeks excellent story structure. Pepperberg’s memoir offers a couple of insights. For one thing, she grabs our attention with a bang, shocking the reader into the midst of the action, a technique the Greeks called “in medias res.” Then the story returns to the beginning, and moves forward through the long middle, towards an ending that resolves the dramatic tension. I love this structure.

Writing Prompt
What powerful event can you start your book with, to grab readers and yank them into the action. Worry about the transition to the flashback later. For now, just consider what event would get readers into the thick of your story.

Alex and Me ends with a Personal Witness to the Evolution of Knowledge

At the end of Alex and Me, Alex dies, as we already knew he would. So how does an author finish a book about loss? Pepperberg has chosen to review what Alex contributed to her and to the world. It turns into a poignant eulogy that contemplates a life well-lived, during which, Alex contributed not only to his trainer but to the world’s understanding of humans and other animals.

Considering his brain was the “size of a shelled walnut,” the vast majority of scientists were confident that Alex could not possibly be learning as much as Pepperberg claimed. But she doesn’t need to debate her findings with me. Even though I don’t have an advanced degree in bird brains, he seemed pretty smart. In fact, I believed that the other scientists were wrong and Pepperberg was right. It turns out that most people believe they know more about their own companion animals than scientists do.

Irene Pepperberg’s experiments herald a sea change in our attitude towards animal intelligence. With incredible persistence and love these two creatures demonstrated a thinking capacity that science had not yet imagined. As Shakespeare said, “There are more things in heaven and earth than your philosophy dreams of.” After reading “Alex and Me” I can feel this little creature’s beautiful influence on Irene Pepperberg and everyone else he touched. And their relationship touched me. My respect for pets, for intelligence, and the evolution of knowledge has been expanded by this loving connection between a scientist and her little winged companion.

Writing prompt
Do you have a story about your pet that demonstrates intelligence, loyalty, curiosity, or other “human” characteristics? The writing exercise may come in handy in unexpected ways for comic relief or to help readers identify with particular situations in your life.

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Note
Click to visit Amazon’s page for Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence–and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process by Irene M. Pepperberg

Note
According to Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” science regularly changes its idea about what is True. My favorite example is that in the 20th century, all neuroscientists claimed that brain cells can never grow, but only die. Around 1995, science changed its mind. After the shift in perspective, scientists have agreed that adults can use their brains and grow. In fact, if you don’t use your brain it will die. This sort of shift in Truth from one decade to another is an ordinary occurrence in the history of science. And so, to study science is to study the constant evolution of ideas.

Note
For another book that shows how the brain has a capacity for wholeness, read Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight – in which she was forced outside the box by direct perception. Click here for my essay.

Note
For another example of starting in the middle of the action, see Bill Ayers’ Fugitive Days. Click here for my essay about Fugitive Days.

Note
For another famous buddy memoir read “Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog by John Grogan”