I don’t need research studies to prove the healing power of keeping a journal. My journal was my lifeline during the most difficult years of my life. On April 2, 1992 I got the call every mother dreads. My nineteen-year-old daughter Maya had fallen from a horse and was in a coma at the local hospital. Could I come right away?
Photo credit: Joyce Pedersen on Visual hunt / CC BY-NC
My internal clock stopped. I became an eddy in a fast moving river of events, 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 John Muir Trauma Center in Walnut Creek, a suburb of San Francisco, and began a four-day vigil at Maya’s bedside. In the midst of the horror of a perfectly healthy young woman suddenly profoundly unconscious, undergoing brain surgery, and then tethered to life support, I had one anchor: my journal.
When I go back and read those pages now, I see how deeply in denial that mother was. I recorded my belief that, against all odds, Maya would live. I sketched out plans for her rehabilitation.
When she was declared brain dead on April 6, the journal was where I wrote my grief, and recorded the moments of grace when I felt Maya at my side, during the days leading up to her funeral, 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 survive, mostly because my eleven-year-old daughter Meghan needed me. In those early months, when all I wanted 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 everyone else, 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 went back and read journals that were decades old in order to research, recollect, and create scenes for the book.
My book, and my recovery, were both built upon the pages of my journals. I began a diary at the age of 1when I was twelve-years-old, and while I gave up journaling in high school and college, I took it up again in my mid-twenties and never stopped.
Words made even the unthinkable real for me. Writing allowed me to process complex emotions in the safety and privacy of those 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 life without it.
A wise, wonderful, and thought-filled post about the power of journaling and healing. Like you, I could not have written my memoir without my journals. It will be published this October. Thank you for this reminder of how much our journals gift us with, Eleanor!