How Writing overcame grief

From the vale of sorrow come words of strength, words of hope, words of tomorrow.

“ Dad I miss you , Dad I miss you, I want to say those words “ I found myself saying these words shortly after my father’s death in September 2007. Sitting on the sidewalk, the sun spun long shadowed trees and I lost in the fog of grief. Consumed, drowning in waves of anguish as I struggled to cope.


I had arrived at a crossroads in my life, the one we fear the most, and I was totally dis-oriented. The passing of our parents. The buffer between myself and my own mortality had been swept away. The passing of my parents brought me closer to that void, that chasm, that emptiness, that darkness.

We seldom encounter death in our lifetime, a favourite aunt, a long lost friend, an accident victim We skirt around the theme. We try to handle it ‘antiseptically’. We try to avoid the term. Death. And grief follows as sure as day follows night.

The few times we suffer grief is insufficient in helping us become accustomed to it. We can’t practice grieving. We can’t take tests in grieving. We can’t prepare for grieving. It comes unannounced. Knocking. Ringing. Unwelcome.

Each of us deals with grieving in our own private way. We keep it a secret. We contain it. Tears and expressions of sorrow are merely ripples on a turbulent sea. Beneath it lies a profound sorrow. Waves of anguish wash over us and we yearn to be flung, found on some faraway, friendly shore.

Several days before my father died, I read him poetry on his death-bed. Keats, Tennyson, Yeats, Kipling. All the stuff he loved.

I read and I cried. I couldn’t get the words out. I stumbled and stopped and started again. My father was conscious and I leant across the bed to hear his last words to me. “Gunga Din”

And then I came across a piece of poetry I had never read before as it stared up at me from the pages of my sons’ GSCE poetry book. Cristina Rossetti’s ‘Remember Me’

“ Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay….

Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.”

I thought how could someone write something so beautiful?

I turned to go, not wanting to stay, not wanting to go, and watched a group of bees busy about their nectar tea on that warm September eve. They all moved away save one who sought a different path.

And then words came. Not at once. Not flowing. Not constant. Not when. But stuttering and stumbling and staggering through this fog of grief. Stop. Start. Write. Wrong.

“…. bright Irish days of hay-time and harvest
….. days of woods and walks and wild, west winds…..”
... we were kings for many a day"

Through writing I had found an outlet for my grief. Through writing I have been able to recollect my childhood in South Derry. Through writing I have been able to visit the fields, the farms, the woods, the village and my boyhood haunts. Through my writing I have found peace.

I have met my father again in the hazy light of those sun-filled evenings in the hayfield. I have met him up the woods. I have held his hand. I hold him in my heart. At rest and at peace.

The little boy in the picture fifty years ago was unsure of his place in the world. He still is.

You the reader too may well find comfort.

If the following words cause you to stop and stare and see what you have, hold it more closer, more dearer, more precious, then that’s good. If they cause you to reflect, to question, to wonder where you are on your journey, then that’s good.

If they cause you to reminisce, to recollect someone or sometime in your life, to smile, to laugh, to shed a tear, then that’s good too.

If that happens pass these words on.

Any comments to mervyn_cooke@hotmail.com