Writing Through Grief Workshops

By Joan Monheit

When I was twenty-five my mother died of a brain tumor; two months before her forty-ninth birthday. Though this happened almost thirty-five years ago, it is a fact that still defines my life. I flew back to Detroit from my home in Berkeley, California to help my father and younger sister take care of her and to be with her for the last two months of her life. This was just at the beginning of the hospice movement here in the U.S., before emotional and practical support for dying patients and their families in our homes was available. We took care of her ourselves, with the assistance of some nurses' aides, but without much outside guidance.

Each morning my sister and I would take turns getting up to feed her breakfast. Oatmeal and applesauce, spoon by spoon by spoon. On my mornings I'd wake with a stomachache and wonder how I would get through another day just like the one before. What would I say to her today, how could we have a conversation when she could no longer make words, how could I walk in, again, bring her a glass of water, straighten the covers on the hospital bed in the gold room that used to be my adolescent bedroom?

My sister and I got through the time by playing backgammon and watching "One Life To Live." Death was on TV, too. One of the main characters in the soap was in a coma; the drama centered on the question of whether she would live or die. Each day, we'd tune in to see if she was still alive. A character on the new dark comedy "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" had just died by choking on a matzo ball. It helped to have it outside of us, to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Sometimes a friend or relative would offer to stay with Mom for a couple of hours. Then my dad, sister and I would all get to go out and run errands together, or we would go to Joe's Bar and Grill for a hamburger. I was drinking scotch that spring. I tried to read Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's Death and Dying, hoping to understand the five stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, acceptance. Trying to figure out which stage I was in. But my emotions kept changing from one to the other and back again, when I wasn't just numb.

Every night, before I fell asleep, I would write to my best friend back in Berkeley. Those letters, describing in minute detail how I was taking care of my mother, what I was thinking and feeling, and how my dad, sister and I were interacting, were my lifelines. I could tug and I knew someone was at the other end reading my stories, that there was a world waiting for me outside my parents' house where my mother lay dying.

It's clearly no coincidence that as I was working through the grief for my mother, I began to work with others as a grief counselor, first as part of my school of social work fieldwork, and continuing as I became licensed as a clinical social worker in 1984. Not only did this help me in my own grief process, but I also needed to provide others the kind of knowledgeable and compassionate support I never received myself at the time my mother was dying. I led groups for partners of people with AIDS and others who were close to them; I led groups for people who had lost loved ones to cancer. I worked for many years as a social worker for a hospice, working with people with AIDS and sometimes getting to accompany families with a dying member through the process I had experienced with my mother.

Though I have always kept journals, in the early nineties I began exploring more possibilities for writing creatively. My first poetry class was taught by poet Kim Addonizio through a community college. One of the initial writing exercises she gave us was to make a list of gifts we had received, and then choose one as the subject of a poem. I ended up writing about my first experience of death, the death of my grandmother, my bubbe. In the voice of nine-year-old me, I described my experience of feeling lost, going up and down the stairs, outside, then back inside, where people were sitting shiva, then outside again, inconsolable and alone. That poem, though not very well crafted, enabled me to express a profound early experience of grief that I had never shared with anyone. I felt the change in my body. Now that I had expressed this painful experience, gotten it out on paper, it was no longer buried inside of me.

In January of 1994, I offered my first Writing Through Grief group and I have been facilitating these groups and workshops in various formats ever since. Although it's been over sixteen years, I continue to be in awe of the power and mystery that writing holds – how it helps people heal and transform their lives.

I've watched many people write themselves through their grief, simply by putting down over and over again all the important details and experiences. Getting it out can help us manage our grief. One widow in her late fifties braved her fear of being overwhelmed by despair and began writing the experience of her husband's suicide, exercise by exercise. She found that despite her fear, as she wrote the details of what happened, and her experience now, after his death, she began to become more and more comfortable with her deep pain, and her anguish became less and less.

A man who wrote about the loss of a friend to cancer some years ago used writing to explore, in the present, what he hadn't let himself be aware of then. He was able to feel his deep regret at what he and his friend hadn't communicated. Through his writing, he was able to express all the thoughts and feelings he hadn't shared: his love, his anger, and how he missed him even now.

People often experience surprise at what emerges through their writing. A widower in his late seventies was surprised, as he wrote about his dead wife, that his pain lessened, and he actually felt consoled by the happy memories of their long life together. Another woman was amazed, that, as she wrote and rewrote her experience of taking care of her dying alcoholic and abusive father, she lost much of her fear and gained tremendous compassion for herself and for him. These are all examples of the power of writing. Writing can help you say what you need to say; it can help you bear the unbearable; it can help you find out what you don't yet know; it can provide healing you didn't know possible.

Here are some poems written by members of my ongoing Monday evening Writing Through Grief® group. The writing suggestion was to write poems based on one of two Japanese poetic forms: the haiku or the tanka.

Haiku For Autumn

Birthday comes again
predictable as dead leaves
crowding my front stairs

tears salt the compost
grief rotting in the backyard
waiting for the spring

     Stacia Biltekoff

Falling

Time for leaves to fall
Everything has its time
cycles, recycles.

     Michelle Roos

Solstice

Sadness seeps in on
shadows cast as light returns.
Always the balance.

     Carolyn Cavalier

A Lazy Woman Ponders Change

Change is hard she thought.
Change for the better, harder.
But no change, no joy.
She felt joy coming closer.
Eager she was, to dip toes.

     Lori Berlin

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