For today’s stop on the WOW! Women on Writing blog tour, I’m visiting Mom Loves 2
Read, to talk about grief recovery – an important skill for mortals. Sooner or later we all lose someone we love. How do we move forward after loss?
It’s been 21 years since my 19-year-old daughter Maya was thrown from a horse and went into an irreversible coma. Healing my grief over Maya’s death has liberated me in ways beyond what I could ever have imagined. The worst has already happened. What is left to fear?
Swimming with Maya is a crisis memoir that plumbs deeply the intense shock, grief, and anger that followed in the wake of my daughter’s accidental death.
The last third of the book is about how I healed my grief. Those stories – how I wrote my way, slowly and haltingly, to acceptance, worked out long buried family patterns in therapy, sought out people who inspired me, including the man who received my daughter’s heart – are the light that draws me as a writer – and a reader.
Reading passages from the book make the experiences alive and fresh again.
Here’s one from Chapter 3: “Maya’s chest rises and falls. The ventilator hisses, the computers beep, fiber optic cable snakes into her skull. I never knew love could be so big, that it could expand to allow even this. I have a premonition of lifelong grief rolling toward me, but I know that, once again, I am being asked to give my daughter her freedom.”
That was the moment I realized I had no right, nor any power, to hold my daughter here. I had to let her go. I gave in to her coma and ultimate death because they were hers not mine, a destiny I could never have imagined. That moment of surrender marked me for life.
The death of a child is something every parent fears, and few want to imagine deeply. Swimming with Maya offers one woman’s way through the tangle of emotions. As one reader wrote after finishing the book, “I feel broken and mended.”
Healing from grief is a long, slow process. Writing about it helped me go all the way to the bottom of my grief, and that is where I found treasures that continue to inspire me.
Swimming with Maya is vital testimony about how losses can be healed. It was worth writing. I hope you find it worth reading. Please stop by at Mom Loves 2 Read to view the full post and leave a comment.
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