Setting It All Ablaze

Good Morning Grief mates:

I want to tell you about my retreat weekend, but it’s so emotionally hot I’m not sure it’s ready to be put down in words.

Here are the things I can say:

I learned that the reason I am up at 4 am every morning — sentences banging around in my head. I’m writing to make sense of myself. God that makes so much sense. Writing and therapy. Same same.

I learned that while there may be competition to publish there is no competition to write. No one can tell your story. The only loss might be in the not telling. Not to the world, but yourself. We just start by telling ourselves our story. I sat with some of the most emotionally generous women storytellers (well, that’s just the truth) who said, “keep writing.”

Kripalu is famous for its yoga and its amazing food. I did not do a single yoga class and I tasted things but I couldn’t eat. I can’t make sense of either. I did, however, walk the labyrinth in air so cold it froze my thighs and stopped my breath.

Dani Shapiro (Devotion, Inheritance, Hourglass — -Thank you, Lindsey Mead Russell) was soft and generous, and brilliant. I went into the weekend wondering, “can you really teach me writing?” The answer to that question is I am an idiot. Dani Shapiro can teach writing. The question is can I learn?

What follows is a short piece I wrote after Dani explained “tacking points.” Moments in your life where, like a boat tacking, you change direction because you were blown off course or you won’t make it to your desired destination without switching winds. In my world, tacking points are called a trauma timeline.

I’ve tried to write about this time in my life a hundred times before. It’s my story, but as Nora McInerny says (No Happy Endings) I’m grief adjacent — not the person principally affected, but impacted nonetheless. I am testing my faith that if my words hurt anyone who owns the emotional copyright to this story, they will know that I’ve long had trouble stripping the pain out of love, but love is where it started.

And Dani said write it anyway, so I wrote it anyway. She gave us 15 minutes.

“I remember I wore my sister’s espadrilles to the funeral. They were too big, and I felt self-conscious. As if an eight-year-old at a sixteen-year old’s funeral could feel conscious.

Just a few weeks left of summer. The county fair, sleepovers and more swimming. How could there ever be any more swimming? My older brother, you know, the one who found him? He played me Pink Floyds’s “Wish You Were Here,” or maybe he didn’t. As if an eight-year-old could invent Pink Floyd.

A few weeks and it was back to hometowns. Back to normal. Be normal. A Family run to Marshall’s to replace the shoes I couldn’t find all summer. You can wear your sister’s shoes for a summer funeral, but the first day of 3rd grade? That’s a bridge too far.

Two weeks into the highest level reading group we finish “Where the Red Fern Grows” and Elizabeth Benson is beside herself because the dog dies. I don’t know because apparently I don’t know how to read anymore, but I do know I hate Elizabeth Benson (decades from this moment Elizabeth’s husband will die suddenly, leaving her a widow with a young son. I won’t have seen her in over thirty years, but I will spend the whole day crying nonetheless).

But in Third grade, I call her an idiot. I tell her dogs don’t matter more than kids and grown-ups can’t even keep kids safe. And Ms. Rose, a woman my eight-year-old self felt bad for because she was single and didn’t even have a man (I will come to understand she was likely a lesbian, and inherited misogyny and prejudice takes years to unlearn), Ms. Rose will say,

“What is wrong with you Meghan? That is enough.”

And then it will be years. Years of complicated feelings gone inward. Years solidifying I was the problem — not that no one ever spoke Chris’ name. Not the fact that adults, in their own profound pain, seemed to disappear.

He drowned and we were all there not to save him.

And I was drowning in the silence.

In the silence, grew my story.

Was I the only person with burning embers of feeling? If they managed to break through into the light where the people were, then I would be pushed into the darkness.

And the light would likely set the whole thing ablaze.”