Writing Through Grief

Two weeks ago, my wonderful mother died. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she passed away in my arms. One final slow exhalation and she was limp. Gone. Grief has bowled me over, set me totally off course. It was the week of publication for THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER and I was bouleversée, as the French say. Devastated.

Nevertheless, I have crept to my desk every day. I have turned up for work, as it were, to stare at my screen and attempt to write. I have temporarily abandoned the novel I was deep in before I lost my green-eyed Irish mother, but other less challenging exercises keep me in my seat.

I began with three simple words. Mummy is dead. Brutal, but a fact. A line drawn across the page of the rest of my life. Everything I live, experience and narrate from hereon will be marked by that line. After typing those three words, I went into super organizational mode. I wrote lists. To Do lists and then lists of Mummy’s favourite flowers, colours, music, holidays we spent together… While out walking, I started noticing what she might see, what she enjoyed, talking to her as I stepped or paused. She loved trees. All trees. I wrote this down; all the memories of Phyllis that included trees.

For funeral reasons, I flew to the UK, to the town where I grew up and where she is to be buried alongside my father. I started taking buses. In her days of solitariness before she came to live with Michel, my husband, and I in France, she used her Freedom Pass to go out into the country on buses. Offering herself ‘days out’. I noted down what I saw: banks of egg-yolk yellow daffodils blossoming surprisingly early. New housing estates, the names of local pubs: The Wheatsheaf with brightly coloured petunias hanging from baskets.

A mere spattering of dried leaves on trees. The kindness of the funeral director. The pattern on the sheets in the guest house where I was staying. Mummy’s habitual breakfasts, which I began to choose for myself, as though to keep her company, as though the sharing of a banana might bring us physically back together. And then I looked into my emotions, the behaviour of my husband who is also grieving. He has gone into obsessive cooking mode.

All these words, these observations, do not make a novel or even a short story, but they are a bridge forward, helping me to do what I do. I write. Through sorrow, joy, grief and the ordinary, uneventful days. Although what is an ordinary uneventful day when you can spin off into worlds within your imagination? Or when you understand that your life has changed forever?

I am attempting to weave the chaos of pain that is swirling about within me into a tapestry of material which may or may not find its way into one or several of my books further down the line, but more importantly for me, at this time, the process of writing calms me, gives me stability. It helps me to bear the grief. It does not heal me – not yet. But, as was the case with every other crisis or loss in my life, the structuring of words, the chronicling of my emotions works as a stake to keep me upright. An arrow to direct me forwards.

Grief is one of the themes that run through my new novel, published last week, THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER. I based my experiences when I was writing the book on a different loss I had experienced several years ago. Each loss has its own personality, I am now discovering. Its own set of circumstances. And different notes of pain. And joy.

Yes, there is joy in grief. There are the memories of joyous times. Of moments shared. Of foolishness and frivolity when life was there for the taking and the days were not numbered, were not overshadowed by darkness. The fear and trembling before a funeral. Also, a tiny frisson of excitement at sharing someone you have loved so deeply with others who have loved that same precious person in their own individual ways.

There is jealousy. There is anger…

Well, whoever you are, if you were writing this you would have your own list. What matters to me is that, by spending an hour or two each day at my desk describing past experiences, remembered moments, arguments, tenderness, I am writing. I am dragging the experiences out of myself and giving them a rough form.

My mother will never leave me. She will journey with my spirit. She is entwined with my spirit and she is slowly settling herself into my creative world. I don’t know yet in which forms or guises she will resurrect herself. In which books she will appear … Perhaps not as a whole, a fleeting gesture, a ring on her finger, her painted nails, her laughter, her sorrows. She is embedding herself within my work. And although I have not been writing my novel. I have gone through a process each day that is essential for me. I am a creature of habit in that I need candles burning – at least two – on my desk. I cannot work with music. I need silence. I need the door to my recently-constructed studio to be firmly closed. I hate to be disturbed.

Ernest Hemingway famously commenced his writing day by sharpening pencils. It was his method of beginning. I like to think of that process as Preparations to Dive, to sinking beneath the surface of the water to the place, the subconscious, where the stories, the images are whirling about waiting to be netted.

During these past two weeks since my mother died I have been drawing her into that room with me; the room where the most unlikely events take place between the screen and my inner self.

It is the magic of writing, and nothing in the world feels finer than when that magic begins to work.

I am learning to trust in the ‘magic’ of the writing process. Scenes play out while I am asleep, the characters go where they want to go and take me along with them. The story is there. I am only scratching at the darkness to reveal it. And I know for sure, or almost for sure, that Phyllis, my mother, will be there somewhere to reveal herself when she is ready and weave her spell.

—

Carol Drinkwater is an Anglo-Irish actress, author and filmmaker, best known for her award-winning portrayal of Helen Herriot (née Alderson) in the television adaptation of the James Herriot books All Creatures Great and Small. As an author, she has achieved bestselling status with her much-loved memoirs of life on an olive farm in Provence.

Find out more about Carol and her books on her website www.caroldrinkwater.com/

Follow her on Twitter @Carol4OliveFarm

 

 

Tags: featured, grief, inspiration, the forgotten summer, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing