I'm a crier. A big messy horrid crier. I can't help myself. I sob in books, movies, TV commercials, etc., so you can imagine what I'm like around death. I flood.
Strangely, for all the tears I shed, I feel like my emotions are all bottled up inside. I can't talk for the tears. Tears make everyone uncomfortable, which makes speaking even more difficult. Everything is caught inside - except the moisture.
Writing seems to be a way I can talk about the pain of loss.
In The Healing Season, it's a young person (Alicia) grieving the loss of another young person (Paul). I don't think I knew anyone who died while I was growing up, or at least not close to me. A girl in my school died, but she was a few years below me and I didn't know her.
As soon as I moved out of Sydney it was something I came across almost immediately, even if indirectly. Car accidents, farm accidents, and suicide seem to take a lot of rural youth, suddenly and shockingly. One moment they're there; the next gone. How on earth do you cope with that? As an adult it's difficult. As a teen or young adult, when life's finally ready for living your way, how do you find a way to go on living when death strikes close to you?
As a new driver, if your mate is killed in a car accident, how do you have the courage to drive again? When you're in a budding relationship, how do you have the courage to love again after your partner dies? If you're at school and a bunch of your classmates are killed at once, how do you keep going back to the classroom?
It takes courage to cope with loss, huge amounts of courage. But there's also the way your body and mind kind of shuts down after loss, at the same time the world keep going. Societal norms force you to keep putting one foot in front of the other, so you keep moving mindlessly forward, almost unaware that you're still living.
Grief is a strange time, when odd things may happen. You may find friends where you didn't expect to find them. While at the same time, you may lose friends you thought were lifelong. People around you can act strangely - some more remote, some smothering. It's a time when you aren't really you; and yet you see depths of yourself you didn't know you had.
I don't believe that anyone goes through grief in the same way, and I don't think every loss is the same for a person, because of individuality and the different relationships between different people.
I don't understand loss or grief any better for having explored it through writing, but I am glad that I have a way to explore a complex emotion.
Alicia's grief isn't my own grief, although there are parts that are similar. Alicia's grief is her own. I know she's a character I made up but she was quite insistent about the way she grieved. When I was writing about her relationship with Lachlan, she was happy to be friends with him. But I felt I needed more intensity in the relationship and I kept writing about them kissing, and then the words stopped. I had to delete the kiss I wrote, and tone down the relationship, before I could continue writing. And I know that sounds nuts...but if Alicia kissed Lachlan too soon, her story didn't work. Nothing I could do to change the way I write.
Alicia's grief doesn't belong to me or anyone I know. It's hers. So it probably doesn't belong to any readers either. Grief is personal. Very personal. But I hope reading someone's struggle might help make a reader's struggle less. I know I've often turned to sad books when I've grieved, just to reassure myself that I was 'normal'.
If you're grieving, I hope the pain of your loss can be comforted with precious memories, and I hope you will one day find peace.
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