Using Writing to Process
Writing as a piece of healing, processing, and recording my life
As part of my work in my annual teaching break, I do some clean up work. That includes super exciting things like taking everything out of the pantry and closet and brutally deciding what goes back. And it includes digital clean up of notes, files, and tasks. As I started this effort with some writing files today, I came across a series of writing I saved from the time my momma was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer to some time after her death.
Anyone who has stared at a doctor as she or he says “pancreatic cancer” out loud, knows the world starts to move in slow motion. And your grief begins at diagnosis because the outlook is still so grim with this cancer (the five year survival rate is now 13%).
Turning to Writing
In the days following Momma’s diagnosis, I needed to dump my thoughts somewhere. Not on another human - all my humans were just as overwhelmed with grief. But I needed to get things out of my head and process my thoughts. I’ve never quite succeeded with journaling but something like a diary to my momma began that week.
I wrote 39 letters to my momma from the week she was diagnosed until two days before she died. She didn’t know I was writing them - no one did then. I was 39 when she died and 40 when I wrote the 40th letter, one year after her death. As I did this week, I revisit them sometimes when I miss her. When I need to remember I can survive her loss and the myriad of other hard things and hard times life presents. I revisit them when I’m afraid I’m starting to lose my grip on her voice, her smell, the touch of her hands with her perfectly filed nails. I find her in my letters, hair still perfectly in place.
When I started writing to my momma and maybe also to God in those days, I just needed a place to dump my brain and how overwhelmed I was. I needed a record of how I was feeling. The screaming at God. The begging and pleading. The acceptance of reality mixed with the stubborn belief in miracles.
The truth of it is - we got a miracle. My momma lived with pancreatic cancer and the unbelievably hard impact on her body until August 2021. Our miracle was time, even if it’s not the one we begged for.
Writing is a Process and It Helps us Process
I can see that record of begging and pleading and acceptance and grief in my letters. There is a huge therapeutic value in these letters and though they are often hard to read - to see how much we were facing and how hopeless it often felt - they are a gift from past me to current me (and probably future me as well).
I have never shared Momma’s letters with anyone. I doubt I ever will. Not all writing needs to be shared publicly despite our culture’s love of posting every unfiltered thought online. There may come a time when I think some of what I wrote should be shared outside of my own re-reading. But the value of having written it and having it to re-read is an important reminder for me of writing for the sake of processing.
Most of us know that writing the awkward first draft is helpful for getting thoughts out before you polish something. Similarly, writing something that you never even revisit or edit is helpful for the same reason. I can go back and see Big Feelings in my writing to my momma that I needed to process. I can see things that were far from true but needed to be felt and witnessed, even if only to myself. I can see the thread of fear of losing her in each letter. I can see my own stubborn refusal to give up hope and I see me holding on to the tiniest light of faith and belief shining in the darkness. There is a nearly fantastical willingness to believe in complete healing - no matter the odds or progression of disease. There is a stubborn hope gripping to the impossibility of waking up and finding her no longer sick, in spite of the arrival of a hospice bed and morphine.
All of this processing was helpful then, but it almost matters more now in the permanence of grief that sets in. The grief of four years after losing her is heavier in some ways, and finding her - and me - in those letters is powerful.
Sometimes when I re-read my letters I am sad seeing that stubborn, stubborn hope. But more and more when I re-read, I am proud of that version of me. I fight to honor that version of me who held on to belief that the tiniest light shines through in dark moments. At my core, that is what I believe and I’m proud that the “me” who held her momma’s hand through cancer could get there.
And that? That’s the value of writing for process, not publication or sharing. We find ourselves in our worst, in our best, and at our core in processing and praying and screaming into the darkness and searching for light. And in realizing that sometimes all of it was prayer after all.