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Ever since my daughter died, and even before that most terrible day that changed the course of my entire life, I have written fervently about my grief. I can’t not — it feels like a therapeutic impulse, and one that I am so glad that I was already tapped into before she left her body at the end of January. There is no ‘right’ way to manage your grief. There is no guide, but what I do know is that grief is big and dynamic, and it needs to move — it needs places to go when it hits you in one of those terrific waves that you only read about until you are forever changed by the experience of it taking you under. My grief can go to places that cause more grief, be that anger or blame. A better place for it to go is onto the page, whether that be digitally on here, or good old messy pen to paper in my ever more shocking handwriting when I do my morning pages.
I have always enjoyed bending words to make sense of my reality, since I was little, but there’s something about grief that gave me a whole new language. I notice it with lots of bereaved people I’ve met. You do not have to be a ‘writer’ to write about your grief. It doesn’t have to be shared, although it is a magic kind of service when it is. There is something about the most profound and perpetual of heartbreaks that cracks open a literacy in you. Why not take advantage of that? Even if just for your own benefit.
I started writing mostly for myself, but I quickly realised that what I was sharing was providing some kind of outlet for others too, and that made me feel much less alone. It also gave me a body of work. In this article, I’m going to share my experience of how I got my grief out from a stagnant place in my heart and into the world of people who are ready to share in it. Writing will not annul the pain of grief, because nothing can, but it will synthesise it into something you can live alongside. Read on for the exercises and techniques that have helped me move through the process and create something tangible along the way.
Grief on the inside, mourning on the outside
I mentioned my morning pages in the opening section, but what I have actually come to refer to them as is my mourning pages. If grief is the state, then mourning is the emotive action — the kinetic energy of grief, and the way we process it. Processing grief will not remove it, but, as I mentioned before, it lets us live alongside it. We can become consumed by it, but we can also be moved by it.
The distinction is not just poetic, it is physiological. When we keep grief unexpressed, held only on the inside, it has nowhere to go. The psychologist James Pennebaker spent decades studying what happens when people write about their most difficult experiences, and found that those who put the hardest things into words showed measurable improvements, not only in mood but in immune function and long-term physical health, compared to those who wrote about surface matters or did not write at all. The act of moving an experience from the wordless interior onto the page seems to change something significant in the body, as though the grief, once given language, no longer has to shout so loudly to be heard. This is why I distrust the advice to simply stay strong and keep busy. Busyness is grief held in, the page provides an outlet for that grief.
Perhaps your morning pages today could become a mourning page — maybe they already are, because we are all grieving something even if we don’t realise it. So here is your first mourning page prompt:
Set a timer for ten minutes, and write a single sentence at the top:
“right now, my grief feels like.”
Then simply keep going, without stopping, without correcting, without any concern for whether it is any good. Let the sentence pull whatever is underneath it up onto the page, however jagged or repetitive or strange. You are not writing to be read, not even by yourself, and you can easily never look at what you’ve written again if you wish. You are moving the kinetic energy of grief out of your body and out into the open, where it has room to breathe. When the timer stops, you can simply close the notebook and walk away. Maybe you’ll read it later, maybe you won’t. Either way the process has begun.
Giving yourself permission
To reduce writing through grief as “just journalling” is a dismissal. It is not purely sentimental as we have seen from Pennebaker’s research, but deeply physiological. It provides a therapy the results of which are palpable and measurable.
For me, my mourning pages are not complete without the observations I make after I have put the pen down. I approach it almost archaelogically, looking for the physical and energetic evidence of how the spinning of my grief into a tapestry of words has created a noticeable effect within my body.
If this appeals to you, try it as a short practice of its own. When you put the pen down, sit still for a moment and move your attention slowly through the body, the way you might scan a room you have just walked into, noticing what has shifted:
Start at the top and move down. The head, the jaw, the throat, the shoulders, the chest, the belly, the hands. Take each one in turn.
Ask each part, without words, how it feels now compared to before you began writing. You are not looking for anything in particular, and you are not trying to change what you find, only to notice it.
Notice any easing. Perhaps the tightness in your throat has loosened, or your breath is reaching lower than it was a moment ago, or a heaviness that had no name before you wrote has lifted a little from your chest.
Notice if nothing has changed. That is worth registering too, and it does not mean that the pages have failed you — sometimes they settle more slowly, over a matter of days.
You do not need to be a ‘writer’
I know previously published writers who have not put pen to page for years, and I also know people who write every day, but still would not dare refer to themselves as “writer”. The saying “writers write” is in place for a very good reason. It is a vulnerable practice, especially if you are looking to get published, because there is a very good chance that some people will not like what you have to say, but that is not the point — especially when it comes to writing about grief.
Society doesn’t like grief very much. It is not pretty and it cannot be placed neatly into any box, because of the way it crosses over with, and often encompasses so many other big emotions. Therefore, you have free reign. Some people might not like it, and many will find deep comfort in what you have to say — because your words will be giving them permission for their feelings that they may have not, until now, been able to articulate.
And if you think that the fear of not being liked, or not being good enough, belongs only to beginners, take comfort in the fact that it never really leaves anyone, no matter what stage of a writer’s career. Some of the most celebrated writers who ever lived were plagued by it. Franz Kafka instructed his friend Max Brod to burn every unpublished manuscript after his death, so convinced was he of their worthlessness, and had Brod obeyed, we would have lost The Trial and The Castle entirely. Maya Angelou, after publishing her seventh book, said she still woke each time thinking, uh oh, they're going to find out now, that she had “run a game” on everybody and was about to be exposed. Sylvia Plath filled her journals with anguish over her own perceived inadequacy. John Steinbeck, a Nobel laureate, wrote in his diary while working on The Grapes of Wrath that he was not a writer and had been fooling himself and other people.
How to start
The hardest part is beginning, because it feels like the first incision of a scalpel with no anaesthesia. However, the deeper you go, the more you balance the pain of that first cut with the immense relief of the pressure of what you’ve been holding within. You can approach it a little bit like a meditation practice. I don’t meditate as consistently as I would like, but when I do remember, I try to keep it simple — first thing in the morning, with a timer to keep time. There was one point in my life where I meditated for twenty minutes, sometimes twice daily. That feels overwhelming to me now, so I start with two or three, and build up slowly. It is much the same with my writing.
When I began writing weekly, here on substack, consistently from around the time Ruby was diagnosed, I found one paragraph quite laborious, and I struggled to keep the thread of what I was saying if life took me away from my draft for a day or two, as it so often did. Now, I have written hundreds of articles and the first draft of a novel. This has taken me years, but it no longer feels like a chore, because I have built by writing resilience muscle slowly and steadily.
So, much like a timed meditation, set a timer today, even if only for two minutes and just write. Two minutes is nothing — it is shorter than the time it takes the kettle to boil, and you can bear almost anything for two minutes, including the first cut. Do not plan what you will say. Do not wait to feel ready, because readiness unfolds and unfurls only as you start. When the timer starts, put the pen on the paper and keep it moving, and if you genuinely cannot find a word, write:
"I don't know what to write"
over and over until something underneath it surfaces, which it will. When the two minutes are up, stop, even if you have found your flow, especially if you have found your flow, because leaving a little wanting is what brings you back tomorrow. Then do it again the next day, and the next. Not for longer, just for the same small, survivable two minutes, until one day you look up and notice the muscle has grown. That is how it builds — not in great cathartic outpourings, but in two honest minutes, repeated, until the page becomes a sanctuary of a sounding board, rather than an impossible mirror to look at.
Write to them, not just about one
This one can be particularly painful, so it might not be the one to start with if writing your grief is still quite new. For me, this method of writing proves to be the most cathartic. I don’t usually publish this work, it is just for me and Ruby, and I find that I need a dedicated space in which to do it, with a generous buffer of time and space either side — especially after, to catch whatever colossal waves crash in as a result.
If you feel ready to try it, give yourself the conditions first, because this one asks more of you than the others. Choose a time when you will not be interrupted and when you have nowhere to rush off to afterward, and if it helps, light a candle or hold something of theirs, anything that signals to you that a door is being opened. Then:
Address them by name. Begin with “Dear” and write to them as though the letter could reach them, because on some level it will.
Tell them something they might not know. What has happened since they left, what you have been carrying, what you wish you had said, what you are grateful for.
Ask them the questions. The ones with no answers. Write them down anyway.
Let it be unfinished. You do not have to reach a resolution or a neat goodbye. You can stop mid-sentence, mid-thought, and come back another day. The conversation does not close.
To share or not to share
In our modern, algorithmic world, we might have come to associate sharing with broad and indiscriminate proliferation of content. Sometimes, where the fragile matter of grief is concerned, that isn’t appropriate. That doesn’t mean that we can’t give our words oxygen and visibility — it might just look different.
James Pennebaker, whose expressive writing work we met with earlier, found that the benefits deepened when writing moved from pure private catharsis toward something shaped for another to receive, because the act of making yourself understood helps you bring order to what have might once felt chaotic — to find the words that act as messengers of empathy across the chasm between two hearts. Grief researchers describe this as one of the key functions of mourning — that it is inherently social, and that it wants for a witness. Psychologist Kenneth Doka, who studies what is called disenfranchised grief, has written extensively on how loss that is never witnessed by others tends to calcify, whereas grief that is seen, even by one person, begins to move. Sharing, then, is not vanity and it is not exposure for its own sake — It is the difference between grieving into a void and grieving into a mutually held space.
So if the open platform does not feel right, and often it will not, there are gentler rooms in which to be witnessed. You might write a letter to one trusted friend and actually send it, choosing a single reader rather than a wider audience. You might join a bereavement writing group, in person or online, where words are read aloud into a circle of people who understand and are asked to receive rather than to fix, which is a very different thing from posting into a feed. Grief specialist and bereaved father David Kessler offers these kind of spaces. You might also choose to share with a therapist or a grief counsellor, who is trained specifically to receive what you want to share, and protect its privacy. You might read a piece aloud at a memorial, or slip it into a memory box, or write it into a shared document that only your family can see, so that the words are witnessed by those that are grieving the same person as you are.
I hope that this article will serve to inspire your writing journey. If you have read until now, then you know that you are already on the path to your first written piece. And if this isn’t for you, do consider sharing it with someone it might help.
Thank for reading. Discussion and reflections are welcome in the chat below.
Elle. You say writing 'doesn’t have to be shared, although it is a magic kind of service when it is.' As one of your readers, I can confirm that it really is a magic kind of service.