Letters from Grief

When words ease our pain

It took seven years for me to journal about my grief. As a writer, you’d think turning towards the pen would have been my natural way to process losing my sister Tracy to a rare form of cancer.

Instead, I turned away.

Writing was the fastest route to my emotions, and truth be told, the last thing I wanted was to feel my pain.

Some might say I was in denial. That wasn’t true. I didn’t deny she had died — I just didn’t want it to be true.

Writing had always been my way of making sense of the world. When things went sideways, I reached for my pen to process what had happened and figure out my next steps. Sometimes my words came out a jumbled mess. Other times, they transformed into poetry. One poem won me a trip out to Vancouver for Expo ‘86. I was 18 and Tracy was 15. Our dad brought us. It’s still a trip that makes me smile.

My words really did shape my world.

So why did I struggle to pick up the pen? Decades later, I understand it was my way of avoiding the pain of ‘being with’ my grief. I excelled at raising money, focusing on the future, and keeping Tracy’s memory alive through the Relay for Life and building classrooms in Nicaragua in her honour.

I didn’t do grief well.

So what changed?

Seven years after her death, I decided to review all of my mom’s journals — the ones she began after Tracy’s cancer diagnosis. For a qualitative research assignment, I thought it might be enlightening to study her experience, code the entries, and interpret them. There were 10 journals. I read them on the seven-hour train journey from Ottawa to St. Catharines, confident I had plenty of time to read, code and analyze them.

By page six of the first journal, I was a blubbering mess. I couldn’t contain the tears pouring out of me. I just didn’t have enough tissues. Still, I continued. Page after page, tears blurring the words together — each a reminder of all we had lost.

Something shifted after I completed the last journal. I was transformed. My grief needed expression. I also knew I needed to understand what was happening to me. I wrote the assignment, earned an A+, and vowed to turn inwards to meet my grief more fully.

Dr. Alan Wolfelt, a renowned grief educator and psychologist, has made supporting the bereaved through life transitions his vocation. He operates the Center for Loss and Life Transitions in Colorado, having supported hundreds of bereaved people and trained thousands of people in his ‘companioning model’. I studied under him in 2019 and launched a Grief Companion Program to train coaches and mental health professionals in bringing a companioning ethos to our work.

Grief work is soul work.

So much became possible once I learned to befriend my grief. Note that I say befriend and not tame. Grief isn’t something to suffocate, repress or silence. Our grief isn’t an illness to get over or push aside. As Charles Doka, another grief expert, says “Grief is neither a disorder nor a healing process. It is a sign of health itself, a whole and natural gesture of love. Nor must we see grief as a step towards something better. No matter how much it hurts – and it may be the greatest pain in life – grief can be an end in itself … a pure expression of love.”

So how do we process our grief? What are some of the ways we can befriend it? What might be our first step toward understanding what happened to us?

For those seeking genuine grief support, I’ve curated a Letters from Grief Practice for my paid subscribers —

a community committed to expanding our collective grief intelligence. It will take a village of compassionate individuals to reclaim our humanity, beginning with acknowledging grief as a natural human experience.