Sometimes, an event breaks you wide open, and the end result is a lovely surprise.
That happened earlier this month, when I presented at a workshop sponsored by Grief Support Services called Reconciling with Grief.
I enjoy delivering writing and storytelling workshops. People come to trade tales, talk about their history, their plans and they leave with new ideas about how to share something important.
I enter with my game face— professional (hopefully), friendly (please say it’s so) and with a slide deck full of photos, quotes and activities. I come ready to do this thing.
But I don’t usually have the honor of sitting next to a friend who has recently lost her ex-husband, of talking with her and another presenter before the event, of listening and sharing and shedding tears at the fact life is too friggin’ real and often freakishly short.
I’m dabbing my eyes as I approach the lectern, ready to deliver wisdom - or whatever - about how we can use writing to process grief.
Presentations are never paint-by-numbers— you try to read the audience, pause for questions along the way and skip prepared activities that you spontaneously decide don’t need the time. Yet I can’t recall feeling so real and vulnerable before this particular workshop. I ached for my friend’s loss, for my loss, for the losses in the room I didn’t know about but that were surely present.
I wasn’t trying to teach so much as trying to reach out. To connect. To be real, because like everyone in the room, I was grieving, too.
I skipped over a line in one of my slides that said, “If you feel a need to write your story, do it. There is someone waiting for what you have to share. Sometimes, that someone is you.”
A participant raised his hand and asked me to go back and talk about the phrases I had glossed over. I told the group how I had sat at my desk for hours, trying to un-spaghetti my brain while writing about my husband’s death inside of a memoir years in the making. As I relived painful events, I realized I needed to afford myself the same grace I would give a friend. It’s a lesson I could have only learned by sitting quietly, fingers on keyboard, head in the past and present at once.
I’m thankful my friend was willing to share her struggles with grief when they were still so raw. I’m grateful for a Saturday morning where what could have been ‘the usual’ became a special memory.
With writing, as with all art, we find meaning in the process, not the product. This process has given me perspective and allowed me to be gentle with myself.
I hope you can also find relief, joy and clarity in your own process.
What are you working on? What is it doing for you?