ABSTRACT
This [book] is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed [the death of my husband], weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad.…
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Creative writing and journaling is a good way to begin to tell the daily events following the death of our loved one. It can be a doorway into alternative endings to the story we don’t want to have to tell ourselves: that our loved one has died. Gently we move into creative ways of telling our stories, writing down the details of each moment so we won’t forget. The written story has a different texture from the telling of our story of loss and grief. For weeks and months we will be unable to express all of our feelings and memories in a coherent fashion. But gradually a whole picture will slowly emerge: fuzzy at first, perhaps unintelligible to anyone else. Sitting before our journals blankness faces us from the page and from our minds, and then we write a word, a feeling, a thought, and gradually
a sentence, fragment though it may be, and then several thoughts, memories, or feelings emerge one after the other.
