When Grief Opens Your Heart
You start a Substack.
Recently, on Inner Life, the wonderful <Mary L. Tabor> wrote about the belief — so widespread as to be considered gospel — that “The really gifted start when they’re so young” and leave the older ones coughing in their dust. You know: Live fast, die young, and leave an oeuvre that will give rise to as many scholarly articles, doctoral theses, and tenured positions at elite universities as there are footnotes in the Gutenberg Galaxy.
But Mary continues: “And now I see there’s an awful lot to know about this.”
May Sarton. Isak Dinesen. Picasso. Degas. Chagall. These are a few of the many writers and artists that Mary cites among those who began careers or reached their peak later in life. I was honored to be mentioned as a late bloomer on Substack, and deeply grateful for the invitation to write a guest post on Inner Life. Along with Mary, I’m here to encourage and give hope.
Life happens. We get interrupted.
Interruptions are not forever.
When my husband died, grief opened my heart. I began to write again.
Writing and grieving are expressions of love.
It’s never too late.
These are the five things — call them ideas, declarations, principles, experiences, or challenges — that brought me to Substack. (Along with unchecked liberty in the use of em dashes and semicolons, of course.)
In May 2022, my husband was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. He died in April 2023. Six months later, with no subscribers, no online presence, and no literary profile, I launched Writer, interrupted.
I found purpose and joy.
And yet.
That last statement seems paradoxical. Am I callous? In opening my heart to happiness, am I dishonoring my husband’s legacy?
I believe he would be overjoyed to see me using what time I have left on this earth to put one word on the page, followed by another, and repeating this action until I’m ready —eyes closed, hands trembling — to hit Publish.
And yet.
As I race to finish this post, loneliness crowds against me in my too-wide bed. Having slept on one side for the forty-three years of our marriage and the two years since his death, I tried sleeping in the middle. But there’s a physical ridge between the hollows our bodies made, and a psychic barrier that shifts me back to the side that should conform to the world I’ve always known. It has degraded.
On the nightstand, a coffee mug bristles with cheap pens. Every time I reach to jot something down I pull out an empty one. And a device that once performed clever tricks upon hearing my voice has devolved into a blank, silent clock face.
The dream dissolves for lack of ink. The smart gadget is dumb. And I don’t have the energy or will to do anything about it.
I pick up my laptop and walk around to his side of the bed.
Life’s interruptions take many forms.
The first time I closed the pages of Alice in Wonderland and hugged the book to my chest, I was seized by a new thought. You can build a world out of words. I had discovered my calling. At age seven, I was a writer.
I wrote in secret for many years, hiding my notebooks. I began publishing sporadically in my twenties: poems, essays, and short fiction. I took writing courses. In my forties, I got an MFA in poetry.
During this time, I was working at a series of unsatisfying jobs. Raising two children. Attending to illnesses: my own and those of family members. Still writing; still hiding my notebooks. After graduate school, I did not find myself on the expected path. Instead of embarking on a literary or teaching career, I had breakdowns. I burned bridges. Smashed opportunities.
I kept writing.
“Grief is a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” ~ C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
A Grief Observed,1 C.S. Lewis’ slim volume of reflections on the death of his wife, has been on my nightstand since I first discovered it, after my husband’s death. The book is not a roadmap. It doesn’t guide you to highway rest stops and little wayside chapels to refresh or comfort you in your sorrow. Instead, it waves you down before you skid off the pavement or hit black ice.
Lewis describes the laziness of grief. To write or read a letter, to shave. Why?
“They say an unhappy man wants distractions — something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy, finally, dirty and disgusting.” ~ A Grief Observed
And why they don’t throw out the pens, and get rid of the clock that can’t recite a recipe for scrambled eggs, because its brain has turned to scrambled eggs.
When I searched “five stages of grief,” the faulty paradigm developed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the first hit was an ad:
Amazon offers products from hundreds of top books at great prices. Get deals and low prices on 5 stages of grief on Amazon.
The second entry, from grief.com, expands this unhelpful cliché. After a loss, we move through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The trope even has a mnemonic: DABDA.
So a map does exist, if you are looking for the small village in Eastern Europe where your great-grandfather was born.
A long valley. A winding valley. New landscapes. Gentle streams. Fast, deadly currents. Places to be lost. Places where all is lost.
But what about finding something in myself, with the aid of the small pilot light that has always been there?
What if I called my Substack Writer, interrupted?
I was my husband’s primary caregiver during the last year of his life. Near the end, he moved to a residential hospice. The staff and volunteers were angels in scrubs and soft colors to avoid agitating the patients.
One day, he asked me to read to him the George Saunders story, “Sticks.” As I did, he looked out the window into some far place where a father tries to communicate through bizarre and desperate decorations of cross-like poles on their home’s front lawn. The story must have brought some healing to a lifetime wound. I will never know.
After I finished reading, he looked up. His eyes were bright, possibly from sunlight through the window.
“Promise me.” His voice was quiet but intense. “Don’t ever stop writing. If you do, I will come after you.” He turned his face away. I said nothing. We both understood. No one wants to trouble an angry ghost.
I was 67. It had been sixty years since I first felt the rapture that rushed through me now. I was a writer. After a lifetime of interruptions, this was still my calling.
I hit Publish.
I keep writing.
It’s never too late to do what you love.
Mary Roblyn is a poet, essayist, and writer of fiction. Her Substack is Writer, interrupted.
All quotes by C. S. Lewis are from A GRIEF OBSERVED. Copyright 1961 by N.W. Clark, restored 1996. Published by HarperCollins.
What a profound essay not only on grief but also on the writing process, Mary. I am so honored that you joined us and that you chose to quote a bit of what I did that makes our essays a great pairing. That rarely happens when I invite a guest--but, of course, you are a generous gem and soulful writer.
I want to add this about the way that grief is misunderstood, and part of what I say here reflects my essay "Lifeboat" on my personal site where I deal with my son's death at age 46 and the amount of time it took me to write about that:
My view is that I must be in touch with the pain and understand that grief has its own time table. This is hard stuff. Like you I was helped by C.S. Lewis and also, with even more by Joan Didion’s _The Year of Magical Thinking_ that deals as you do with the loss of a spouse. Then, in the week after my son died, I read in one sitting at night (no sleeping was possible) _Lincoln in the Bardo_ by George Saunders: brilliant.
Perhaps most important here on what you write, Mary, is that I've been moved by every essay you've written on your site and by your depth of understanding of grief--with no timetable. ~Mary
Stunningly beautiful and resonant. I, too, have had countless interruptions on “the path” though the word interruption would imply that I had an end goal. Unlike you, I was wayward, following a very crooked, looping, disjointed path, and only in hindsight can see how it brought me here, to Substack, to the written page. It’s important for the world to see fruition and harvest happen later in life, and it’s so clear that—after a lifetime of digging in the dirt—your basket is now bountiful.