A Memoir from a Grieving Therapist by Sally McQuillen
by Sally McQuillen
I began writing to my son Christopher twenty-one days after he died at the age of twenty-one in an accident. I wrote to connect with him. I wrote to let him know how I was feeling after he left his beautiful body and went somewhere I wasn’t yet sure existed. Most of all, I wrote because of my great need to have him know how fiercely I love him.
Reminiscent of the love letters I began to write upon his arrival nearly thirty-one years ago in April, I just wanted all that overwhelming pain and affection to have a destination. It started out like entries in a diary. I typed notes into my phone each day as if I was texting my son, a few lines at a time. I cry incessantly. Where are you? My heart has been ripped out, I can’t find you and I can’t find comfort. Over time, these entries developed from making my yearning known, to writing about what it was like to raise my wild child from the edge of my seat. I wanted to capture his life story, reconcile my decisions, analyze our relationship, and make meaning of what happened by identifying the life lessons he taught me while he was here and through his death.
At a certain point, I realized I was attempting to stake a claim over his life’s contents and possibly even operating under the magical thinking that writing to him could bring him back to life.
As I wrote, it both brought forth more tears and sopped them up. Writing enabled me to put words to a loss so dense it simultaneously had me spinning into space and struck as if by lightning. Questions were posed and answers sought as the words flew from my shattered heart. Could there be any value in sharing words I was collecting to show people what grief over the loss of a child feels like?
As had been the case so often true throughout my life, if you were looking at me from the outside, you might conclude that my blonde highlights, wide smile, and high energy were evidence of a life entirely unscathed by life’s harder handouts. But I have always wanted people to get a more complete picture of my life.
Writing a memoir could be an opportunity to reveal the innermost tender corners of my felt experience. In those first months, eviscerated and reaching, I began to wonder whether writing a book could not just provide an inside look at grief over the loss of a child (since it is happening to way too many of us), but also whether writing could save me.
I, like many grieving parents have done and will continue to do, decided to embark on writing a memoir. I’d nearly forgotten by the age of fifty-two that I had been an English major in college who’d spent afternoons in the library attempting to illuminate nature’s gifts with poetry or describing choreography in a dance performance for the school paper. When, in the first years after Chris died, I began to focus on the craft of writing, I was transported back to those creative days of my youth.
I learned from writing retreats with my new writing group, through writing classes, and working with a writing coach, about the importance of writing in scene, creating tension, including dialog, and showing versus telling as ingredients of producing a well-written story. All of which I wanted to achieve in honor of my son, but challenging to accomplish in real time while I was simultaneously shell-shocked and back at work as a therapist specializing in addiction.
I hoped that it would serve my writing to have such a natural inclination toward the inner landscape of my characters, except that one of the main characters I was writing about was me. I continuously fought the inclination to include repeated ruminations of despair and yearning while also striving to articulate the whole of grief’s intense, complicated layers of guilt and fear. My memoir became fraught with analysis of every move I’d made as Christopher’s mother, prompting reflection on my own childhood and its effect on my parenting.
As a therapist, I appreciated the connection between the fear I carried as a little girl and how it played out while mothering my addictive, full-of-life son. I recognized the panic his death invoked, and knew I needed to do work to lighten my trauma. I tried to lean into the pain and let my tears fall but the truth is, even when I tried to keep my sadness at bay, it couldn’t be escaped. I also knew that there was no better time to offer myself the compassion I so often encouraged my clients to offer themselves. The deeply feeling grieving me converged with the professional therapist me who respects that we are all just here to learn, heal, and grow. I can only hope that this convergence of my grieving, writing and professional self serves the reader. When Reaching for Beautiful launches in April, just as my firstborn did, my ultimate wish is that readers will be lifted by Christopher’s spirit and learn alongside me that love has the power to dissolve guilt and fear. Love is all that matters.
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Sally McQuillen, LCSW, CADC, is a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in addiction recovery, grief and trauma healing. An avid reader with a double major in writing and dance criticism in college, she began working in public relations and marketing prior to obtaining her master’s degree in social work. Reaching for Beautiful is Sally’s first book. She and her husband live on the north shore of Chicago where they raised their three children.
For fans of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking or David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy, this debut memoir about a mother grieving her young-adult son’s death is a must-read for any parent who has lost a child or whose child struggles with addiction.
A luminous story of how love triumphs over pain, love transcends fear, and love never dies; this debut memoir from a mother grieving her young-adult son’s death is a must-read for any parent who has lost a child, is raising a child from the edge of their seat, or whose family struggles with addiction.
When Sally’s twenty-one-year-old son died in a boat accident, her greatest fear is realized. Christopher was often drawn to risk and struggled with addiction. In this riveting memoir, Sally captures the wild ride of his jam-packed life and her deep love for him while reflecting on her own childhood and family’s legacy of alcoholism.
Sally shares insights about what it’s like to experience the emotional aftershocks of acute grief, filtered through the lens of her personal experience as a mother and her professional vantage point as a psychotherapist. Even if they have not been touched by loss in this way, readers may see themselves in Sally’s bittersweet illusion of trying to keep her son safe, in how she is challenged to let go of her fear, guilt, and regret in order to forgive herself, and in the ways grief teaches her about the power of love.
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Category: On Writing
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