Writing Grief

For many years, I’ve been working on a series of essays about grief. These essays include various threads; the first is a family memoir of the six months between my mother’s diagnosis and death from pancreatic cancer. I describe our family’s experiences with illness, the medical-industrial complex, fear, and loss. I also delve into our society’s end-of-life rituals, from “get well soon” cards to “celebrations of life.” The essays’ second and third strands explore material I collected during artist residencies at Harborview Medical Center, in Seattle, and the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), in Worcester, Massachusetts.

At Harborview, I shadowed and interviewed palliative care staff, spent time with patients facing terminal diagnoses, and led writing workshops for both staff and patients. The UW News wrote about my work there: “Life narratives unfold with Harborview writer-in-residence.” At AAS, I studied nineteenth-century cancer treatments, apothecary notebooks, mourning art and clothing, death announcements, and funeral traditions. The essays explore how I grieved, how my family grieved, how our society grieved long ago, and how our society grieves now. 

Over the years of writing these essays, I have offered workshops on writing about grief for a range of communities: medical professionals, former sex workers, aspiring writers at community literary centers, recent immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries, and patients in a locked psychiatric ward. These workshops always remind me (not that I could have forgotten) that grief is a universal experience. My goal with these essays is to speak to the part of each reader’s heart that has been wounded by loss. 

Each essay in the series takes a different form—abecedarian, collage essay, ekphrastic essay, lyric essay, poem—and each was inspired by one or more pieces of ephemera: family photographs, quotes from medical files, recipes from an apothecary’s notebook, examples of mourning art, notes and documents that belonged to my mother.

The essays (and one poem) listed below have appeared in anthologies, literary journals, trade magazines, and on a Seattle city bus. You can read some of them online:

“Only the Necessary Suffering,” Sonora Review, Summer 2022

“Apothecarium,” StoryQuarterly, Rutgers University, Spring 2017, winner of the StoryQuarterly Nonfiction Prize and named a “Notable Essay of 2017” in Best American Essays 

“Beautiful Flesh,” Georgia Review, Fall 2015, republished on Lit Hub, June 2017, and as the title essay in the 2017 anthology Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind

“After Most Words Have Left Her,” Poetry on Buses, King County, WA, November 2015

“On the Phone,” Reflections, American Journal of Nursing, August 2014

“Grief’s Hidden Gift: What I learned about happiness during my mom’s last days with cancer,” Yes! Magazine, Winter 2009, republished on AlterNet

“Facing Loss and the Page: My First Year as Writer-in-Residence,” Re-write: A Quarterly Publication of Richard Hugo House, Seattle, WA, Winter 2008

You can listen to an interview I did with Brainard Carey's Yale University Radio (28 minutes) in March 2018 about this project.