For today’s stop on the WOW! Women on Writing blog tour, I am visiting Journaling by the Moonlight, a wonderful site hosted by Tina M. Games. Tina provides tips, encouragement, and resources to journal writers everywhere, with a special focus on mothers. She invited me to share my thoughts about how writing in my journal helped me heal following my daughter Maya’s death.
On April 2, 1992 I got the call every parent dreads. My 19-year-old daughter Maya had fallen from a horse and was in a coma at the local hospital. Could I come right away? I wrote down every word the Emergency Room nurse said and sat at my dining room table unmoving, staring at my spiky handwriting.
I eddied in a river of crisis, swirling in memories. I kept my mind focused on all the “before” moments because the “after” was too horrible to comprehend.
In my book Swimming with Maya I recount how, as if moving through quicksand, I made it to the trauma center in Walnut Creek, a suburb of San Francisco. I sat in the ICU waiting room while Maya underwent brain surgery, and then faced my daughter’s limp body tethered to life support equipment. Throughout my nightmare, I had one anchor: my journal.
When I read those pages now, I see how divorced from reality I was. I recorded my belief that, against all odds, Maya would live. I sketched out plans for how she would learn to walk and talk again.
After a four-day vigil at her bedside, Maya was declared brain dead on April 6. My journal was where I wrote my grief, as well as recorded the moments of grace when I felt Maya at my side during the days leading up to her burial and memorial service.
I described my numb state of shock, and the searing pain when the shock wore off. I wrote about my suicidal impulses, and my determination to live and heal, mostly because my 11-year-old daughter Meghan needed me. In those early months, when my overwhelming desire was to be with Maya, the journal was a safe place to record my insanity.
And it was the witness to my gradual recovery. Of course many people played an important role in my healing, but it was the journal I trusted never to judge me or be frightened of my intense emotions. With other people, I had to pretend.
In Swimming with Maya I describe how crazy and unmoored I felt during the early months and years of grief. Many of those descriptions began as journal entries. As I was writing the book, I read journals that were decades old in order to research, recollect, and create scenes for the book.
My book, and my recovery, were conceived and created in the pages of my journals. Words make things real for me. Writing allows me to process complex emotions in the privacy of my journal’s lined pages. Grieving for Maya was the hardest work I’ve ever done, and my journal was my companion through those long years.
Today my journal pages are filled with celebration: of my two granddaughters, accounts of time spent with Meghan and her husband, or with friends. Of course, I still use those pages to work out inner conflicts. The journal is the raw material of my life and my writing. I cannot imagine living without it.
What stories do you tell your journal before entrusting them to another person? Do you use your journal for healing? I believe that to live and write well, our journals are an essential tool.
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