Writing Through Grief
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“I was at the dentist and she was dying.” It was the first line to a poem I’d written for a class called Poetry as Performance at Temple University. It was an instrumental time in my development as a writer because it taught me how to use every part of my life experience as an inspiration for my writing. We explored depths of the human experience that will forever bond all of us that were present for that semester.
The poem I’d written was about losing my best friend, Dena White, in high school. Processing her death has been a lifelong process. We were together three days before she died of meningitis. I never had the chance to say goodbye.
In that class, with Professor Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, I explored writing through my grief. Many of us understand that grief isn’t a one-time thing that we somehow get over. It lives with us all of our lives. I’ve written many pieces since then about my time with Dena—my struggle to go on even after many years later and the triggering effect that so many other deaths have on me every, single time. And so, it’s become somewhat of a normal routine for me to write through the things that hurt the most.
Most recently, Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven others perished in a helicopter ride on January 26th. So many people find themselves wondering why the deaths of people they don’t know personally affect them so greatly. It’s only through writing that I’ve been able to process the phenomenon when I realized I couldn’t get through the day without fighting back tears.
Through writing I realized that this is a tragedy, period. Even if we didn’t know Kobe Bryant. The loss of life is devastating no matter what. Because this tragedy included a public figure, especially one who played at the very top of a field that only includes the upper echelon of the sport, his death reverberates through so many other lives. We grieve Kobe, his daughter, and their teammates and coaches. And we also grieve every other loss in our own lives. We try to even fathom what his wife and those other families are feeling. We try to imagine how they go on; not realizing that somehow, we also seem to go on. With every person we’ve lost, we still wake up every day and put one foot in front of the other.
We don’t just grieve Kobe, we grieve a wife that lost her husband, a mom who lost her daughter, a family that lost their mother and father and sibling. We grieve the fragility of life. Seeing Kobe Bryant as someone bigger than life forces us to face our own mortality. If he could be gone in an instant, where does that leave us? How do we ensure that our lives make an impact? If not to the extent of someone like Kobe, how are we positively impacting our family? Our neighborhood? Our workplace?
Writing through what we feel can be an amazing lifeline. It is a place with no judgment. A place where I can explore my honest feelings and best believe there have been many times that tears have stained my pages. Getting it out is so much more helpful than trying to bottle it up. It’s really okay to not be okay. I think we have to realize that truth and if you can, find a way to use it in your work.
Writing is something that I can always come back to. Writing has literally saved my life, helped me to find peace in my most frantic moments and healed my soul when it felt wounded and exposed.
At the end of the class at Temple, we had to perform some of our best pieces from the workshop and I picked that poem I wrote about Dena. I left something on the stage that night that helped me persevere—to wake up each day and know that she will forever and always be with me. I was fortunate enough to share a piece of her with everyone who was there that night.
Take a minute to process and when you have the strength, see where the pen takes you. Writing can be a saving grace. It has been mine, time and time again.
Ashley Coleman is a freelance writer and project manager based in Philadelphia. Her work has been featured in The Cut, Apartment Therapy and more. She’s working on her novel manuscript and tweeting about it along the way.
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