Writing through grief; grief through writing

When logging into this blog, I'm starting to get the feeling I used to have when I attended a writing group in which none of the members wrote very much, if anything at all, between meetings. We'd have a writing exercise and inevitably someone would suggest the topic, "Why I'm Not Writing."

It's not that I haven't been writing lately; it's simply that I haven't been blogging.

When I sit down at my computer to write lately, I've been trying to tell the story of my youngest brother's death. It's a hell of a journey because it took him almost four years to die -- and because the weeks immediately following the car wreck that eventually killed him were a complicated, emotional time. I am on page 20 or so (single-and-a-half spacing), and I have only covered the ground of two weeks, plus some non-linear stories that help the situation make sense.

Technically, I'm writing this story as part of the independent study I'm doing around death & dying. But it seems I am also subjecting myself to a form of grief therapy that I have been thinking for some time is probably useful -- an airing of the entire story one has assembled around a death or other form of loss. Themes and vantage points emerge in this process that I think may offer insight to people who have engaged in a protracted grieving process -- or perhaps have not engaged in one and repressed their grief instead.

The situation with my brother and me is probably a combination of the two. I got pretty fucked up in my head while he was in a coma for those four years. I grieved, but in many ways, I couldn't grieve. While he was still alive, my grief was stifled by hope and socio-cultural ideals. After he died, I grieved, but at the same time, I was feeling really fucking tired of the subject. I talked about my brother to a point, whereupon I couldn't talk about him anymore.

Those who know me well, especially those who knew me during that time, might be surprised to hear me say I couldn't talk about him anymore. After all, I talk about him all the time! But the truth is that I have flattened out the story, simplified it, robbed it of some of its complexity and assigned meaning to events and the people involved that don't come close to doing justice to them.

And so I have started from the beginning, from the point in which an unexpected phone call intruded on my evening and created a sudden dividing line between my one phase of my life and another. I am trying to be as honest as I can, which means I have gone on a little fact-gathering journey. I've called family members and friends and asked them what they recall. I've attempted to get his medical records and the crash report taken by the highway patrol. I've dug out my old writings, videotapes and files and photographs.

Assembling all of the information into a coherent narrative is not all that difficult. But writing about my thoughts and feelings at the time is something of another order altogether. It requires me to re-inhabit that time, those events and my emotions and then try to find accurate words to describe them. It is the most tiresome bit of personal writing in which I have ever engaged. It is also the most personally compelling.

So compelling, in terms of drawing my attention to it, that I could not even finish this blog entry without opening the file and making revisions to the pages I wrote earlier today. It may be ambitious, but I have a goal of finishing the first draft of this story by the 27th of this month, when I am taking a week of vacation in Hawaii.

After I'm done with this draft, I'll have to turn my attention toward the analysis of the themes that emerged in the interviews I conducted with several friends last fall about death and dying. Then, I figure to analyze this narrative I'm writing for the themes that emerge in it. For my term paper, I'll weave those two together somehow and try to make sense of what I've learned in the process.

Theoretically, this will make me a better therapist. But in the meantime, I seem to be applying my own theory about grief therapy to myself. So I wonder what this process will do terms of making me a better-functioning human. Am I on the right track? Or am I just kicking up a lot of emotional and psychic dust?

Either way, I just want to state for the record: I am writing. A lot. Just not so much here.