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Bearing Witness to Your Grief Helps Me Carry Mine

Recognizing the grief that others carry

Jacqueline Dooley
Grief Book Club

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Koi Study — Illustration by Author

When I started writing about grief nearly eight years ago, it was from a place of unfettered despair. I was lost without my daughter, wandering, trying to find my way back to some kind of life. By writing about this, I was throwing out a lifeline for myself. I hoped that people — strangers and loved ones and (most of all) fellow grievers — would find me and lead me back to some kind of stable ground.

And this did happen. In writing about caring for Ana in the last months of her life and discovering birds and the solace they gave me and surviving my first Mother’s Day without her, I connected with people. Readers left comments. They emailed me. Friends read my essays and reached out. They sat with me on my porch or went for walks with me.

I didn’t have to explain myself because it was all out in the open, readily available for anyone to read — my manifesto to pain. I used the connections my writing created to climb out of the darkest place of despair and begin to move forward again.

“My bright beautiful light I miss him so very much,” a woman who read one of my essays wrote me about her adult son who died from cancer. “I ask him every day to come home…he loved his life…I am struggling with grief and would love to read

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