How People Use Writing to Help with Grief

How Writing Can Help With Sadness

This is a tough subject, but it’s important. Most of us suffer grief in our journey through life and for some writing will help with that grief.

C.S. Lewis in a 1963 letter to American scientist Thomas Van Osdall, with whom he struck up a correspondence late in life, the author wrote of his sadness to learn that Van Osdall’s only child, Thomas, had been killed in a car crash at the age of 18, in 1962.

Lewis, recalling his own grief at his wife’s death, wrote: “You tell a most moving story. I too have lost what I most loved. Indeed unless we die young ourselves, we mostly do. We must die before them or see them die before us. And when we wish – and how agonizingly we do, o how perpetually! – it is entirely for ourselves, for our sakes, not theirs.”

At the passing of his wife, Lewis wrote: “A Grief Observed.” At the passing of his mother, he wrote a book too.

Write short stories that help you process.

I read recently of a man who lost his pup to lymphoma after 14 years together and he said during that time that writing a short story helped him cope with the loss.

Writing short stories can be very comforting. It isn’t overwhelming like a novel and you can get out the feelings you want to in a short amount of time.

With a short story you can capture a moment, a feeling, or a memory that otherwise might have slipped away.

Write characters that are inspired by your loved one.

I recently read of another man that also experienced immense grief. He lost his young boy.

He said he wrote fiction to help cope with his loss. He even made a character like his boy.

He said that putting his boy’s personality into the character, seeing him on the page helped him feel more at peace than any therapy.

Writing about him made him feel better more than anything in years.

Write what inspires you.

Writing just like creating music or artwork seems to be very helpful and cathartic when dealing with pain, suffering, and loss.

When we feel our most pain emotionally, an overflow of that pain can be turned into something useful. It can be the creation of something else.

For years, I personally dealt with depression, and something that seemed to make me feel a little better was writing music.

The pain was hard but I am grateful for the songs that came out of it and what I have to remember from those times.

Even these days writing for this blog helps me in an emotional way that is difficult to describe. I want it to succeed, but even if it doesn’t, I imagine I will be grateful to possess the writings and the learning and growing that came of it.