Grief, Gratitude, and Greetings on the Phone

a writing prompt for you

Welcome to Writing in Company. This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. Each week I share some words and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation or prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. You can always look back through the archive for more ideas. Grab your pen and paper, and let your words loose on the page.

I’m with my writing group of bereaved mothers this week. We each landed in a one-day workshop twenty-two years ago, hoping for something—anything—that might help deal with the swirling memories and numbness and whys and what nows. We found it in scribbled words on the page, from prompts given by a wise leader, and a safe space in which to read them aloud without judgment or pity. We didn't know it that first day, but we found a family, too. We are sisters of a sort. I have sisters by birth (hi, love you three) and these are not the same kind. Rather than being linked by birth, we are linked by the words we have crafted after our children's deaths. I won’t speak for all of them, but those words and these sisters have also helped me craft a new life after Jack’s death. We are not a faith-based group, but for me, it is a kind of resurrection story.

After our one-day workshop, we just kept meeting. We gather twice a year for weekends of writing, reading, talking, eating, card-playing and every kind of emotion from crying to belly-laughing. In between weekends we text and email, and every few years we take a bigger trip together. This week we are in Québec City, and it is as beautiful as our decades of sisterhood. Yesterday some of the group walked past a coffeeshop called Café Les Infants Perdu. The lost children in the name may refer to French soldiers, but for us, it means something else. Our fourteen lost children are still the reason we gather. After two decades of navigating grief together, we are still grateful to have one another, and the tender shared understanding evoked by a sign on a cafe.

Writing with this group for so many years has helped tune my ears and eyes to notice potential prompts around issues of grief and loss. When I recently found a deck of grief prompt cards in a shop, I hoped there would be some that would resonate not just with me and with them, but also with you. Here’s one for all of us, especially those carrying particular grief right now.

I found this set of cards in a plant shop in Seattle. The proprietor and I had a conversation about how there are good grief resources and others that are questionable. We looked through the cards together and agreed this deck has some promise. You can find it here.

a writing prompt for you

How would ___________ answer the phone?

You might already have someone in mind to write about. Write about their voice, or their usual greeting. Keep your words flowing and see what develops on the page.

For me, and a few others in my writing group, the children we mourn didn’t live long enough to answer a phone. Maybe this prompt doesn’t quite fit for you either. Use it in a different way. Write about someone else—maybe someone living whom you love, and how their voice sounds on the phone. Or adjust the prompt another way. I might write about imagining a phone call with Jack, or start a list of ordinary things he didn’t get to do. Maybe that list becomes things he did do, or things I do in his memory—like this weekly writing prompt newsletter, and this week’s trip to Québec with these extraordinary mothers.

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Photo by Wesley Hilario on Unsplash