How writing changes when you lose a loved one

Losing my grandmother has been impossibly, unbearably difficult, horrible at times. The parts she added to me, to my life… they feel broken and empty.

It makes writing hard—when you’re empty. It changes your writing, and it changes you.

Writing hasn’t been the same in the last two months, and it won’t ever be again. It will never return to the phrase media likes to use when recovering from tragedies: “Returning to normalcy.”

It makes my job, my desire, to be a journalist even more incredibly difficult. It’s just an added self-guessing, of the things I write.

Lately, I’m forcing myself to write. Even though it feels like pulling muscles, even though I don’t feel like writing. This hurts, and feels like there’s a part of me that’s hollowing out. I can’t remember a time since I was 14-years-old (when I first fell in love with writing) that I didn’t feel like writing.

My grandmother died peacefully on the evening of Oct. 6, 2015. She died, rebellious to the end, as her next door neighbor (an LDS bishop) was blessing her.

Kicker alert: My grandmother and our family are Jewish.

She was my biggest supporter when it came to my writing. And for the last several years, she only asked one thing from me: To finish my book.

I didn’t finish the book before she passed away, and I am so sorry.

Maybe one day I will. But right now I can’t look at it without crying. I can’t look at it without thinking about how my biggest supporter will never read the words. How she will never leaf through the pages, hear the creaking of the spine as she cracks it open for the first time, or smiles or screams or cries or laughs as she slams the back cover shut—finally finished.

What an interesting parallel to the way she lived her life, and the way it ended.

But another part of me doesn’t want to finish the story. I want to leave its pages unfinished and the words incomplete, just like her life.

Or maybe it’s that secretly I feel if I don’t finish the book, if I don’t type “THE END”, I can try and pretend to erase time—to back track and make up for it.

A week after my grandma died, I attended a Tao drumming circle for a reporting class. I thought I would be able to sit back, relax and just observe.

Well, that just wouldn’t do for the drumming circle leader or apparently whatever karmic force exists in the world. At probably the most normal point in the evening, she made me stand up and pick up at least two tarot-like cards with illustrations of animals on it.

I picked up the bear and the polar bear. In a nutshell, they both represent peace, invulnerability and power.

Honestly, I just felt like my grandma was pulling strings from wherever she was (heaven or hell, if you believe in that stuff) and messing with my head. It really doesn’t come as a surprise to think she was messing with me. In fact, that’s exactly what she’d probably have done if she were still alive.

And the truth I’m realizing now is that while I may have felt invulnerable, peaceful and powerful like those animal tarot cards told me I did, I don’t feel that way now.

I don’t feel invulnerable, and I don’t feel powerful. And I definitely don’t feel at peace.

In fact, I feel extremely vulnerable and uncomfortable. I feel disrupted, and not at peace at all.

Some people said that my grandma was too young. Honestly, everybody is too young — no one should ever have to go.

But they do, and that’s the trouble with time: You think you have enough.

I don’t have forever to write, to breathe, to run, to play, to sing, to love. I don’t get that time, and I won’t pretend that I do.

And you shouldn’t either. Because one day you’ll get a phone call that brings you to your knees in the middle of a crowd of elated, screaming girls on bid day. Because one day you’ll have to be brave and step up despite the fact that you are shaking with fear and anger and pain, and write your grandmother’s obituary because “you’re the journalist, the writer.”

It’s been just two months since she passed away, and this is first time I’ve written something of my own desire and free will since then.

It’s not normal, it will never be normal and it hurts.

But it’s a first step.