The Grief-Growth Cycle of Being a Writer

By Megan Aronson

“I’ve been lost and reclusive of late as I deal with the most recent iteration of my grief-growth cycle,” my friend Candace Cahill, author of Goodbye Again, wrote in an online writing group I belong to the other day. “Learning—the hard way, mostly—new things about myself and the challenges still ahead.”

My eyes hovered over her words as her thoughts echoed my own. I wasn’t the only one who’d stopped at the words “grief-growth cycle.” Soon the comments were flooded with ...