‘My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.' As a 17 year old, sitting in my high school French class, I remember staring in horror at those opening lines from Albert Camus’s L’Étranger. I was living alone with my mother: my brother was away at university; my father had been out of the picture for a while. My mother and I were each other’s world. Reading the opening lines of that novel, I was shocked at how anyone could not know the exact moment, the second, that their mother died. How it couldn’t utterly consume their every thought. Surely, there are few events as significant as the loss of the person who brought us into the world.
Meursault, the protagonist’s indifference to his mother’s death, to her age, his uncertainty about his love for her, felt deeply alienating - which I suppose is the point of existential writing. I didn’t much like the book, its perspective didn’t feel honest to me. No matter the nature of our relationship, I don’t believe that any of us can ever feel so indifferent to our mothers. The death of a mother, regardless of her age or sickness, regardless of our preparation, cracks us open. It shifts things deep inside us, ignites memories and emotions that come at us in waves and sucks us under.
My mother died at 3am, UK time, on Friday the 2nd of March. In the US, I was putting my girls to bed late after they’d gone out for ice-cream with the cast of a show they’d been in. My mother loved ice-cream. She would take the kids out for ice-cream all the time when we were in England last year. It was the last meal she had in the hospice. Drawing this parallel (the girls eating ice-cream as she was passing), was the beginning of my longing to find some kind of meaning or symbolism in something as unfathomable as her dying. Eating ice-cream has taken on a kind of magical quality for us as a family. Everything does, I think, at times of great transition. Which is why I’m beginning to think that this is an important time to write, even though it’s hard.
I don’t think I could ever have imagined the depth of loss and grief that has lived in me these past few weeks. This feeling of being unmoored from the world because the person who gave me life has gone. It seems impossible that she isn’t here anymore. How could this person, who was so full of life, who had so many thoughts and views on everything, who had such big emotions, who was sending me emails in response to a conversation we had about an idea I have for a novel just a few weeks ago - have vanished?
Science tells us that energy never dies, it just transforms. She was so full of energy: it can’t just have dissolved. But where, then, did it go? Where did she go? I’ve been looking for her everywhere. Sometimes, mostly in nature, I think I catch a glimpse.
I heard a singer-songwriter say, in an interview, that she can never write about something painful that happened to her either in the moment or too soon after. That she needs to wait a while and reflect back with some perspective. I’ve heard writers say this too. But I’m beginning to wonder whether the reverse can also be true. That writing from this raw, painful place, from this place of being cracked open, can allow us to tap into feelings and words and images and metaphors and stories that we don’t usually have access to in the humdrum of daily life. I’m reminded of Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she writes about the loss of her husband and her young daughter:
“Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
She goes on to say:
“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.”
There are two things that I draw from Didion’s words, which I think are important to us as writers. At times of great change, of great loss or transition, daily life recedes. When that happens, when the mundane falls away, a kind of clarity comes. You see what is most essentially human, unclouded by the trappings of the everyday.
There is a truthfulness, an essentialness, a luminosity, in that way of seeing, that we don't often have access to.
Didion also writes about how we go about the world, for a while, at least, in a state of ‘vulnerability, nakedness, openness.’ This, too, is a gift for a writer. We can’t keep the armour on because the armour feels pointless and too exhausting to carry. We meet people on a more vulnerable level and that opens them us up to them too. We connect more authentically. We become more truly ourselves and we see others as more truly themselves. And as more sacred too: we know how fragile their very existence is, and ours too.
The rawness I feel now, with my mother gone, is similar to the rawness I felt in the first hours and days after my babies were born. I felt as though I was in a kind of fog, removed from the world, but there was also a clarity there, a sense that I was tapping into something elemental, something direct and true. It was like, for a moment, a curtain had lifted, allowing me to see how things really were. I remember wanting to hang on to that clarity.
I think it’s what we all strive for as writers, to drill down to those essential truths. In daily life, we need to work hard to get at them. When life cracks us open, we have a more privileged and direct access.
I felt at my most creative. I wanted to scribble down lines that came to me in the middle of the night, exhausted by interrupted sleep. I feel the same now. Of course, there’s a big difference between feeling creatively alive, and actually being able to write. When I was a mother with a newborn the tiredness often prevented me from writing anything. Living in this recent state of loss, after the death of my mother, brings such sadness that the thought of writing feels overwhelming. But still, I know that these windows of time, when our lives are disrupted, when we’re given a kind of clarity, are a gift. I’m not writing chapters and books. I’m not writing for hours. But I have my notebook with me, for when a thought hits me, an idea, a phrase or an image. And I think it’s worth writing those things down, now, even when it’s raw, rather than when it’s been processed, when the edge of this experience has been dulled by reflection. So I’m going to try and keep my notebook open; I’m going to try to keep putting words on the page.
Writing Prompt
We are all living with loss of some kind. Sometimes, ambiguous loss, like the loss of a job or a friend, divorce or a the loss of good health, can be even harder to navigate, because there aren’t the established rituals or protocols. My house is full of flowers and cards and books. This is what we receive when someone close to us dies. Some of us live with loss that others don’t understand or that we feel unable to share but that goes just as deep. Anyway, this prompt is about the things we miss because of the things we’ve lost, whatever shape that loss takes. Interpret it in any way that comes to you. Don’t over think it. Write non-stop for ten minutes (and keep going if you get up some momentum). Don’t look back or edit or let the critic in. This is your time. Start by writing out the phrase:
Today, I miss…
And then keep going.
Adapting Your Writing Prompt
Sometimes, it’s easier to write ‘at a slant’ - and by that, I mean to write through fiction. I process so much of my life through my novels. By acting out my biggest thoughts and feelings and fears and questions through my characters, I make sense of life.
Why not take the prompt above and give it to one of the characters in a story you’re writing on. What does you character miss and why? Tapping into these deep longings and emotions is a great way to get to know your characters, where they’ve come from and where they’re going and what they want.
Recommendations
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
I first came across this remarkable book when I was researching a memoir I was ghost writing about child loss. It’s one of the most truthful, insightful and comforting books on grief I’ve read. It speaks to those of us who see the world through the lens of being a writer too.
The Invisible String by Patricia Karst (author) and Joanne Lew-Vriethoff (illustrator)
A kind neighbour left this on our doorstep for the kids. The death of their grandmother has been the first real loss that they’ve experienced. It’s hit our ten your old particularly hard as she’s known her grandmother the longest. She l oves her, misses her and is like her in so many ways. I gather this picture book is something of an American classic. A story of the love that connects us all, the invisible string, that never disappears, regardless of physical distance and even death. At the weekend, the five of us piled onto my middle daughter’s bed and read it together. It comforted us in a way that sometimes, only a book can.
Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe by Laura Lynne Jackson
My bookseller friend at my local indie, Ashely, who reads through all her lunch breaks in the café where I write, gave me this book when she heard that I’d lost my mother. Some of us are open to the insight of psychics and mediums, others of us are more sceptical. But still, I think that at times of great loss, all of us, whatever our spiritual persuasion, search for signs, for messages, for glimmers of those we’ve lost. This book is all about that. About looking at the universe with new eyes. Of understanding that there’s a different language out there, a different way of communicating with those whose bodies we can no longer hold in our arms.
News & Events
I’m exciting to be on an author panel at NHSMLA’s (New Hampshire School Media Library Association) Spring Conference, Better Together, in Concord, NH. The conference takes place over two days, the 28th and the 29th of March. I’ll be on a panel on the 29th but if you’re local, do take a look at the whole conference, which is full of wonderful authors and speakers. And, of course, we know that librarians are the angels of the literary world, so anything they put on is definitely worth going to!
A Quotation to Chew Over This Week
“Nobody lives a small life. No one is forgotten by the universe.”
Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe by Laura Lynne Jackson
Thank you, as ever, for reading. I know this week was a rather personal post, but I hope that it ignited something. I’d love to know how you feel about writing from a raw place, when you’re wading deep in emotions, versus writing later, reflectively. I also know that everyone is grieving something - it’s one of the things about grieving: we understand, more clearly, the pain of those around us, that to be alive is to live in a perpetual state of loss. My heart goes out to you.
With love, dear friends and keep writing, if you can.
Virginia🤍
Virginia Macgregor is the author of five novels for adults and two for young adults. She has an MFA in Creative Writing with a specialisation in the teaching of writing. She lives with her husband, her three children, her four cats and a home full of books and coffee mugs, in New Hampshire.
While reading this I imagined your creativity as a mostly domesticated horse. Powerful, practiced, and well attended. Being cracked open (I love that description), to me, includes a temporary freedom from walls we require to function. We cannot always be so naked, and vulnerable, and survive, but the experience has much to offer. Your horse is certainly more dangerous and less productive if unbridled, but surely something new, raw, and magnificent is hidden in that freedom as well.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings. I am sorry for your loss. See you soon.
Thank you for this Virginia. You continue to be in my heart.
In 2013, I was in the last semester of my MFA. I lost my son that April, my mother that June. With great love and support, I wrote my way through to graduation that July. My fellow graduates asked me to represent the class as student speaker. I wasn’t sure I could do it. But I did it for all of us. My son was in that speech, my mother, and all I had learned about love and loss thus far. In a horrible year, it was one of the best days of my life. I was supported. I was loved. I was brave. I was vulnerable. I was the writer I had set out to be.