Writing As Therapy
About a year and a half after Lucas died, the person I was talking to weekly at the local counselling center told me that he was leaving the country. I had been talking to him via Zoom for the majority of the time I was his patient, but the time difference from where he was moving to would have made continuing with our counselling a challenge. Rather than start over with building a relationship with a new counsellor, I decided that I was “good enough” and stopped therapy. Over the past couple of years, there have been a few episodes that almost made me consider going back into therapy, the suicide of a high school student at our school being one of them. In the end, the main reason that I have decided to go it alone is that writing has been my therapy.
So much of what is published on this website was originally raw, emotion-filled writing. I didn’t know how to talk about what I was thinking. In some cases, it was a means to organize my thoughts. The first entry was written two hours after I learned about Lucas’s death. I based my recounting of the events of that day primarily from that first entry and the one written the day after. I wrote that partly because I needed an outlet for what I was feeling and partly because I didn’t know what else to do with myself.
In one of my early entries, I outlined the five sources of my grief. That was my way of sorting through why I felt like I was fine then would suddenly get blindsided by a new revelation. In writing about what I was thinking, I was able to sort through the thoughts and realize that it wasn’t all about one aspect of Lucas’s death.
Others have admitted to me how writing about Lucas has helped them come to terms with his death and to sort through the emotions. In his essay, Lucas’s friend Isaac admitted that writing about Lucas caused him to confront the loss and to reevaluate his thinking about their friendship.
Most of what I wrote around that time is what you see on this website. At times, I’ve written letters to Lucas and even though I know he’ll never read them, it feels like I’m communicating with him. At one point, someone suggested that I write a letter from Lucas to me. This helped me to envision what he was thinking. In almost every case for the first few years, the writing would cause an intense release of emotion. The good thing about having this catharsis through writing as opposed to talking to someone is that I can continue to type and cry but not to talk and cry. I could also do it at any time and would feel tremendously better afterwards.
I recently was listening to an interview on the fantastic podcast, “All There Is.”Will Reeve, son of actor Christopher Reeve, was talking about his relationship with his father and then his father’s eventual death, followed three years later by his mother’s death. In talking about some particularly painful memories, he said,
“You need to push on the pain points. You need to work at it. It’s like you go to the gym to get strong. You read books to get smart. You’ve got to go to the dark places in your own way to bring light there.”
For me, that’s what the writing has been. That’s what listening to songs that remind me of Lucas is. I think back to those painful memories, I force myself to feel the pain so I feel stronger and more able to withstand it. I’ve mentioned that I have a steady state of grief and so I made the decision to strengthen myself to make it more bearable. My writing has allowed me to share and to organize my thoughts around why I think the way I do. I have brought light to those dark places to make them not so scary.