Writing one’s way through grief is a process that helps us integrate our loss into our interior life. Writing about loss, we face life without the physical presence of someone we loved dearly. Having written a memoir about the loss of my son and teaching an online class called “Writing Grief” for those who want to use the craft of writing in their healing, I seek out essays written from the experience of great loss. This week, I present an essay that I think demonstrates the alchemical creation of new perceptions grief survivors need to go on.

Cora Goss-Grubbs’ essay originally appeared in She’s Shameless: Women Write About Growing Up, Rocking Out and Fighting Back, edited by Stacey May Fowles and Megan Griffith-Greene, published by Tightrope Books, May 2009.

 When Julie called me that Saturday morning, I was probably sulking in my room, trying to write in my first real journal. I could have been rifling through the box of memories I’d begun, the one with my brother’s Sex Pistols cassettes and punk poems, the bars of Sex Wax that he used on his surfboard, and the newspaper articles about his death and funeral. In one of those articles, there was a photo of a young punk placing a red rose on Michael’s casket, me in the background looking small and sad, awkward in my thirteen-year-old body and a dress I didn’t want to wear.

I picked up the phone on the first ring.

“Cora,” Julie said. “My dad killed himself.”

I laughed. I actually laughed, because it was impossible that her father would die just three weeks after my brother was killed in a fight at a party.

“Cora. Stop. He’s dead.”

I did stop. The pain in her voice finally reached me, deep inside where my own anguish was just starting to crack through the numbness. “Oh my god. Julie.”

We’d known each other for three years, but that’s the moment our real friendship began: Julie and I in our separate homes, tethered by a phone line that stretched across town. It transmitted the deepest pain we would ever feel, and it bound us to each other. Twenty-five years later, that connection is still real.

For the next two years, Julie and I were inseparable. Our grieving swerved from serious to silly, sometimes within minutes. We made friends easily with others who had experienced tragedy, and those who shared our fascination with death. We played with Ouija boards at slumber parties until we were too chilled to continue. We snuck out of our houses in the middle of the night and walked two miles on a busy road to the cemetery. We’d sit on my brother’s gravestone, smoke clove cigarettes and talk about why this happened to us. It made us different, special, even invincible. We reasoned that we’d already experienced the worst that can happen — a death in the family. Surely we were safe from any more harm.

There was no memorial marker for Julie’s father. His ashes had been spread over the ocean. With him in the sea, and Mike’s love of surfing, the California beaches also became a place of solace. Saturday mornings we’d take the bus from Saratoga to Santa Cruz, an hour’s ride, and spend the day on the beach. Boys were intrigued by us, our unusually close connection, our sadness. Sometimes I used it to my advantage. “My brother died in a fight at a party,” I’d say quietly, at the right moment. Sometimes a boy had even heard of it, in the newspaper or at school. He’d feel sorry for me, put his arm around me, hold me close. But the moment would often turn awkward and fake, and I’d find my way back to Julie, where I felt safe and totally, completely understood.

Slowly — so slowly — Julie and I veered onto our own grieving paths. Julie struggled with the fear that she might succumb to the same mental illness as her father, and the guilt of a parent’s suicide. I was haunted by the private life my brother never shared with his family. I searched for a way in to the side of Mike I never knew.

Then I met Marshall through Devin, Mike’s best friend. They played in a band together that Devin started after Mike died. An attractive, shy and moody musician, Marshall drew me into my brother’s circle of friends. I hoped they would share with me the secrets they’d shared with him. I believed that life was trying to make up for itself; that an unusual amount of luck was being heaped on me to make up for my giant loss.

Marshall and his band mates were as inseparable as Julie and I had once been. I felt like an outsider in the punk scene; nonetheless, I inserted myself into their lives and got lost in the smoke and music and Marshall’s eyes. Lost in this idea that as long as I was with them, I was with my brother, too. While they played music and partied, I pieced together that other side of Mike. He wrote poetry and lyrics despite his learning disabilities, he was fiercely loyal and hung out with everybody: punkers, surfers, stoners, poets, musicians, nerds. The more I knew, the more I felt transformed from his annoying little sister to an acquaintance, a comrade even.

For a while, this bond distracted me from the dysfunction of the band members and their friends. They hid from their own messy lives in the basement where they practiced, drank cheap beer and watched hours of TV. They teased me the way my brother had; to them I was still Mike’s little sister. I tried to draw Marshall away, but Devin clung to him; he wasn’t about to lose another best friend. Gradually, Devin shared less of my brother with me, and less of Marshall with me, too. After six months, I broke up with Marshall, hoping he’d come running back to me. He didn’t.

In my grief, I sought out Julie. But she had fallen too far into her own despair to help me. I sank into a sadness that hurt as much as the day I held my brother’s hand and watched his brain-dead body get unplugged from a life support system and die. I no longer had my brother, my blood sister, or my lover. I was totally, utterly alone.

I found salvation in writing. If my brother could do it, so could I. I wrote feverishly, in my journal and for school. I joined the school newspaper, stayed up late with my co-editors, creating words and images from nothing. The act of creation kept me going, kept me grounded. I watched as Julie drifted farther and farther away.

One night, I got a phone call from Julie’s mom.

“Have you seen Julie?” she asked.

Julie’s phone call three years earlier came rushing back to me. “No,” I replied.

“She left a note that says she ran away from home. You haven’t heard from her?” Her voice quivered with fear.

“No. I’m sorry. I’ll let you know if I do.”

After hanging up, I thought about calling Marshall. I knew he would come to me. He would hold me as long as I needed. And eventually, he would leave. And I would be alone again.

Instead, I went out to my backyard. It was warm and clear, and the new moon was a small tear in the vast blanket of stars above me. I lay on the grass and stared at every part of that great big sky until it made me dizzy.

“Julie?” I asked the night, feeling silly. “Are you okay?”

I needed to know she was alive. I needed to know, selfishly, that she still loved me. Julie had become a part of me, a spare heart when my own had been broken. And now that spare was aching, too. I needed to know it could be fixed.

In that moment, lying flat on my back and feeling myself spinning in the vast universe, I felt again the lifeline that tethered Julie and me to each other. I realized then that it was strong and pliable, that it could survive this brief strain as she drifted off to find herself. I just needed to hold on, to be here when she returned.

And she did.

****

Sometimes those we have lost are lost only temporarily. Always, the essence and guidance of those we have loved and lost can stay with us, though we fear this isn’t possible. Writing teaches us it is possible and infinitely valuable.