12 Tips on Writing About Grief

Write about specifics, not generalities. What was lost will always feel specific. Also, the experience of grief is specific, the circumstances specific.

Write sensually. How grief feels visually, tactilely, smells, how it sounds. Write about every part of the body experiencing grief. This is not a time for social niceties. Grief sometimes smell of vomit or pee.

Write real emotions, even the unpleasant ones. Grief often comes out as anger. Or terror. Or sometimes a numbness that makes doing even the simplest tasks impossible.

Grief isn't rational. Don't try to write the reasons for the turns of grief. Sometimes there are no reasons. There are only things that set it off and those may make no sense and no pattern.

Part of grief is laughter, relief, and pleasure. Don't forget to balance the nasty side of grief with this other side. Those who are grieving are those who live on, and part of living is good. Always.

Grief is about guilt. Guilt is about control. If we can see what we did wrong, we can make the past ours again. We can change what happened, or at least make sure it never happened again.

Don't write about some stages of grief crap that you read in college. If you really have never experienced grief yourself, go talk to someone who has. The stages of grief do not usually map well into reality. And no one feels like they are going through a stage.

Grief is never over. There's no closure to grieving, so don't pretend that there is. Every moment you think it is gone, it will come back and strike again.

Remember that whatever problems you see come out of someone after a grieving experience, they were there before. They don't suddenly appear. Grief may trigger a more intense reaction, but people are basically who they are.

If you think that grief is a group experience, as one of my therapists suggested to me, I think you're crazy. Grief is a solitary journey and no one, even those who are also grieving about the same thing, can really go along the same path. Many people who are grieving will push away all contact with others because it is simply too much work to grieve and deal with relationships at the same time.

Some people find a way to memorialize their grief in some majestic way, like founding a charity in the name of a loved one. Some people go on a pilgrimage or other great quest to find closure. These people are not better and are not dealing with their grief better than others. They are dealing. That is all.

Remember that the people who are trying to “help” the grieving person are often going to be the ones who are targets of a backlash. This is partly because the anger has to go somewhere, but it is also because people say the stupidest things in the face of someone else's grief. Seriously, stupid.