We come to journaling to record what we are doing and what we are thinking. As a writing teacher, I spend a lot of time onsite teaching and even more off-site creating lessons.

When I was journaling about my son’s death, it is not surprising that I recorded the teaching part of my life as well as an exercise I created to help me write during a time I felt I should give up writing. If I couldn’t have my son, my thinking went, I shouldn’t be enjoying anything, and writing, no matter how painful, is something I like to do.

What I found in some of the entries I made in the month after my son’s funeral might help you find a way to speak out about hurt and sadness that seem too difficult to voice. I saw that if we allow writing exercises into our journal keeping, we are almost guaranteed to find out something important in the juncture between doing and thinking.

Here’s are three consecutive journal entries from that time:

Wednesday:
A month after my 25-year-old son Seth died, and I am flying to Arizona to keep a commitment I made to teach at a writer’s conference. I will lecture in the mornings, and in the afternoons, and meet with students individually about their poems-in-progress.

Friday:
As I sat with participants this morning reading their deepest feelings, my sadness intensified, an ache, growing in diameter, at the bottom of my throat and near my heart.

 After one series of sessions, I phoned my aunt who, during my childhood, had survived cancer along with her newborn son. “Keep your chin up,” she said.

“I don’t want to,” I told her. It was an attitude that I admired in her and that worked for her, but I didn’t have it in me.

I remembered other well-meant comments that I hadn’t wanted to respond to with joy. “You have Vijay now, ” my daughter’s new mother-in-law told me gently at Seth’s funeral, spinning threads of trust.

“I want you to know that Vijay and I are planning to have a baby soon,” my daughter Emily said, letting me know how much she valued life and thought the news would help me.

I don’t want to be unkind in the face of caring, but I am jealous and angry. My son has not survived, no one can replace him, and I cannot give birth to him again.

Monday:
I am going to invent an assignment for myself. I am remembering “The Voice of Robert Desnos,” a poem that I enjoyed teaching my students last semester when I found it, translated from French by William Kulik, in Edward Hirsch’s book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. Like Hirsch, I am enthralled with the way Robert Desnos imagined that his voice was powerful enough to shake the world but not powerful enough to stir the one he loved to return to him.

Hirsch wrote that Desnos was “taking the comet’s path away from the daylight and into the night mind,” and “giving full throated voice to the immensity of desire.”

Since my return from Arizona, I am aware that my voice is anything but full throated. Sometimes people can’t hear my voice. When I go out with friends or speak to people behind counters, I hear, “What? Can you repeat that?” Outside of teaching, it seems that I cannot project my voice. I reread Hirsch’s description of Desnos’ poem, and I realized I am drawn to the poem because I, too, feel my voice is useless. But unlike Desnos, if I can’t ask for the impossible, which is to have my son back, I don’t think I need to be heard.

I keep reading these lines from “The Voice of Robert Desnos”:

…I call to me those lost in the fields
old skeletons young oaks cut down
scraps of cloth rotting on the ground and linen drying in farm country…
I call lovers and loved ones
I call the living and the dead
I call gravediggers I call assassins
I call hangmen pilots bricklayers architects
assassins…
the belfries and the poplars bend to my wish
the former collapse the latter bow down
those lost in the fields are found in finding me
the old skeletons are revived by my voice
the young oaks cut down are covered with foliage…

As I let the lines seep in, I realize that in poetry, I can let myself ask for whatever I want. I will try doing this by borrowing Desnos’ syntax and strategy to find out what the voice of Sheila Bender sounds like behind the hidden sobs.

Here’s a title: “The Voice of Sheila Bender.”

Who do I want to call to? The slopes he died on. They need to hear me:

I call to the ski slopes of Breckenridge;
I call to the trees on the slopes of Breckenridge;
I call to the snow and the ice hanging in their branches;
I call to the snow on the run and the melted layer iced over;
I call to my son, to my son in his thermal clothing, to my son

twenty-five years old and snow boarding, headed into the trees.
I call to him to tumble off the board, not to worry about looking

clumsy, not to worry about finishing the run.
I call and I call, but he does not hear me.

I call over the weeks between then and now
to the hospital and time of death: 3:30 December 28th 2000

but my son does not tumble where I want him to.

I call to the moon, single eye I howl beneath, a coyote licking

pebbles from a wound. I call and I call.

The wound weeps over my eyelids, hands,
knees, feet that will carry me the rest of my days.
In the snow, I see sadness crystallize, hear my voice

force the follicles in my body to burst along their single

seams, spray seeds, and my son everywhere, everywhere I call.

****

In the weeks after I wrote these entries, I re-titled the poem, “I Call to the Ski Slopes of Breckenridge.” I realized people less frequently asked me to repeat what I had just said. I saw that using words in the “comet’s way,” I’d written cries of pain and found emotional liberation.

My hope is that by trusting both what brings you to the page and your admiration of others’ work, you’ll be able to fill your writer’s journal with words that help you articulate your life experiences.