Grief, Loss & Recovery: A Web Resource for Writing About Loss

In my own experience, one of the most powerful things a writing workshop can offer—and perhaps especially a workshop on writing and healing—is a kind of template of what is possible. One person writes a story—or a poem—or a something—and this calls forth a story or a poem or a something from another person. I’ve seen this over and over. Seeing someone else find words for an experience that had before been inarticulate can, often, make it more possible for another person to find words.

In this spirit, I decided to offer a link today to Grief, Loss & Recovery, a site which offers poems and articles that have been posted by people experiencing loss. If you decide to visit the site you’ll discover poems and articles written by people who have experienced a range of losses, including the loss of children, of spouses, of parents, and the losses engendered by illness.

One particular article that caught my attention is one entitled “Healing Power of the Pen,” which turns out to be a moving article by a woman, Alice J. Wisler, written four years after the death of her four-year-old son, Daniel.

She begins her article this way:

The first year after the death of a child is like having the worst noise possible running through your head each day and night. There is no way to turn the horrendous sounds off because there is no off button. I wrote through that noise. . .

She writes of carrying her journal to a particular spot beneath weeping willows at a local park and writing there. She did this, she says over the course of many months, and she observes, with the benefit of hindsight, how her writing moved along a progression similar to that of many of the psalms: “starting with anger and agony and, gradually, ending with hope”.

She writes of how writing can begin the process of transforming devastation:

We enter into our devastation, get a good grip on what our struggles are and something about seeing them on paper causes us to realize the pain is not only within us anymore. It is shared, even if only on a sheet of notebook paper. It is documented and the more we write, the better we are able to understand and deal with our intense sorrow.

Ms. Wisler offers such a deeply felt and hard-earned template of what is possible: moving from the inarticulate—the worst noise possible—those horrendous sounds inside her head with no off button—to the articulate. Moving from noise to words. Moving, over the course of many months—and perhaps years—from a place of devastation to a place where she is able to understand and deal with intense sorrow.

Comments

[Alice J. Wisler]

Thanks for writing this and for your kind words about my article.