Writing Poetry through Grief by Florence Wetzel
Why do so many people turn to poetry to express their feelings after losing someone to glioblastoma, even if they don’t consider themselves poets?
Watching my dear friend Sara battle GBM for seventeen months and coping with my grief afterward were experiences I found difficult to articulate. The emotions were extremely intense, and I was often overwhelmed by them. I was also unsure how to discuss my feelings with others without minimizing Sara’s heroic struggle or my own bottomless sorrow.
To put it another way: What do you say when there are no words to describe what you’re experiencing? What words arise from the place of no-words?
One of the hardest feelings to describe is how I still sense Sara in my life even after her death. I find great comfort in the belief that Sara still exists in an invisible way. This feeling is hard to convey, but poetry helped me find a way.
And I’m not alone. I would like to share three excerpts from different poems on grief that elucidate this feeling. The first is from “A Poetic Account of Grief and Loss” by Caroline Snedeker, which is the first blog post on this website:
His body wraps me in warmth
As the summer season descends
I absorb his love
As the sun burns my body
The next excerpt is from the book The Fighter Remains by Alexandra Mazza:
now,
you live amongst the sunset.
i,
still earth-side,
transfixed
by its view.
The final excerpt is from my book Sara My Sara: A Memoir of Friendship and Loss:
Sara was still with us.
Luminously invisible
wonderfully iridescent.
There she goes!
Dancing through
waves of stardust.
Flying free
like a scent
a sunbeam
a symphony.
It’s lovely that all three of us found poetry to illuminate the experience of our loved ones living on within nature. I found genuine relief in setting these words free, and my guess is that writing was also a healing balm for Caroline and Alexandra. Just a little bit of comfort, but even a small amount is welcome at such times.
Why not give it a try? You don’t need a writing degree or extensive knowledge of poetry to get started. Poetry can be written using whatever is at hand, be it a laptop, a simple notebook, or even scraps of paper. You can write while relaxing in a park or from the comfort of your home. Writing can become a daily habit or an occasional burst of inspiration, depending on your mood and schedule.
My approach to poetry is to write freely. That means letting go of formal sentence structure, punctuation constraints, and grammatical restrictions. What emerges might not follow a logical order and can almost feel like dream-speak, especially for words that arise from the place of no-words. The resulting lines may be few, but that makes them all the more precious. And of course poems can always be refined and reshaped after that initial burst of inspiration.
The magic of the blank page is that it can hold all of the feelings we found so hard to express. We might well be surprised at the beauty flowing out of our fingertips. An even bigger surprise is how poetry can bear our grief, and allow us to shape it into something we can hold and maybe even share.
Sometimes life takes away the people we love in a brutal fashion. But life also gives, and discovering the alchemy of putting words on paper can provide comfort as we move forward without our beloved person. Perhaps it can even be the start of a new adventure.
Book Tips: Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones offers practical advice and inspiration for tapping into your inner writer. Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers beautifully blends prose and poetry to explore the depths of loss. Alexandra Mazza’s The Fighter Remains is a spare, eloquent book on grief and healing that includes graceful drawings. The latter book is available on this website on the Shop to Support page, with 25% of royalties going to Gray for Glioblastoma.
Florence Wetzel is the author of Sara My Sara: A Memoir of Friendship and Loss, which is also available via the Shop to Support page on this website. She is delighted to partner with Gray for Glioblastoma and will be donating 25% of her royalties from Sara My Sara to the organization.
