est quaedam flere voluptas

There’s a certain pleasure in weeping, says Ovid. There’s an even greater pleasure in tracing the patterns teardrops make on paper. The silence you hear is me deciding what word to type next. And that sums up what I’m trying to do when I write about grief.

It’s the same impulse that might drive someone else to attempt a difficult form of poetry, say, a sonnet. The aim is to cage a violent emotion within fourteen lines and fixed number of syllables, to make it march to a given set of stresses. The act of writing is in itself healing, a diversion from feeling pain to examining it, cataloging it, giving it a structure and a name. If grief doesn’t have a meaning, it can be forced to have a cadence. Sentences, at least, can be made whole.

In writing about grief I’m lowering the bar, setting myself a task that can be accomplished. I’m not trying to get over it, I’m just trying to put it into words. And description creates distance. As I’ve discovered, you can’t write and cry at the same time. Not even if you’re writing about crying.

Ultimately, the hope is that grief will be reworked, transformed. The alchemy of prose will change lead into, if not quite gold, something shiny and pleasing to the eye. Why am I doing this? It’s really very simple: to shape my anguish into something I can bear.