I’ve kept a daily morning pages practices every single day since my daughter Ruby passed away at just two years old. It is a practice that has allowed me to transform my grief from something that could consume me into something that drives me. It has allowed me to live bravely in the sadness I feel. Many of us are grieving something or someone, and we need an outlet to feel it. In these letters, I share my own morning/mourning pages with you, and give you a prompt to start your own. This is for paid subscribers only. My Sunday letter remains free for all.
There is talk of how your life grows around the hole left by the grief, but what happens when that grief is so immense and you don’t know if you have the capacity to match its size with the contents of your life? It got me thinking about whether or not grief to me actually feels like a hole at all. I’ve spent many hours, days, weeks, and now, more than five months, meditating and journalling on the shape it takes in my life. It isn’t really a shape as such, and much less a blank space. It is more a whole than a hole.
I’m always interested to read the many theories and studies out there about grief, but there is nothing like the personal practice of grief to help you understand what it really means. We all grieve differently, of course, and that is why I try to balance these essays with my own, lived experience of loss, whilst also drawing upon different academic resources out there to both support (and sometimes contradict) what I write about in my own mourning pages.
Thursday July 2nd (an excerpt)
Grief is not a hole in my heart, but the whole of my heart, and the whole of my life. That does not mean that all of my life is sad all of the time, but it does mean that my heart now beats with the ferocity of all the love it has lost, along with all the love it has left to give. There will be more love along the way, and parts of life that need to come into being and to join me. How do I add potential to loss? How can I consolidate what is to come with what I’ll never see again? Grief is a thief of the imagination, of inspiration, they say, but I am not sure I agree. It just colours your imagination in a different way.
