The Role Of Journaling in Grief

The thing about grief is that there are a whole bunch of thoughts and feelings that you just don't dare tell anybody. They're too raw, too intimate, too painful. Or they're just too new to know how someone will or won't react if you share. So journaling became a safe space for me to just sob it out, and to say the things that I wanted to say, that I didn't want somebody to judge me for, and I didn't want somebody to judge my loved one for. 

The five stages of grief, as we know, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It is important to note that these are experienced in no particular order. Grief is entirely different for each who experiences it, and that’s the beauty of it. In speaking of anger through the lens of grief, there are going to be a lot of emotions there, with all of them at different levels. It is critical to let those emotions out. But if all you do is let out the angry side of how you feel, that will be all that people hear. They might get a false understanding of what your relationship was or wasn't, which isn't reality. And while every relationship has its ups and downs, there are just too many things that you don’t feel you can safely say, or those thoughts may come at times when nobody else is around. 

For a long time, I woke up almost religiously at 4 o'clock in the morning. When it was that early, it's not like I could have picked up the phone and woken up anyone in the rest of the world, because they are all asleep. But that is when I want to vent my frustrations, my hurts, and my memories. But even if I found a 4 am companion to voice these to, it would have been tough to put them into the proper words. That was when my journal became the place I could go to express my concerns, questions, and everything on my mind. And all of a sudden, while writing, new thoughts and feelings came to my mind in the afterthought of my questions. That brought me so much peace. In many of those moments, those thoughts came from my loved one, my husband, Rob. And the way I knew that was because I recognized the inflection and the feeling of those words. I knew them. They were Rob’s. I knew he was there. And that’s how it works. You will know they are there, and that inspiration is so personal. Those moments of journaling became, for me, my “love link” to the other side of the veil, and they connected me with Rob in such a tangible way. I loved hearing from him because he had a vantage point so much bigger than mine, yet he also knew my entire life experience, and it all felt so personal. That is what made it so beautiful.

So over the years, I spent a lot of time journaling. It’s a large part of what got me through and kept me sane. And now my kids will have novels of details that they can glean from when I'm gone.