descriptive essay about someone dying

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5 moving, beautiful essays about death and dying

by Sarah Kliff

It is never easy to contemplate the end-of-life, whether its own our experience or that of a loved one.

This has made a recent swath of beautiful essays a surprise. In different publications over the past few weeks, I’ve stumbled upon writers who were contemplating final days. These are, no doubt, hard stories to read. I had to take breaks as I read about Paul Kalanithi’s experience facing metastatic lung cancer while parenting a toddler, and was devastated as I followed Liz Lopatto’s contemplations on how to give her ailing cat the best death possible. But I also learned so much from reading these essays, too, about what it means to have a good death versus a difficult end from those forced to grapple with the issue. These are four stories that have stood out to me recently, alongside one essay from a few years ago that sticks with me today.

My Own Life | Oliver Sacks

As recently as last month, popular author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was in great health, even swimming a mile every day. Then, everything changed: the 81-year-old was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. In a beautiful op-ed , published in late February in the New York Times, he describes his state of mind and how he’ll face his final moments. What I liked about this essay is how Sacks describes how his world view shifts as he sees his time on earth getting shorter, and how he thinks about the value of his time.

Before I go | Paul Kalanithi

Kalanthi began noticing symptoms — “weight loss, fevers, night sweats, unremitting back pain, cough” — during his sixth year of residency as a neurologist at Stanford. A CT scan revealed metastatic lung cancer. Kalanthi writes about his daughter, Cady and how he “probably won’t live long enough for her to have a memory of me.” Much of his essay focuses on an interesting discussion of time, how it’s become a double-edged sword. Each day, he sees his daughter grow older, a joy. But every day is also one that brings him closer to his likely death from cancer.

As I lay dying | Laurie Becklund

Becklund’s essay was published posthumonously after her death on February 8 of this year. One of the unique issues she grapples with is how to discuss her terminal diagnosis with others and the challenge of not becoming defined by a disease. “Who would ever sign another book contract with a dying woman?” she writes. “Or remember Laurie Becklund, valedictorian, Fulbright scholar, former Times staff writer who exposed the Salvadoran death squads and helped The Times win a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots? More important, and more honest, who would ever again look at me just as Laurie?”

Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat | Liz Lopatto

Dorothy Parker was Lopatto’s cat, a stray adopted from a local vet. And Dorothy Parker, known mostly as Dottie, died peacefully when she passed away earlier this month. Lopatto’s essay is, in part, about what she learned about end-of-life care for humans from her cat. But perhaps more than that, it’s also about the limitations of how much her experience caring for a pet can transfer to caring for another person.

Yes, Lopatto’s essay is about a cat rather than a human being. No, it does not make it any easier to read. She describes in searing detail about the experience of caring for another being at the end of life. “Dottie used to weigh almost 20 pounds; she now weighs six,” Lopatto writes. “My vet is right about Dottie being close to death, that it’s probably a matter of weeks rather than months.”

Letting Go | Atul Gawande

“Letting Go” is a beautiful, difficult true story of death. You know from the very first sentence — “Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die” — that it is going to be tragic. This story has long been one of my favorite pieces of health care journalism because it grapples so starkly with the difficult realities of end-of-life care.

In the story, Monopoli is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, a surprise for a non-smoking young woman. It’s a devastating death sentence: doctors know that lung cancer that advanced is terminal. Gawande knew this too — Monpoli was his patient. But actually discussing this fact with a young patient with a newborn baby seemed impossible.

"Having any sort of discussion where you begin to say, 'look you probably only have a few months to live. How do we make the best of that time without giving up on the options that you have?' That was a conversation I wasn't ready to have," Gawande recounts of the case in a new Frontline documentary .

What’s tragic about Monopoli’s case was, of course, her death at an early age, in her 30s. But the tragedy that Gawande hones in on — the type of tragedy we talk about much less — is how terribly Monopoli’s last days played out.

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How to Describe Someone Dying in a Story

By A.W. Naves

Are you writing a scene where a character is close to death? Let us help by explaining how to describe someone dying in a story. Read on to learn about 10 words that can be used to this.

1. Resolute

Determined, unwavering ; showing firmness and resolve in the face of adversity.

“My father clung to life with a resolute spirit, refusing to succumb to the illness that ravaged his body.”

“Even in the final moments, her resolute gaze conveyed a fierce determination to leave a lasting impact on the world.”

How it Adds Description

Use “resolute” to describe someone who is perishing if you want to emphasize their unwavering strength in the face of death. It reveals the character’s determination to fight till the end and desire to leave a significant mark on the world, moving your readers on an emotional level that further invests them in your story.

Tranquil, peaceful ; displaying a calm and undisturbed demeanor.

“The elderly man’s face remained serene as the life force gradually ebbed away, bringing an air of tranquility to the room.”

“The Queen’s serene presence served as a balm for the grief felt by those present at her bedside as she lay dying.”

Choose “serene” to evoke a sense of calmness and peaceful acceptance that sets the tone for your scene and resonates throughout the storyline. It portrays your character as someone who has found inner peace even in the face of mortality, bringing a certain tranquility to the tale that draws in your readers.

3. Vulnerable

Exposed, defenseless ; being susceptible to harm.

“Stripped of all strength and vitality, the warrior lay on the battlefield, vulnerable and at the mercy of fate.”

“The sight of my grandmother’s frail form stirred a deep sense of compassion in those witnessing her vulnerable state.”

Employing “vulnerable” will help you illustrate that a dying person is in a fragile and defenseless condition. It elicits empathy from your readers and highlights the delicate nature of life. Select this word to make the death more poignant and transition into how the death affects the other characters in your tale.

Diminishing, declining ; gradually losing strength, brightness, or vitality.

“With each passing breath, his life force grew fainter, his former presence slowly fading away.”

“The flicker of hope in her eyes was fading , replaced by a weariness that revealed the hard toll of her struggle to survive.”

“Fading” captures the diminishing essence of a character’s existence. It adds a sense of transience and impending loss, creating a heartbreaking feel to a scene that serves to heighten the emotional impact of your narrative. This can serve as a catalyst for a change in the storyline or as closure for a character who has fought a long battle.

5. Regretful

Remorseful, repentant ; feeling sorrow or guilt over past actions or missed opportunities.

“In his final moments, a regretful expression crossed his face, reflecting the weight of unfulfilled dreams and unresolved conflicts.”

“The warlord’s raspy voice trembled in a regretful whisper as he uttered apologies for the mistakes and violence of his past.”

You can use “regretful” to describe a dying person who reveals their inner turmoil and personal burdens. It adds complexity to their character, suggesting a desire for redemption or closure before departing, and can introduce themes of reflection and the human capacity for growth and forgiveness.

Yearning, nostalgic ; having a feeling of longing or melancholic desire for something unattainable or lost.

“During the soldier’s final moments, a wistful smile graced her lips, as if reminiscing about cherished memories.”

“His eyes wandered to the window, a wistful gaze hinting at the unfulfilled dreams and adventures that would forever remain unrealized.”

Portraying a person as “wistful” evokes a sense of longing and nostalgia, suggesting a life full of unfulfilled aspirations. It highlights their introspective nature and the bittersweet emotions accompanying the end of their journey. Use this word to illustrate the regrets of a character that may not have previously been obvious.

Difficult, arduous ; involving or requiring much effort and exertion.

“Each breath the patient took was labored , a painful reminder of the body’s struggle to sustain itself.”

“His voice emerged in short, labored whispers as if the weight of his words matched the burden of his deteriorating condition.”

“Labored” portrays a person facing imminent death as someone who is enduring great physical toll and hardship as they come to the end of their life. It adds realism to your tale, portraying the visceral struggle of their deteriorating health and emphasizing the fragility of life in the face of impending death that has been protracted or difficult.

8. Reflective

Thoughtful, contemplative ; engaged in deep or serious consideration.

“In her final hours, she became increasingly reflective , delving into the profound questions of existence and the meaning of it all.”

“The wizard’s eyes, filled with wisdom and insight, met mine in a reflective gaze that spoke volumes to me without uttering a word.”

Saying that a perishing person is “reflective” portrays them as someone who contemplates the broader aspects of life and engages in introspection about their life as they lay on their death bed. It adds a philosophical dimension to their character’s demise, allowing for profound conversations and introspective moments that enrich the narrative.

9. Dignified

Gallant, composed ; demonstrating a composed and noble manner.

“In the face of pain and suffering, he maintained a dignified composure, radiating a quiet strength that inspired admiration.”

“As the end drew near, my mother remained dignified , refusing to let the agony overshadow the grace with which she lived her life.”

Use “dignified” to depict a person nearing death if you want to highlight their ability to maintain poise and honor despite their declining condition. It adds a layer of nobility to their character, representing them as an exemplar of grace and inspiring those around them, even in the face of death.

10. Transcendent

Elevated, surpassing ; going beyond ordinary limits.

“A transcendent light seemed to radiate from within him, illuminating the room and touching the hearts of all who witnessed it.”

“As the nun lay on her deathbed, her spirit shone with a transcendent grace, radiating a profound sense of peace and serenity.”

Depict a dying person as “transcendent” to demonstrate a character’s ability to rise above the limitations of mortality and connect with something greater. It adds a mystical and spiritual element to your story, inviting contemplation about the nature of existence and what lies beyond death.

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Death And Dying

8 Popular Essays About Death, Grief & the Afterlife

Updated 05/4/2022

Published 07/19/2021

Joe Oliveto, BA in English

Contributing writer

Discover some of the most widely read and most meaningful articles about death, from dealing with grief to near-death experiences.

Cake values integrity and transparency. We follow a strict editorial process to provide you with the best content possible. We also may earn commission from purchases made through affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Learn more in our affiliate disclosure .

Death is a strange topic for many reasons, one of which is the simple fact that different people can have vastly different opinions about discussing it.

Jump ahead to these sections:

Essays or articles about the death of a loved one, essays or articles about dealing with grief, essays or articles about the afterlife or near-death experiences.

Some fear death so greatly they don’t want to talk about it at all. However, because death is a universal human experience, there are also those who believe firmly in addressing it directly. This may be more common now than ever before due to the rise of the death positive movement and mindset.

You might believe there’s something to be gained from talking and learning about death. If so, reading essays about death, grief, and even near-death experiences can potentially help you begin addressing your own death anxiety. This list of essays and articles is a good place to start. The essays here cover losing a loved one, dealing with grief, near-death experiences, and even what someone goes through when they know they’re dying.

Losing a close loved one is never an easy experience. However, these essays on the topic can help someone find some meaning or peace in their grief.

1. ‘I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago’ by Rachel Ward

Rachel Ward’s essay about coping with the death of her husband isn’t like many essays about death. It’s very informal, packed with sarcastic humor, and uses an FAQ format. However, it earns a spot on this list due to the powerful way it describes the process of slowly finding joy in life again after losing a close loved one.

Ward’s experience is also interesting because in the years after her husband’s death, many new people came into her life unaware that she was a widow. Thus, she often had to tell these new people a story that’s painful but unavoidable. This is a common aspect of losing a loved one that not many discussions address.

2. ‘Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat’ by Elizabeth Lopatto

Not all great essays about death need to be about human deaths! In this essay, author Elizabeth Lopatto explains how watching her beloved cat slowly die of leukemia and coordinating with her vet throughout the process helped her better understand what a “good death” looks like.

For instance, she explains how her vet provided a degree of treatment but never gave her false hope (for instance, by claiming her cat was going to beat her illness). They also worked together to make sure her cat was as comfortable as possible during the last stages of her life instead of prolonging her suffering with unnecessary treatments.

Lopatto compares this to the experiences of many people near death. Sometimes they struggle with knowing how to accept death because well-meaning doctors have given them the impression that more treatments may prolong or even save their lives, when the likelihood of them being effective is slimmer than patients may realize.

Instead, Lopatto argues that it’s important for loved ones and doctors to have honest and open conversations about death when someone’s passing is likely near. This can make it easier to prioritize their final wishes instead of filling their last days with hospital visits, uncomfortable treatments, and limited opportunities to enjoy themselves.

3. ‘The terrorist inside my husband’s brain’ by Susan Schneider Williams

This article, which Susan Schneider Williams wrote after the death of her husband Robin Willians, covers many of the topics that numerous essays about the death of a loved one cover, such as coping with life when you no longer have support from someone who offered so much of it.

However, it discusses living with someone coping with a difficult illness that you don’t fully understand, as well. The article also explains that the best way to honor loved ones who pass away after a long struggle is to work towards better understanding the illnesses that affected them.

4. ‘Before I Go’ by Paul Kalanithi

“Before I Go” is a unique essay in that it’s about the death of a loved one, written by the dying loved one. Its author, Paul Kalanithi, writes about how a terminal cancer diagnosis has changed the meaning of time for him.

Kalanithi describes believing he will die when his daughter is so young that she will likely never have any memories of him. As such, each new day brings mixed feelings. On the one hand, each day gives him a new opportunity to see his daughter grow, which brings him joy. On the other hand, he must struggle with knowing that every new day brings him closer to the day when he’ll have to leave her life.

Coping with grief can be immensely challenging. That said, as the stories in these essays illustrate, it is possible to manage grief in a positive and optimistic way.

5. Untitled by Sheryl Sandberg

This piece by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s current CEO, isn’t a traditional essay or article. It’s actually a long Facebook post. However, many find it’s one of the best essays about death and grief anyone has published in recent years.

She posted it on the last day of sheloshim for her husband, a period of 30 days involving intense mourning in Judaism. In the post, Sandberg describes in very honest terms how much she learned from those 30 days of mourning, admitting that she sometimes still experiences hopelessness, but has resolved to move forward in life productively and with dignity.

She explains how she wanted her life to be “Option A,” the one she had planned with her husband. However, because that’s no longer an option, she’s decided the best way to honor her husband’s memory is to do her absolute best with “Option B.”

This metaphor actually became the title of her next book. Option B , which Sandberg co-authored with Adam Grant, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is already one of the most beloved books about death , grief, and being resilient in the face of major life changes. It may strongly appeal to anyone who also appreciates essays about death as well.

6. ‘My Own Life’ by Oliver Sacks

Grief doesn’t merely involve grieving those we’ve lost. It can take the form of the grief someone feels when they know they’re going to die.

Renowned physician and author Oliver Sacks learned he had terminal cancer in 2015. In this essay, he openly admits that he fears his death. However, he also describes how knowing he is going to die soon provides a sense of clarity about what matters most. Instead of wallowing in his grief and fear, he writes about planning to make the very most of the limited time he still has.

Belief in (or at least hope for) an afterlife has been common throughout humanity for decades. Additionally, some people who have been clinically dead report actually having gone to the afterlife and experiencing it themselves.

Whether you want the comfort that comes from learning that the afterlife may indeed exist, or you simply find the topic of near-death experiences interesting, these are a couple of short articles worth checking out.

7. ‘My Experience in a Coma’ by Eben Alexander

“My Experience in a Coma” is a shortened version of the narrative Dr. Eben Alexander shared in his book, Proof of Heaven . Alexander’s near-death experience is unique, as he’s a medical doctor who believes that his experience is (as the name of his book suggests) proof that an afterlife exists. He explains how at the time he had this experience, he was clinically braindead, and therefore should not have been able to consciously experience anything.

Alexander describes the afterlife in much the same way many others who’ve had near-death experiences describe it. He describes starting out in an “unresponsive realm” before a spinning white light that brought with it a musical melody transported him to a valley of abundant plant life, crystal pools, and angelic choirs. He states he continued to move from one realm to another, each realm higher than the last, before reaching the realm where the infinite love of God (which he says is not the “god” of any particular religion) overwhelmed him.

8. “One Man's Tale of Dying—And Then Waking Up” by Paul Perry

The author of this essay recounts what he considers to be one of the strongest near-death experience stories he’s heard out of the many he’s researched and written about over the years. The story involves Dr. Rajiv Parti, who claims his near-death experience changed his views on life dramatically.

Parti was highly materialistic before his near-death experience. During it, he claims to have been given a new perspective, realizing that life is about more than what his wealth can purchase. He returned from the experience with a permanently changed outlook.

This is common among those who claim to have had near-death experiences. Often, these experiences leave them kinder, more understanding, more spiritual, and less materialistic.

This short article is a basic introduction to Parti’s story. He describes it himself in greater detail in the book Dying to Wake Up , which he co-wrote with Paul Perry, the author of the article.

Essays About Death: Discussing a Difficult Topic

It’s completely natural and understandable to have reservations about discussing death. However, because death is unavoidable, talking about it and reading essays and books about death instead of avoiding the topic altogether is something that benefits many people. Sometimes, the only way to cope with something frightening is to address it.

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37 Ways To Write About Grief

In this post, we have included 37 things for you to consider when you write about grief .

One of our most popular series of posts on Writers Write is ‘ways to write about different emotions’. We’ve written about these so far:

37 Ways To Write About Anger
32 Ways To Write About Fear
43 Ways To Write About Love
29 Ways To Write About Happiness
40 Ways To Write About Empathy

In today’s post, we look at ways to write about grief.

This is not necessarily a post about grief as a story, but about how the emotion of grief affects the characters and the plotting of a book.

How do we write about grief in an authentic way?

A) What Is Grief?

Grief is an intense sorrow, a feeling of deep and poignant distress, which is usually caused by someone’s death (including a pet’s). Grief can also be felt with the ending of a relationship, or the death of a dream or an idea around which a life has been built. It can be felt with the diagnosis of a terminal illness. It is an intense emotion and the pain can seem unbearable.

Words associated with grief include:

Use these words when you’re describing a grieving person.

People often describe grief as a process . There are generally five stages associated with grief:

These are based on On Death and Dying , the 1969 book by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Some people may experience them in this order, but they can occur in any sequence and you can revisit the stages at any time. Some people skip a stage and others can experience more than one at the same time. The length of grieving depends on the person. It may take weeks or months or years.

People have also added ‘shock’ and ‘guilt’ to these stages.

B) Body Language

In your body language, signs of loss are important. You can:

Curl into a foetal position.
Cover your face with hands or a pillow or blanket.
Stare unseeingly.
Sob uncontrollably.
Find it hard to swallow.
Wrap your arms around yourself.
Scratch your hands and arms.
Push people away.

C) Ways To Create Conflict With Grief

The loss of a loved one can spur your main character into action. Love interests in fiction are the most common way to create internal and external conflict. A love interest does not have to be a romantic love interest. ‘It can be a friend, a pet, or a family member.’ ( source ) The loss of this loved one could create a need for revenge or simply for healing.
The emotion of grief could cause the character to lose their job, or resign from it.
The emotion of grief could change other important relationships that were dependant on the person who has died.

D) The Importance Of Grief In Plotting

Grief is a powerful and debilitating emotion. Only use it if it serves your plot.

If you want to write a book about grief, this will obviously be your main plot. You will show the pain and despair of your main character and how they find their way back to life again. A good way to do this is with the use of a motif that is derived from a hobby or an occupation. The grieving person could be building a boat, or breeding a rare species of birds – anything that gives them a tangible story goal. They must do something – or the book would be boring.
If you want to use it as a sub-plot, the death of the love interest is the one to choose. The love interest is the most useful and the most common of all sub-plots .
Use their loss to show us more about them.
Use the loss and their grief to move the story forward. This works in a detective story where the main character vows revenge for their loss – or simply becomes more determined to make things that are wrong, right.

E) Exercises For Writing About Grief

Write about the moment your protagonist is told about someone they love dying. Use body language, dialogue, and the senses if you can.
Write about the moment your antagonist is told about someone they love dying. Use body language, dialogue, and the senses if you can.
Show how a grieving person is unable to stick to their daily routine. Let them wake up to the loss and then show how they go about trying to get ready for the day.
Show a moment where a grieving person is pulled out of the well of despair by something that happens that gives them a story goal .
Write 12 diary entries on the first day of each month after the character has lost their loved one. Show how they change over the year.

Top Tip : Use our Character Creation Kit to create great characters for your stories.

If you liked this blogger’s writing, you may enjoy:

10 Perfect Writing Prompts For Thanksgiving
The Romantic Hero
Fictional Pillars For Writers
The 4 Pillars Of A Memoir
Banned Books Week – The 10 Most Challenged Titles Of 2020
What Is Procrastination & How Do Writers Beat It?
The 5 Pillars Of Police Procedurals
Mystery, Horror, Thriller – What’s The Difference?
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Top Tip : Find out more about our workbooks and online courses in our shop .

Body Language , Creating Characters , Description , Featured Post , Show Don't Tell , Writing Tips from Amanda Patterson

1 thought on “37 Ways To Write About Grief”

Excellent ideas!

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May 3, 2023

Contemplating Mortality: Powerful Essays on Death and Inspiring Perspectives

The prospect of death may be unsettling, but it also holds a deep fascination for many of us. If you're curious to explore the many facets of mortality, from the scientific to the spiritual, our article is the perfect place to start. With expert guidance and a wealth of inspiration, we'll help you write an essay that engages and enlightens readers on one of life's most enduring mysteries!

Death is a universal human experience that we all must face at some point in our lives. While it can be difficult to contemplate mortality, reflecting on death and loss can offer inspiring perspectives on the nature of life and the importance of living in the present moment. In this collection of powerful essays about death, we explore profound writings that delve into the human experience of coping with death, grief, acceptance, and philosophical reflections on mortality.

Through these essays, readers can gain insight into different perspectives on death and how we can cope with it. From personal accounts of loss to philosophical reflections on the meaning of life, these essays offer a diverse range of perspectives that will inspire and challenge readers to contemplate their mortality.

The Inevitable: Coping with Mortality and Grief

Mortality is a reality that we all have to face, and it is something that we cannot avoid. While we may all wish to live forever, the truth is that we will all eventually pass away. In this article, we will explore different aspects of coping with mortality and grief, including understanding the grieving process, dealing with the fear of death, finding meaning in life, and seeking support.

Understanding the Grieving Process

Grief is a natural and normal response to loss. It is a process that we all go through when we lose someone or something important to us. The grieving process can be different for each person and can take different amounts of time. Some common stages of grief include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It is important to remember that there is no right or wrong way to grieve and that it is a personal process.

Denial is often the first stage of grief. It is a natural response to shock and disbelief. During this stage, we may refuse to believe that our loved one has passed away or that we are facing our mortality.

Anger is a common stage of grief. It can manifest as feelings of frustration, resentment, and even rage. It is important to allow yourself to feel angry and to express your emotions healthily.

Bargaining is often the stage of grief where we try to make deals with a higher power or the universe in an attempt to avoid our grief or loss. We may make promises or ask for help in exchange for something else.

Depression is a natural response to loss. It is important to allow yourself to feel sad and to seek support from others.

Acceptance is often the final stage of grief. It is when we come to terms with our loss and begin to move forward with our lives.

Dealing with the Fear of Death

The fear of death is a natural response to the realization of our mortality. It is important to acknowledge and accept our fear of death but also to not let it control our lives. Here are some ways to deal with the fear of death:

Accepting Mortality

Accepting our mortality is an important step in dealing with the fear of death. We must understand that death is a natural part of life and that it is something that we cannot avoid.

Finding Meaning in Life

Finding meaning in life can help us cope with the fear of death. It is important to pursue activities and goals that are meaningful and fulfilling to us.

Seeking Support

Seeking support from friends, family, or a therapist can help us cope with the fear of death. Talking about our fears and feelings can help us process them and move forward.

Finding meaning in life is important in coping with mortality and grief. It can help us find purpose and fulfillment, even in difficult times. Here are some ways to find meaning in life:

Pursuing Passions

Pursuing our passions and interests can help us find meaning and purpose in life. It is important to do things that we enjoy and that give us a sense of accomplishment.

Helping Others

Helping others can give us a sense of purpose and fulfillment. It can also help us feel connected to others and make a positive impact on the world.

Making Connections

Making connections with others is important in finding meaning in life. It is important to build relationships and connections with people who share our values and interests.

Seeking support is crucial when coping with mortality and grief. Here are some ways to seek support:

Talking to Friends and Family

Talking to friends and family members can provide us with a sense of comfort and support. It is important to express our feelings and emotions to those we trust.

Joining a Support Group

Joining a support group can help us connect with others who are going through similar experiences. It can provide us with a safe space to share our feelings and find support.

Seeking Professional Help

Seeking help from a therapist or counselor can help cope with grief and mortality. A mental health professional can provide us with the tools and support we need to process our emotions and move forward.

Coping with mortality and grief is a natural part of life. It is important to understand that grief is a personal process that may take time to work through. Finding meaning in life, dealing with the fear of death, and seeking support are all important ways to cope with mortality and grief. Remember to take care of yourself, allow yourself to feel your emotions, and seek support when needed.

The Ethics of Death: A Philosophical Exploration

Death is an inevitable part of life, and it is something that we will all experience at some point. It is a topic that has fascinated philosophers for centuries, and it continues to be debated to this day. In this article, we will explore the ethics of death from a philosophical perspective, considering questions such as what it means to die, the morality of assisted suicide, and the meaning of life in the face of death.

Death is a topic that elicits a wide range of emotions, from fear and sadness to acceptance and peace. Philosophers have long been interested in exploring the ethical implications of death, and in this article, we will delve into some of the most pressing questions in this field.

What does it mean to die?

The concept of death is a complex one, and there are many different ways to approach it from a philosophical perspective. One question that arises is what it means to die. Is death simply the cessation of bodily functions, or is there something more to it than that? Many philosophers argue that death represents the end of consciousness and the self, which raises questions about the nature of the soul and the afterlife.

The morality of assisted suicide

Assisted suicide is a controversial topic, and it raises several ethical concerns. On the one hand, some argue that individuals have the right to end their own lives if they are suffering from a terminal illness or unbearable pain. On the other hand, others argue that assisting someone in taking their own life is morally wrong and violates the sanctity of life. We will explore these arguments and consider the ethical implications of assisted suicide.

The meaning of life in the face of death

The inevitability of death raises important questions about the meaning of life. If our time on earth is finite, what is the purpose of our existence? Is there a higher meaning to life, or is it simply a product of biological processes? Many philosophers have grappled with these questions, and we will explore some of the most influential theories in this field.

The role of death in shaping our lives

While death is often seen as a negative force, it can also have a positive impact on our lives. The knowledge that our time on earth is limited can motivate us to live life to the fullest and to prioritize the things that truly matter. We will explore the role of death in shaping our values, goals, and priorities, and consider how we can use this knowledge to live more fulfilling lives.

The ethics of mourning

The process of mourning is an important part of the human experience, and it raises several ethical questions. How should we respond to the death of others, and what is our ethical responsibility to those who are grieving? We will explore these questions and consider how we can support those who are mourning while also respecting their autonomy and individual experiences.

The ethics of immortality

The idea of immortality has long been a fascination for humanity, but it raises important ethical questions. If we were able to live forever, what would be the implications for our sense of self, our relationships with others, and our moral responsibilities? We will explore the ethical implications of immortality and consider how it might challenge our understanding of what it means to be human.

The ethics of death in different cultural contexts

Death is a universal human experience, but how it is understood and experienced varies across different cultures. We will explore how different cultures approach death, mourning, and the afterlife, and consider the ethical implications of these differences.

Death is a complex and multifaceted topic, and it raises important questions about the nature of life, morality, and human experience. By exploring the ethics of death from a philosophical perspective, we can gain a deeper understanding of these questions and how they shape our lives.

The Ripple Effect of Loss: How Death Impacts Relationships

Losing a loved one is one of the most challenging experiences one can go through in life. It is a universal experience that touches people of all ages, cultures, and backgrounds. The grief that follows the death of someone close can be overwhelming and can take a significant toll on an individual's mental and physical health. However, it is not only the individual who experiences the grief but also the people around them. In this article, we will discuss the ripple effect of loss and how death impacts relationships.

Understanding Grief and Loss

Grief is the natural response to loss, and it can manifest in many different ways. The process of grieving is unique to each individual and can be affected by many factors, such as culture, religion, and personal beliefs. Grief can be intense and can impact all areas of life, including relationships, work, and physical health.

The Impact of Loss on Relationships

Death can impact relationships in many ways, and the effects can be long-lasting. Below are some of how loss can affect relationships:

1. Changes in Roles and Responsibilities

When someone dies, the roles and responsibilities within a family or social circle can shift dramatically. For example, a spouse who has lost their partner may have to take on responsibilities they never had before, such as managing finances or taking care of children. This can be a difficult adjustment, and it can put a strain on the relationship.

2. Changes in Communication

Grief can make it challenging to communicate with others effectively. Some people may withdraw and isolate themselves, while others may become angry and lash out. It is essential to understand that everyone grieves differently, and there is no right or wrong way to do it. However, these changes in communication can impact relationships, and it may take time to adjust to new ways of interacting with others.

3. Changes in Emotional Connection

When someone dies, the emotional connection between individuals can change. For example, a parent who has lost a child may find it challenging to connect with other parents who still have their children. This can lead to feelings of isolation and disconnection, and it can strain relationships.

4. Changes in Social Support

Social support is critical when dealing with grief and loss. However, it is not uncommon for people to feel unsupported during this time. Friends and family may not know what to say or do, or they may simply be too overwhelmed with their grief to offer support. This lack of social support can impact relationships and make it challenging to cope with grief.

Coping with Loss and Its Impact on Relationships

Coping with grief and loss is a long and difficult process, but it is possible to find ways to manage the impact on relationships. Below are some strategies that can help:

1. Communication

Effective communication is essential when dealing with grief and loss. It is essential to talk about how you feel and what you need from others. This can help to reduce misunderstandings and make it easier to navigate changes in relationships.

2. Seek Support

It is important to seek support from friends, family, or a professional if you are struggling to cope with grief and loss. Having someone to talk to can help to alleviate feelings of isolation and provide a safe space to process emotions.

3. Self-Care

Self-care is critical when dealing with grief and loss. It is essential to take care of your physical and emotional well-being. This can include things like exercise, eating well, and engaging in activities that you enjoy.

4. Allow for Flexibility

It is essential to allow for flexibility in relationships when dealing with grief and loss. People may not be able to provide the same level of support they once did or may need more support than they did before. Being open to changes in roles and responsibilities can help to reduce strain on relationships.

5. Find Meaning

Finding meaning in the loss can be a powerful way to cope with grief and loss. This can involve creating a memorial, participating in a support group, or volunteering for a cause that is meaningful to you.

The impact of loss is not limited to the individual who experiences it but extends to those around them as well. Relationships can be greatly impacted by the death of a loved one, and it is important to be aware of the changes that may occur. Coping with loss and its impact on relationships involves effective communication, seeking support, self-care, flexibility, and finding meaning.

What Lies Beyond Reflections on the Mystery of Death

Death is an inevitable part of life, and yet it remains one of the greatest mysteries that we face as humans. What happens when we die? Is there an afterlife? These are questions that have puzzled us for centuries, and they continue to do so today. In this article, we will explore the various perspectives on death and what lies beyond.

Understanding Death

Before we can delve into what lies beyond, we must first understand what death is. Death is defined as the permanent cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. This can occur as a result of illness, injury, or simply old age. Death is a natural process that occurs to all living things, but it is also a process that is often accompanied by fear and uncertainty.

The Physical Process of Death

When a person dies, their body undergoes several physical changes. The heart stops beating, and the body begins to cool and stiffen. This is known as rigor mortis, and it typically sets in within 2-6 hours after death. The body also begins to break down, and this can lead to a release of gases that cause bloating and discoloration.

The Psychological Experience of Death

In addition to the physical changes that occur during and after death, there is also a psychological experience that accompanies it. Many people report feeling a sense of detachment from their physical body, as well as a sense of peace and calm. Others report seeing bright lights or visions of loved ones who have already passed on.

Perspectives on What Lies Beyond

There are many different perspectives on what lies beyond death. Some people believe in an afterlife, while others believe in reincarnation or simply that death is the end of consciousness. Let's explore some of these perspectives in more detail.

One of the most common beliefs about what lies beyond death is the idea of an afterlife. This can take many forms, depending on one's religious or spiritual beliefs. For example, many Christians believe in heaven and hell, where people go after they die depending on their actions during life. Muslims believe in paradise and hellfire, while Hindus believe in reincarnation.

Reincarnation

Reincarnation is the belief that after we die, our consciousness is reborn into a new body. This can be based on karma, meaning that the quality of one's past actions will determine the quality of their next life. Some people believe that we can choose the circumstances of our next life based on our desires and attachments in this life.

End of Consciousness

The idea that death is simply the end of consciousness is a common belief among atheists and materialists. This view holds that the brain is responsible for creating consciousness, and when the brain dies, consciousness ceases to exist. While this view may be comforting to some, others find it unsettling.

Death is a complex and mysterious phenomenon that continues to fascinate us. While we may never fully understand what lies beyond death, it's important to remember that everyone has their own beliefs and perspectives on the matter. Whether you believe in an afterlife, reincarnation, or simply the end of consciousness, it's important to find ways to cope with the loss of a loved one and to find peace with your mortality.

Final Words

In conclusion, these powerful essays on death offer inspiring perspectives and deep insights into the human experience of coping with mortality, grief, and loss. From personal accounts to philosophical reflections, these essays provide a diverse range of perspectives that encourage readers to contemplate their mortality and the meaning of life.

By reading and reflecting on these essays, readers can gain a better understanding of how death shapes our lives and relationships, and how we can learn to accept and cope with this inevitable part of the human experience.

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The Creative Penn

Writing, self-publishing, book marketing, making a living with your writing

Writing About Death, Dying, And Grief With Dr Karen Wyatt

posted on March 19, 2018

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:00:39 — 49.4MB)

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

Death is an inevitable part of life. We spend a lot of time trying to forget that fact but as writers, our job is to face the difficult things and write about them anyway.

In the introduction, I discuss the Audible Romance Subscription payout , the new Audible.com Author pages that use your Amazon Central Profile to pull from [ here's mine ], and the New York Times new audiobook bestseller list. Audio is not going away!

Plus, predictions on 2018 – 2038 from Peter Diamandis, whose companies span asteroid mining and human longevity, including 5G streaming internet for global mobile users by 2020, and self-driving cars as mainstream by 2026 – both will mean a LOT more consumers. We are only just starting this digital transformation!

My personal update about walking last week on the Amalfi Coast in Italy – pics here on Instagram , although it did rain a lot! I talk about the need for fallow periods, writing about places you haven't been, gathering ideas and emotional reaction to place, as well as creating a life you don't want to escape from. Plus, I recommend Seth Godin's new podcast, Akimbo .

You can listen above or on iTunes or Stitcher or watch the video here , read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Lessons learned from working with those close to death
On paying attention to our inner passion for writing
Tips for dealing with death and grief in our characters and our writing. Joanna talks about some of the issues tackled in Desecration .
Why we are able to write about grief that we might not have experienced personally
Why it's okay to be comfortable with the subject of death
On changes in death culture as boomers age
My interview on End of Life University on writing about death and dying

You can find Dr. Karen Wyatt at KarenWyattMD.com and on Twitter @spiritualmd

You can find another interview with Karen on how traveling has helped her deal with death and grief here .

Transcript of Interview with Dr. Karen Wyatt

Joanna: Hi, everyone, I'm Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today I'm here with Dr. Karen Wyatt. Hi, Karen.

Karen: Hi, Joanna, thanks for having me.

Joanna: Oh, it's great to have you on the show. Just a little introduction.

Karen is a hospice physician and bestselling author of books about death, loss and grief. She's also the host of the “End of Life University” podcast, and an inspirational speaker who teaches how to live a life that really matters by embracing our mortality.

I have something to show you, Karen, and the viewers on the video, because I wanted to do this because this is what I have on my desk next to me all the time. This is a sugar skull for those on the audio.

I have a sugar skull covered in butterflies right next to my writing desk, because I absolutely believe in thinking about death and mortality all the time. But enough about my skull.

Tell us a bit more about you, Karen, and why and how you chose this path for your career in writing?

Karen: Well, like so many writers that you've interviewed, I had a passion for storytelling and writing as just a young child. But I took the long route to becoming a writer and I decided to become a doctor.

So all those years during my medical training and practice, I really wasn't able to write. I would have 30 minutes here and there, and I have notebooks full of projects I tried to start because I had this constant flood of ideas in my head, always thinking of a new story.

I could write a play about this. I can write a screenplay. Like, what about this? I always saw the stories, but I had no time to write them. So it took all these years of a long medical career.

During that time I started working in hospice, taking care of dying patients, which really changed my life. I got there because I was trying to cope with my own grief after my father committed suicide. So hospice really became a refuge for me where I could just focus on death and dying and bring my grief.

I learned these amazing lessons from working there. And I always knew I have to write about this, but still I was in medicine. I still had a long career to go through.

About eight years ago, I met a woman who is a psychic at a party who just came up to me knowing nothing about me. And she said, “You have an unfulfilled passion within you. I can read it right now. And if you don't start paying attention to that, you'll get sick.”

Instantly I knew it's time. I have to start writing. That happened on a Friday, and on Monday, I resigned from my job and I started writing. I took it seriously. It's been an eight-year journey. Since then I've been trying to write my stories that are in my head.

Joanna: I think it's really interesting you say about that, whether it is somebody externally who says, “You must do this or you will get sick.” Or the evidence of so many people I know who are writers who start to write because they did get sick.

It's like you got there first. But I know so many people and in fact, I did. I was spiritually sick and I was probably 20 pounds heavier than I now, when I was so miserable in my job.

If we have an unfulfilled desire, we can get sick.

Now circling back then to you mentioned the lessons you learned in the hospice. I imagine one of them is that you must do the thing that's unfulfilled before you die.

Karen: Very true.

Joanna: So what were some of the other lessons that you really feel? And, of course, you've written a book about lessons from the dying.

Give us a couple of the things that really stand out.

Karen: One of the things that I saw from all the patients to sitting at their bedsides, I saw how important relationships are. How many of them had regrets that they didn't reach out more to the people they loved. How many needed to practice forgiveness in order to be at peace.

It made me realize I don't want to go there. I'm going to work on my relationships now.

And also the idea of being in the present moment, which I had always heard about. I hear so many people talking about the power of now, be in the present moment. But I witnessed it with dying patients.

I'd sit with a man while he was watching the sunset, and he took in every color and every cloud, and he watched the entire sunset until it completely faded away.

And the reason is because he didn't know if he would ever see another sunset. And it became clear to me, like, wow, I've never enjoyed a single sunset I've seen to the extent that he has.

It made it clear to me that when we're aware that we could die at any time, we can really go to the depths and really mine every one of our experiences for everything that's there, and really make the most of it. I saw the power of being aware of death and mortality.

Joanna: I totally agree on that present moment emphasis, and I do catch myself, particularly because Jonathan and I work in the same office. And he'll be saying something and I'll be like, “Just stop it. I'm concentrating on my thing.”

And then I'll be like, “No, stop and pay attention to what he's talking about.”

But then that we have to balance living in the present moment with doing our writing work, which often means we're living in the past or imagining something else.

How do we balance doing our writing work, the work of our soul with that living in the present moment?

Karen: I like to think of it as separating my soul from my mind, in a way, and that if I'm writing in the present moment, I'm being in the present moment, even if what I'm thinking about and processing is something from the past.

I'm being right here, right now doing what it meant to do and what my soul is supposed to be doing by writing.

I think of it always as both ways. I'm in the present even though I'm processing the past or planning for the future, I'm aware of everything happening around me right now.

Joanna: Now, that makes sense. Thank you for that.

Circling back on death in general and hopefully, the people who are still listening into this topic. I'm imagining everyone else has gone away, but so many people struggle to talk about death and to think about death.

I particularly notice with my parents, how different they are. My mum has organized everything. Everything is all paid for, all the paperwork's done and my dad just will not even talk about it.

The denial of death is, is huge in some people, right?

As writers, how do we tackle this difficult subject, either in memoir or in fiction? How do we bring ourselves to the page to even face that fear?

Karen: I think we do have to do our own inner work first, and look at our own fear of death and our own thoughts and emotions when we contemplate our death. And then also look at our own history with death.

Do we have unresolved grief over a loss we've had in the past? Has that entrenched our fear of death even more, so that we kind of open ourselves up to the subject of death.

For me, the moment I started studying death by working with dying patients, instantly my fear went away and I was instantly able to just sit with it and realize, “Oh, this is just part of life.”

Why had I shut off that part of myself for so many years and not addressed it or thought of it. And it was actually, a huge relief once I was able to just bring death into my awareness every day.

I think if writers would like to write about death, they need to spend a little time journaling first and doing their own inner work to prepare for it.

Joanna: It seems like we see a lot of deaths even on screen and in books, but we may not have seen it in real life. And often, the death we see on screen and I'm thinking of “Game of Thrones,” for example, which is very violent and there's a lot of death and dying.

But it's not, as you say, on an emotional level. It's done as entertainment.

There's so many things I want to ask you about, but let's stick with the writing.

What do people get wrong with things like writing about death, with writing crime novels, with writing entertainment, that you see as is incorrect?

Karen: I don't necessarily see it as being wrong, but I think many writers objectify death. They project death outside of themselves, as if it's something that happens to other people but not to them. That allows the reader to do the same thing.

The reader can read all kinds of crime novels and thrillers and watch violent movies and play video games, and never think about their own death because they're only seeing the death of the other, of someone else outside of them.

That's also because of the emotions around death are not being addressed in that way. I think what writers need to do, again, is explore their own thoughts and feelings about death and even their own experiences, if they're carrying their own pain of some sort of grief that's really valuable and trying to write about it with a character.

And then remember, death is the most common experience of every human on earth. Every single one of our characters in some way should have some thoughts or feelings about death.

If we remember to incorporate it in the back stories of our characters we can ask what has this person's experience been? What are they grieving? How are they accepting and coping with death and how does that affect their behavior?

That's the one thing I'd love to see more authors address it. Just like you did in “Desecration” with Jamie Brooke when her daughter was dying. I just thought that made Jamie such a rich and authentic character because she was genuinely grieving.

We got to see her doing her detective work and we had all the thrilling aspects of the crime thriller, but there was genuine emotion when Polly died. I hope I'm not spoiling the book. I'm sorry.

Joanna: No, I think that that's fair enough. I was going to bring that up because I am a happily child-free woman, and yet I wrote about the death of a child in that book, that has not happened to me.

My experience of grief as I was writing it, I've never actually, other than that book, cried when I was writing a scene and it did affect me, because I was empathizing with someone who was going through that. Even though I haven't been through that myself.

Which implies that we can imagine this even if we haven't been through it. Would that be right?

Karen: Yes, absolutely. Because we've all been through loss and we all go through they call them the “little deaths.”

The Buddhists refer to that the little deaths of life, and each one of us has probably had a relationship breakup, or a betrayal in life, or something else, or losing a pet that we loved that died.

So each one of us has had losses throughout life and had that experience of grieving when something you loved that was just here with you is now gone. I think we can apply all of that.

You clearly did because you wrote in a very authentic voice about Jamie's grief. So to me it sounds like you did draw from that well within of a level of grief you had experienced.

Joanna: Part of it also is I feel like I have been thinking about death all my life. I was going to ask you about this because like you mentioned as a child wanting to write.

I remember thinking about death as a child and my mom getting upset about this and I'm like, “It's nothing to do with you, mom.” I had a very happy childhood. I just think I've always been aware of that.

Some people have said, you know, “You're an old soul or something like this.”

Do you believe that there is a different awareness or belief? Have you seen evidence that different people have different awareness of death that perhaps they have, even as children? And if you're a parent of a child who seems a bit morbid, that maybe you shouldn't worry?

Karen: Absolutely. I see it all the time and those of us who ended up doing hospice work, many of us talk about, “Oh, I've always felt comfortable with death.” Or, “I've always been interested in death.”

We ended up doing that work because it's fulfilling to us and meaningful, and we're not afraid to be there with someone who's dying.

Don't be afraid at all because the people who are comfortable with death and aware of it, they end up really benefiting from that overall in life because if you can cope with death, you can cope with other things that happen in life. It really helps you have equanimity.

Joanna: I have actually thought about getting involved in hospice work. Some people wanna be wedding celebrants. I'm interested in death culture and end of life stuff, which is why you and I connected when I came on your podcast. I find it endlessly interesting.

Let's get more into the emotional side because there's obviously upset, there's perhaps wanting to self-harm or the destructive side. I also think about grief and death, especially it seems of parents, is guilt and anger.

Guilt and anger seem to be difficult emotions. And yet I suspect that that's just very common.

What do you think about guilt and anger when it comes to dealing with grief?

Karen: I think on the one hand, they can come from these unresolved issues in a relationship that never got addressed, and we can feel guilty after the death of a loved one, because there was something we should've said or we wish we had done.

That was huge for me after my dad took his own life because first I'm a doctor and I treated depression yet I somehow couldn't see this coming with my dad and couldn't help him.

It was a terrible, the guilt that I felt over his death. And then anger. It's one of those stages in the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, “Five Stages of Acceptance,” that we just go through anger because it feels wrong, and it feels like this should not have happened to me.

But part of that comes again from our lack of awareness on a day to day basis that death is normal, and death happens to everyone at some point. The fact that we're so offended and upset when it happens is part of just our denial of it all along, that we weren't accepting all along.

Someday my parents will die and I need to be prepared for that. I need to know that everyone around me eventually will die.

Joanna: And in terms of writing as a form of healing, is that something you've seen work for people?

Karen: It absolutely worked for me. Because that's the thing that was my solace and my savior after my dad's suicide was journaling a lot and sometimes writing poems, writing letters to him, writing stories about things that had happened between us.

It was really a way to put my grief on the page, but I could go back and reread it, and it helped me process. And at a time when it was very difficult to find people I could talk to about it.

Writing was a great alternative. I wrote, I discussed my grief with my journal basically.

Joanna: My grief was a broken relationship when my first husband left me. It was a shock, like your dad. I was like, “What? How did that happen? I didn't see that coming.”

It's interesting reading my journals from that time. I wanted to self-harm. I was angry. I went through those stages of grief. And then I read it back and I don't recognize the woman who wrote that.

Is it the same with the grief in death process; you look back at those and do you recognize yourself?

Karen: Definitely for me, I look back and see, wow, I can see where I was and what a deep hole I was in at that time, and just how much transformation has taken place.

That it gives me great peace and a lot of acceptance about my dad's death in the first place, because I realized I wouldn't be writing right now, I wouldn't have written the book I've written, I wouldn't have gone to hospice work.

Not that I'm saying that justifies my dad's death, but I can accept that it happened now and it has a place in my life. I'm not angry that it happened or that I'm trying to eliminate it from my life history. I embrace it and include it in my life story because it was something important that made a difference to me.

Joanna: That's a message of hope for anyone listening who is still in the depths of it is that if you can work it through, there is a point where you start to emerge.

Karen: Yes. I always think about the process of writing a book, when you're in the middle build and things just don't always make sense and it's confusing and you're not sure where you're headed with this story, and it feels like things are falling apart and you're losing the thread.

But when you keep remembering there will be an ending and I am going to come up with the ending, and I am going to put these pieces together and it will happen. That's how I look at it.

Sometimes we're lost in the middle section. As long as we keep our hope and know we will find a way for these pieces to come together and the loose ends to be tied up eventually.

Joanna: I wanted to ask you as a medical doctor, you've dealt with physical bodies. This is one of the things that I was really interested in exploring in “Desecration.”

My theory being that the physical body at death is no longer us. However, people believe in a religious sense, doesn't really matter. But given the number of people you've seen go through the death transition as such.

Did you see that evidence that the physical body was no longer the person?

Karen: Absolutely, and it was never more clear. I was with my mom when she died five years ago and the transition was amazing and that suddenly when she stopped breathing and I almost felt as if her spirit was leaving her body, and what was left on the bed was a carcass, and it didn't look like my mom.

It didn't feel like my mom. It was not her. I could feel her in some ways bigger than that outside of that body.

But the body, as you said, it was just a body like just like the clothes we take off at the end of the day laying there. So you're exactly right. For me, at least, that was the experience I had.

Joanna: That gives me hope. I don't believe in an afterlife.

I don't think it matters what you believe, but that we're not left in that physical body is the important thing.

Karen: Yes, exactly. I think that's the mentality behind the whole green burial movement, is that we need to stop trying to preserve the physical body and embalming it and using vaults and caskets to try to keep the body from decomposing.

Allow the body to go back to nature. It's part of nature and let it be that and let the normal process happen. That happens for every other living thing on the planet.

Joanna: I did want to ask you about this because I received an email today from some research firm about the change in the boomers reaching 70. A lot of them reaching 70, including my parents, my husband's parents, everyone's hitting 70 in our generation's parents.

It's the boomers, I think, also changing things around death. We have seen a change in death culture as this hippie generation of going, “We're not going to do that the same way.” In one way changing death culture, death cafés, that type of thing.

But also interestingly with the life extension, those boomers who are not ready to die.

What do you think is changing in the death culture with this aging of the boomers?

Karen: It's absolutely changing because boomers tend to be very self-actualized; the most educated generation. The first most educated generation to come along, and having witnessed our parents dying.

I think that's the thing that made the biggest transition for boomers is to see, “Whoa, I don't like the way my parents experienced death and that's not happening for me.” And so they've decided that they need to make plans, they need to get educated.

I do think that a lot of the movements that are happening and including death with dignity here in the U.S. is because baby boomers are saying, “I want to take death in my own hands. I don't want to at the mercy of other people making decisions for me.”

That's a huge movement that I think is probably going to keep growing over time because of the boomers, but also talking about death more and preparing for it.

Though I still see a lot of baby boomers are youth-obsessed and focused on anti-aging, and so we have a ways to go to convince them that it's actually okay to be getting older.

Joanna: The idea that it's okay to be getting older is the interesting thing. My hair has really getting grayed out and I look at yours and I'm like, I actually, I'm waiting for when I can let my hair go. At the moment it's just a little bit.

I was talking to my hairdresser and she said, “You just need to wait till all the roots are going and then go for it.” I like that acceptance. And I actually love that idea of just letting things go. I love Mary Beard, you know Mary Beard, the classicist?

Karen: Mm-hmm. Yes, yes.

Joanna: I just think she's awesome. She's an amazing woman.

I'm fascinated with this acceptance of death with this mortality, life extension. There's even some of these Silicon Valley billionaires getting blood transfusions of younger blood and stuff like that.

Is this just mad? Or, do you think there is some life extension stuff?

Karen: I personally see it as a by-product of the fact that we've evolved to this rational thinking in a way, and that causes us to reject death even more. So I see it as still kind of death avoidance and not really appreciating how valuable death is to us really.

Steve Jobs in his commencement speech, that you might have heard said, “Death is life's change agent.” That we wouldn't have life if we didn't have death. If you look in the natural world.

I feel like some of the life extension, it's slightly misguided and I understand people. I understand it's intriguing and what can technology do and what's available, but I still know in my heart, we will all die one day, no matter how much we managed to extend a few more years here and there, we will still all die one day and we need to be aware of that and we need to grapple with that. That's ultimately what makes us human, is grappling with that reality.

Joanna: I don't know if you saw the very violent program, “Altered Carbon” on Netflix?

Joanna: Quite recent series that just came out as we talk in 2018 and based on a book. It's basically that the physical body is like a sleeve and you swap out your mind into these bodies and you can live forever if you're rich, just for swapping out your bodies.

It's interesting to me how many films and books are tackling this right now because it's a trend that's growing, which is fascinating.

Circling back on the physical body and other cultures. I was in Italy last year and put some pictures on my Pinterest and everything of the jewel skeletons in the churches, these saints that are venerated. Skeletons very much used in, not worship but in the church.

You've recently done a trip, haven't you? A grief pilgrimage to Italy.

Tell us about that and how travel helps you and what you've been writing.

Karen: Yes, I got the idea because on two of my previous trips to Italy, I was dealing with death. One the death of a young patient, a child, the day we were leaving for Italy, a child I had taken care of in my office which devastated me.

And our second trip, my brother-in-law died while we were in Italy. I realized there's something about Italy and death for me. So I need to go back there and recreate these places we've been, but through the lens of grief and really looking at this country.

What can I learn about grief when I keep open to it, instead of just being a tourist to going to see how many pictures I can take. It was really phenomenal because I saw things like in Marina Grande, the little port village near Sorento, the women there still wear mourning clothes.

They wear black for a year after a loved one dies. So grief is visible. They walk around the streets and you see a woman in all black and you know she's grieving.

And in Naples, they put up posters, black and white posters in the neighborhood when someone dies with their photo on it and their date of birth and date of death and funeral information. And so noticing that as you walk down the street in Naples, you see, oh, someone in this neighborhood on this street died yesterday.

There's the poster to tell everyone about it. It's visible, and the grief is visible. It's really powerful to feel connected to everyone there. Like, everyone in that neighborhood is grieving Giuseppe, who died yesterday, and to feel connected and how that experience of grief is the one thing that binds us to everyone in every culture, every religion, everywhere on our planet.

For me, it was really profound looking through the eyes of grief in the first place, and then also being aware, as you said, of churches with decorated with skulls and skeletons and how common those images are in Italy that we don't see very often here in the U.S.

Joanna: I was just researching in Pittsburgh, you have a massive collection of religious relics.

Karen: Really? I didn't know that.

Joanna: I was just researching relics in America and you have a ton of relics in Pittsburgh of all place. I might even have to come visit, but this is interesting because the Catholic religion definitely does death in, you know,

I'm not of any religion but from a Protestant upbringing. I have an Irish friend. And we were joking one day and I said, “Whichever one of us dies first, the other one must ululate at their funeral.” Because women ululating, this sort of wailing is just not common in the British culture.

Karen: No, no, and not here in the U.S. either.

Joanna: But it seems to me like a really good thing to do to kind of let it lose and that kind of thing.

What have you seen about the different cultures and different ways that cultures deal with death that seem more healthy than the west?

Karen: When you brought up the ululating. When we were in Italy on this trip, we stopped in Paestum, the Greek ruins there and there was an exhibition at the museum of tombs that had been painted and had pictures of women mourning and they were paid mourners. Hired mourners. Not the family necessarily.

I watched a little video about that and there are places in Italy where there are professional mourners who come to funerals to weep in order to help the family with their grief, and I thought that was just beautiful. I loved that idea that we can weep and grieve openly at a funeral, just as you were mentioning.

I know in the Tibetan and Buddhist cultures, they're very open about death and even have a spiritual practice of thinking about death five times a day and focusing on death, and also their rituals around dying and cremating the body and allowing the body to go back to ash and back to the air.

They're just so accepting of the disintegration of the physical body. I think that's something, as we mentioned before, we're really missing in our western cultures of letting the body go.

Joanna: We don't talk about the business of death very often, but in America particularly the embalming and these massive caskets.

And that's why my mom's cool and she's already chosen all that and sorted it out and got the cheapest, most basic stuff. And I'm like, “Way to go, mom.”

But also, she's very green and very concerned that even with cremation and the stuff that goes into the air. But I think these technologies are going to change with the boomers. That's what I hope anyway.

Tell us about your “End of Life University” podcast because I think it's very cool.

Karen: I started it once my book that I wrote about the hospice patients was released.

I had a rude awakening, that you can't just make a living by writing one book and putting it out in the world, but also, especially if you write a book about death and dying, it doesn't necessarily sell well in the beginning, especially in 2012, which is when it came out.

I knew I had to do something else. I had to build an email list, I have to get followers and I got the idea to start doing interviews and I called it “End of Life University.”

I just started emailing people all over the country who worked in some aspect of death and dying, and doing interviews and posting them on my website. At that time, I'd never heard of podcasts. I didn't know that was even possible and I hadn't discovered you yet.

So that's how I began and I remember it took me like two years to get my mailing list to 500 subscribers. I had been contacted about being on someone's radio show, and when she was processing the application, she said, “Oh, you have to have at least 5,000 subscribers to be on our on our show.”

I was just crushed, “Are you kidding me? I won't live long enough to get 5,000 subscribers. I talk about death. This is terrible.” But the interviews I did really helped because each speaker I talked to had their mailing list, and I got introduced to their followers.

And now, I'm up to 5,000 followers and subscribers. And things are so much easier now when you have an actual list and I can write to people, and 700 people buy my book overnight. That made all the difference. It just took a long time.

But what's happened now at this point, I have this whole library of interviews I've done of information and knowledge about death and dying that's out there for people to listen to and if people are curious about death, but they can just come and listen to two other people talking about it like we are and it'll help them a little bit with their exploration.

Joanna: We are almost out of time, but tell people where they can find you and your books, and the podcast, and everything online.

Karen: They can find me at karenwyattmd.com or eolniversity.com. And my book is for sale there, but also on Amazon. My book, “What Really Matters: 7 Lessons for Living from the Stories of the Dying.” That's the book that I waited all those years to finally write.

Joanna: And will there be a book about Italy? Because I'm really interested in that one.

Karen: Yeas. I'm actually working on that right now after our last trip. So hopefully by the end of the year, I'll have that finished.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Karen. That was great.

Karen: Oh, you're welcome. Thank you, Joanna.

Reader Interactions

March 19, 2018 at 6:16 am

What a fascinating interview. It really touched me today, because in the past weeks, I’ve been having panic attacks based on the fear of dying while birthing the baby I’m expecting any day now (no, there isn’t any medical indication, it’s purely psychological). People being dismissive (“oh, you’re just silly, birth is safer than driving”) doesn’t help. There’s anger (“why didn’t anyone stop me while I was thinking about another child?”), guilt (“how could I do this while my existing children need a mother?”) and grief – today we couldn’t take the kids to an activity they were looking forward to, and I just burst out crying because, for all I know, this could be our last time doing this. There’s also the relishing of every moment, such as Karen described. In the past weeks, I don’t rush through walks or bedtime stories, because for all I know, these are the last walks and stories. I don’t mind taking my time.

Finally, having stopped rationalizing and talking myself out of fears, I sat my husband down today, and talked to him about everything I want him to do if something happens to me – hospital litigation, applying for government aid, being there for the children, accessing my bank account, contacting my publisher. It made me feel better prepared for any outcome.

I realize I’m digressing here. Death is a powerful motive in literature, and I am strongly attracted to describing its emotional aspects in my fiction. I think it helps me process my personal fears.

March 20, 2018 at 1:50 am

Sending you strength, Hannah. It sounds like a rollercoaster time for you. I’m sure everything will go well, but I’m glad you were able to discuss your fears and practicalities with your husband. I find the practicalities helpful too. I have a letter detailing everything and plans in place in case of an accident. It makes me calmer to know it’s all ready just in case. I hope you can find time for some writing, as that can also help us navigate the crazy way our brains process life.

March 24, 2018 at 6:43 pm

I’m glad to be able to come back and say that our baby girl was born yesterday and we’re both well. Nevertheless, things happen, and facing fear ultimately makes us stronger.

March 23, 2018 at 10:52 am

Hanna thank you for sharing your story. I totally resonate with this because I experienced the same anxiety around the births of each of my children. As a doctor I had heard enough stories of tragedy to make me aware that death is an ever-present factor in life so it seemed natural to think of death when childbirth was at hand. I’m sending you lots of love and support that all will be well during this beautiful passage for you and your family.

March 21, 2018 at 6:41 am

I love how your interviews weave and wander hither and thither 🙂 This was of interest and help to me, both on a personal level…and in realizing where some of the death-thought in my first book came from. (It opens with a recently-bereaved young woman; there are subsequent events that cause her to reflect more on her loss and what it means.) And I drift to Keith Richards (I’ll someday finish that biography) and the skulls he wears (rings). We are all the same beneath the skin; mortality is an ever present thought. I cheer you, Joanna, as you came to your discovery of Who You Really Are and What You Should Be Doing comparatively early in your life. Thank you for all you give. You’ve changed lives.

March 23, 2018 at 10:57 am

Hello Cheryl, I agree with you that Joanna is an amazing interviewer! She has a way of getting to the deeper aspects of a subject. I’m happy to hear that you included loss and bereavement in your first book and I hope you’ll keep writing! With Joanna as our inspiration we are off to a good start! Best wishes to you.

March 21, 2018 at 1:05 pm

This was really an amazing interview to listen to. I am currently trying to write a book in which death is a personified character, and this was a great resource for me. After listening/reading I realized that writing this book is, in a sense, my way of coming to terms with death and what comes after, something I tend to think about too much. My mother is studying to become a doctor (go figure) and when I voice my concerns to her, she always combats them with asking /why/ I am afraid, telling me to be curious about those fears.

The story I am writing has a lot to do with death, and accepting it (spoilers, the main character dies) and I think being aware of the lessons in this interview is very important to portray the story correctly. Thank you so much!

March 22, 2018 at 8:07 am

I’m glad it was useful!

March 23, 2018 at 11:01 am

I’d love to read your book! I hope you’ll reach out to me through my website when it’s finished. Kudos to you for having the courage to think about death and face the fears that arise. Best wishes to you on your writing journey!

March 22, 2018 at 9:36 am

A lot of boomers are full of life – recycled teenagers- But many do think and plan. We went to a funeral at a riverside hotel with a humanist celebrant. The man had planned his own funreal – wicker coffin – we all left the room and went next door for lunch – he wanted no one to go to the crematorium. Another chap, a Christian, had a simple service at the woodland burial and the male voice choir he had belonged to led the procession out to the burial site. Both were lovely. I know others who have applied to donate their body to science and no funeral.

March 23, 2018 at 11:04 am

Thanks for sharing these lovely stories Janet. It’s encouraging to hear that people everywhere are beginning to be “pro-active” about death by planning ahead. It really helps reduce our fears and anxiety if we’ve already thought things through and made some choices for ourselves.

March 23, 2018 at 6:24 am

Palliative medicine is very different from all other branches of medicine because when you think about it, medicine is about not accepting death and using knowledge to extend life. Accepting your own mortality has value in getting over your fears and doing what you really want with your life, but so does not rushing death which gives you more time to enjoy life. Medical specialties extend on a wide spectrum between those with many solutions (like infectious diseases) and those with none where quality of life is the only thing that matters (palliative medicine). But as medical technology evolves many of them will move towards the first part of the spectrum, geriatrics medicine included. I don’t find being interested in life extension as being in denial of death, on the contrary. There is so much suffering in aging that searching for methods to slow it down or even better, cure it, is just as important as looking left and right before you cross the street or taking your medication if you have any disease where there is efficient medication invented and available. There are countless species of animals and plants which display no signs of senescence, so why should people accept aging just because it is a ‘disease’ affecting all humans? A balance can be reached between accepting your mortality (so that you don’t procrastinate) and not accepting it (so that you don’t prematurely die from things which were preventable). This is also what I noticed as a physician when working with long-lived patients – they were serene about their finite life, but also took great care about their lifestyle and not missing on medical appointments.

March 23, 2018 at 11:12 am

Hello Anca, I totally agree with you that balance is the most important factor – the balance between living fully and accepting mortality. In my experience those who can hold both of those perspectives in mind have the most equanimity and joy in life. But I have seen many patients who were seeking more life because of a fear of death rather than a love for living. Those patients were more likely to choose painful and costly treatment at the end of life, which may have diminished the quality of their last days. So my goal is to reduce the fear of death overall so that patients will choose a healthy lifestyle out of a love for life itself rather than fear of dying.

March 25, 2018 at 4:30 am

I agree with those types of patients, I encountered them as well, but at the end of the day we have different values and what is expensive to me may be cheap to someone else or what is not important to me may mean everything to someone else. I find fear of death to be completely normal, especially when young and/or when you didn’t finish doing what you set up accomplishing in your lifetime. But if you can reduce the fear of death in patients that is a great thing as it’s exactly this fear which can increase anxiety and turn people away from what they secretly want from life.

March 23, 2018 at 8:08 am

I really enjoyed this interview. We’ve experienced a lot of death in our family in recent years. In 2015, my brother committed suicide. It was rather dramatic as he went missing and wasn’t found until almost 2 months later. There was a lot of drama about identification and that took another 6 months. My brother suffered from mental illness for much of his adult life, and I have found great comfort in the fact that I believe he is completely healed and whole now – the person he was meant to be before mental illness stole so much from him. In September, my father passed away from cancer, but again, I take great comfort in both the belief that I will see him again and the fact that he had a well-lived life and left a lasting legacy. One thing I have found very interesting is that death is never grieved the same way. The way I grieved for my brother was very different than the way I grieved for my father. It was the difference between coming to the end of a book, reading the end, and while feeling sad the book was over, having a sense of this is the end of the story versus feeling like someone ripped the book out of my hands and the story wasn’t finished. Anyway, I really appreciated this interview. I always listen while walking my dog Kipper (think Lassie). I have learned so much from your podcasts and always find them uplifting, encouraging and challenging in the best of ways!

March 23, 2018 at 11:19 am

Thank you for sharing your story Rosanne. I so agree with your depiction of grief – having the book ripped out of your hands before the story is complete vs. reading all the way to the end with a sense of sadness but resolution. A few years after my father’s suicide I had a dream in which he was young, whole and happy and it still gives me great peace when I think of him now to see that image. In a way that dream helped complete the ending of my father’s story. Best wishes to you!

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Fault in Our Stars — The Theme of Death, Loss, and Grief

The Theme of Death, Loss, and Grief

Categories: The Fault in Our Stars

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Published: Jan 29, 2024

Words: 512 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Interpretation of death as a theme, exploration of loss as a theme, discussion of grief as a theme, analysis of the relationship between death, loss, and grief, comparison of different perspectives and cultural interpretations.

Shakespeare, William. "Hamlet."
Green, John. "The Fault in Our Stars."
Morrison, Ton"Beloved."
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

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Essays About Losing a Loved One: Top 5 Examples

Writing essays about losing a loved one can be challenging; discover our helpful guide with essay examples and writing prompts to help you begin writing.

One of the most basic facts of life is that it is unpredictable. Nothing on this earth is permanent, and any one of us can pass away in the blink of an eye. But unfortunately, they leave behind many family members and friends who will miss them very much whenever someone dies.

The most devastating news can ruin our best days, affecting us negatively for the next few months and years. When we lose a loved one, we also lose a part of ourselves. Even if the loss can make you feel hopeless at times, finding ways to cope healthily, distract yourself, and move on while still honoring and remembering the deceased is essential.

5 Top Essay Examples

1. losing a loved one by louis barker, 2. personal reflections on coping and loss by adrian furnham , 3. losing my mom helped me become a better parent by trish mann, 4. reflection – dealing with grief and loss by joe joyce.

5. Will We Always Hurt on The Anniversary of Losing a Loved One? by Anne Peterson

1. Is Resilience Glorified in Society?

2. how to cope with a loss, 3. reflection on losing a loved one, 4. the stages of grief, 5. the circle of life, 6. how different cultures commemorate losing a loved one.

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“I managed to keep my cool until I realized why I was seeing these familiar faces. Once the service started I managed to keep my emotions in tack until I saw my grandmother break down. I could not even look up at her because I thought about how I would feel in the same situation. Your life can change drastically at any moment. Do not take life or the people that you love for granted, you are only here once.”

Barker reflects on how he found out his uncle had passed away. The writer describes the events leading up to the discovery, contrasting the relaxed, cheerful mood and setting that enveloped the house with the feelings of shock, dread, and devastation that he and his family felt once they heard. He also recalls his family members’ different emotions and mannerisms at the memorial service and funeral.

“Most people like to believe that they live in a just, orderly and stable world where good wins out in the end. But what if things really are random? Counselors and therapists talk about the grief process and grief stages. Given that nearly all of us have experienced major loss and observed it in others, might one expect that people would be relatively sophisticated in helping the grieving?”

Furnham, a psychologist, discusses the stages of grief and proposes six different responses to finding out about one’s loss or suffering: avoidance, brief encounters, miracle cures, real listeners, practical help, and “giving no quarter.” He discusses this in the context of his wife’s breast cancer diagnosis, after which many people displayed these responses. Finally, Furnham mentions the irony that although we have all experienced and observed losing a loved one, no one can help others grieve perfectly.

“When I look in the mirror, I see my mom looking back at me from coffee-colored eyes under the oh-so-familiar crease of her eyelid. She is still here in me. Death does not take what we do not relinquish. I have no doubt she is sitting beside me when I am at my lowest telling me, ‘You can do this. You got this. I believe in you.’”

In Mann’s essay, she tries to see the bright side of her loss; despite the anguish she experienced due to her mother’s passing. Expectedly, she was incredibly depressed and had difficulty accepting that her mom was gone. But, on the other hand, she began to channel her mom into parenting her children, evoking the happy memories they once shared. She is also amused to see the parallels between her and her kids with her and her mother growing up.

“Now I understood that these feelings must be allowed expression for as long as a person needs. I realized that the “don’t cry” I had spoken on many occasions in the past was not of much help to grieving persons, and that when I had used those words I had been expressing more my own discomfort with feelings of grief and loss than paying attention to the need of mourners to express them.”

Joyce, a priest, writes about the time he witnessed the passing of his cousin on his deathbed. Having experienced this loss right as it happened, he was understandably shaken and realized that all his preachings of “don’t cry” were unrealistic. He compares this instance to a funeral he attended in Pakistan, recalling the importance of letting grief take its course while not allowing it to consume you.

5. Will We Always Hurt on The Anniversary of Losing a Loved One? by Anne Peterson

“Death. It’s certain. And we can’t do anything about that. In fact, we are not in control of many of the difficult circumstances of our lives, but we are responsible for how we respond to them. And I choose to honor their memory.”

Peterson discusses how she feels when she has to commemorate the anniversary of losing a loved one. She recalls the tragic deaths of her sister, two brothers, and granddaughter and describes her guilt and anger. Finally, she prays to God, asking him to help her; because of a combination of prayer and self-reflection, she can look back on these times with peace and hope that they will reunite one day.

6 Thought-Provoking Writing Prompts on Essays About Losing A Loved One

Essays About Losing A Loved One: Is resilience glorified in society?

Society tends to praise those who show resilience and strength, especially in times of struggle, such as losing a loved one. However, praising a person’s resilience can prevent them from feeling the pain of loss and grief. This essay explores how glorifying resilience can prevent a person from healing from painful events. Be sure to include examples of this issue in society and your own experiences, if applicable.

Loss is always tricky, especially involving someone close to your heart. Reflect on your personal experiences and how you overcame your grief for an effective essay. Create an essay to guide readers on how to cope with loss. If you can’t pull ideas from your own experiences, research and read other people’s experiences with overcoming loss in life.

If you have experienced losing a loved one, use this essay to describe how it made you feel. Discuss how you reacted to this loss and how it has impacted who you are today. Writing an essay like this may be sensitive for many. If you don’t feel comfortable with this topic, you can write about and analyze the loss of a loved one in a book, movie, or TV show you have seen.

Essays About Losing A Loved One: The Stages of Grief

When we lose a loved one, grief is expected. There are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Discuss each one and how they all connect. You can write a compelling essay by including examples of how the different stages are manifested in books, television, and maybe even your own experiences.

Death is often regarded as a part of a so-called “circle of life,” most famously shown through the film, The Lion King . In summary, it explains that life goes on and always ends with death. For an intriguing essay topic, reflect on this phrase and discuss what it means to you in the context of losing a loved one. For example, perhaps keeping this in mind can help you cope with the loss.

Different cultures have different traditions, affected by geography, religion, and history. Funerals are no exception to this; in your essay, research how different cultures honor their deceased and compare and contrast them. No matter how different they may seem, try finding one or two similarities between your chosen traditions.

If you’d like to learn more, our writer explains how to write an argumentative essay in this guide.For help picking your next essay topic, check out our 20 engaging essay topics about family .

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Writing about death is one of the hardest, most valuable things journalists do — here’s how to do it correctly.

Alma matters: journalism resources for professors and students during the covid-19 pandemic.

Welcome to Alma Matters, a regularly updated feature on Poynter.org to assist educators and student media organizations.

Struggling and need advice? Have a tip or tool you want to share with others? Email me at [email protected] .

Reminder: All News University self-directed courses and webinars are free until May 31. Use the discount code 20college100

One of the toughest rites of passage for young journalists is writing about someone who just died.

For many working journalists, interviewing distraught loved ones and grieving friends is a hard but necessary part of the job — and something we’re used to.

The nation’s student journalists are about to face this nearly alone.

The in-person support network that a college newsroom used to offer is gone, replaced by teleconferencing and texts.

Advisers and experienced student editors should be mindful of their staff members as the death toll for COVID-19 mounts, keeping an eye out not just on deceased community members but the students who are being asked to cover their deaths.

Here are my best tips for dealing with death. I hope you won’t need them.

A hard necessity

First and foremost, understand that writing about a person who has died is important and meaningful. You cannot skip this part of the job because it’s intimidating. Telling stories of people’s lives and deaths is a way that journalism connects humanity, and that’s more important now than ever.

An easy litmus test: Think of someone you truly hold dear, and imagine them dying (unpleasant, I know). Now imagine that a local TV station airs a long story about this person without ever talking to you. How do you feel about being excluded from this process to tell stories and celebrate the life of your loved one? Carry that thinking with you throughout your reporting process. It will help you always do the right thing.

Make a plan

If they haven’t already, student media organizations should get a plan in place. Consider:

Who will write profiles of the deceased?
Who will edit and fact-check them?
Has your staff been briefed on how to deal with grieving sources?
Will you treat students, faculty, staff, donor and alumni deaths the same or differently?
Where will these stories reside? Are you creating a special page?
Who will gather photos and perhaps audio/video?

Interview skillfully

Interviewing the bereaved is hard enough in person, but this time it’s going to be even harder without the body language and potential physical contact you can have with sources.

You should do it anyway.

Arrange a time and place for a phone call, Facetime, Zoom, or Google Hangout, or whatever technology you’re most comfortable with and are assured the other party can use. Encourage your source to pass the phone/device around and talk to as many loved ones as you can if there are multiple people at the home.

Loved ones congregating at one home may not happen now, so be sure to get as many names and numbers as you can from your initial source so you can call other people.

As with most journalism, a richer and more full story emerges as you talk to more people. Do not rely on texts or emails for these stories if at all possible. Really attempt personal connection, even if it’s virtual.

Where to start with sources

A cardinal rule of death writing is that you must talk to the family and friends — you cannot rely on loving social media posts or online funeral home memory books.

The best sources for stories about death are immediate family — spouses, children, parents. Start there and move outward toward siblings, friends, cousins and coworkers.

Call the funeral home. Often there’s a person designated there to be a contact for the family, and the funeral home will let that person know there’s a media inquiry into their loved one’s death. Some funeral homes understand the important role journalism plays in mourning; others don’t. Don’t be intimidated either way.

What to ask

Do research beforehand. Your list of questions should attempt to answer some basic biographical questions: the decedent’s birthplace/hometown, where they grew up, where they moved around to and settled or lived when they died, where they went to high school and/or college, their major, the date they graduated or were set to graduate, where they worked and in what industry, the name of their spouse(s), the year they got married, names and birth years of children. You should also ask about hobbies, interests, extracurriculars or volunteer work. The more questions about their life you have going into an interview, the smoother it will go.

Use other published material and social accounts to fact-check and backup your story.

Don’t forget the pictures

Get photos. Publish several. Write good cutlines on each one.

It’s preferable to ask for family photos than to take them from social media profiles, but you can also ask permission to use social photos. Sharing a photo on social media does not waive ownership, and it’s not an invitation for you to copy and republish it, experts say.

Style and accuracy check

As hard as it is sometimes, we always say that someone died, not that they “passed away” or “passed on.” You can certainly use this language in your questions, but when it comes time to write the story, stick to “died.”

Generally, obits and death stories focus on the positive parts of a person’s life. That’s generally OK.

Bear in mind that a project like this is an important historical work that may be kept in the family for generations to come. Often, this is the single bit of press a person will get in his or her lifetime.

Self-care matters

Despite what we might have heard from older generations of journalists, you shouldn’t tough this out alone. There’s absolutely no shame in having and sharing serious emotions around death, and your experiences as you gather news around that topic. You want to maintain a level of professionalism, but even the pros can become distraught on the job .

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma offers the tip sheet Covering Breaking News: Interviewing Victims and Survivors that’s worth reading in its entirety, and Poynter has this advice for self-care for journalists.

Here are highlights from the Dart Center’s tip sheet:

Be transparent, calm and soft-spoken.
Identify who you are, what organization you represent, what will happen with the information you collect from the interview, how it might be used and when it will appear.
Tell them why you want to talk with them.
If they are open to an interview, then proceed. If not, then leave your contact information with them and ask them to contact you anytime if they would like to talk.
If they are not interested in talking, or willing to speak on the record, there will be another opportunity to find another source.
Don’t patronize.
Don’t ask “How do you feel?”
Don’t say “I know how you feel,” or “I totally understand,” because in most cases nobody truly knows what somebody else is going through.
“So what you’re saying is…”
“From what you’re saying, I can see how you would be…”
“You must be …”
Give ample time for the interview – you may need more time than you think.
Record the interviews so you can always go back and listen – in case you missed something in your notes.
Don’t take things personally. Sometimes sources may be going through interpersonal responses to trauma and may not be showing you signs in the interview of interaction – don’t take this personally, it may be the way they are dealing with the situation.

Don’t bottle up your feelings. Don’t forget that covering a traumatic event can impact you, too. Be sure to find ways to talk about the experience with your friends, family, adviser or editor. They may have covered something similar and/or can just be a listening ear. You should not keep your emotions bottled up; sharing your experience is one way of coping with witnessing and reporting on such a difficult event.

Send me your questions, ideas, solutions and tips. I’ll try to help as much as I can in a future column. Contact me at [email protected] or on Twitter at barbara_allen_

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In the face of death, telling and sharing our story helps us make sense of dying

Lecturer in Health Research, Lancaster University

Disclosure statement

Amanda Bingley was a researcher on the team that received funding from Macmillan Cancer Support for this research.

Lancaster University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.

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For those who may feel that many decades separate them from their deaths, contemplating the end of life seems difficult, even abstract. But stories of the dying hold a fascination for us, from diagnosis to treatment, remission or relapse, survival or death.

Personal dying narratives – in which the author writes about their own imminent death, or the tale of their death as written by someone close to them – first emerged as a popular genre in books, newspapers and magazines in the 1950s. Today, such stories published online can confer authors with celebrity status: Stephen Sutton died of cancer in 2014 aged just 19, and his blog, written over the two years prior to his death, was read by more than a million people and helped raise a staggering £2.3m for the Teenage Cancer Trust.

The earliest of these dying narratives tended to be the preserve of public figures, celebrities, authors and journalists. For example, American journalist Charles Wertenbaker’s account of his facing colon cancer in 1955 and his choice to die by euthanasia was the basis of the book Death Of A Man written and published after his death by his wife Lael Wertenbaker . She later said that her determination to publish this story was to raise awareness about the realities of a cancer death and the need to talk openly about euthanasia, and in that she has been successful.

Since then, there have been many other high profile stories of facing death that have raised other issues that go beyond the purely biographical. Tennis player Arthur Ashe , in his autobiography, written as he was dying from AIDS acquired from an HIV-infected blood transfusion during heart surgery, sought to raise awareness of the risks of untested donated blood.

Stories of medical errors or delays in treatment are a common theme. Journalist Ruth Picardie , who died of breast cancer in 1998 aged 33, wrote about the impact of poor medical decision making at her diagnosis that significantly reduced her chances of survival.

Other writers elaborate on the stark everyday realities of a terminal illness: fear and uncertainty. Journalist John Diamond died in 2001, and eloquently wrote how “cancer is for cowards, too”, and not just a battle for the “brave” and “heroes”. For most people, there is no choice but to get on with it, to endure horrible treatments and find very ordinary ways to cope.

In a similar way, doctor Kate Granger shares on her blog the unpredictable emotional responses since her diagnosis with terminal cancer:

As a newly diagnosed 29-year-old girl I thought I knew exactly how I wanted things to be with regards to my treatment. As a hardened and experienced 34-year-old cancer patient I now know I have to face each decision at a time and cannot predict how I’m going to react emotionally to any of this.

The appeal of deathbed tales

Personal stories of death and dying are more likely to be told if the writer is younger, has a cancer diagnosis, and is running a campaign to raise funds or awareness of specific challenges (and benefits) of treatment, or working with clinicians. Older people are much less likely to share stories of illness, particularly if they’re struggling with the more common effects of age, such as stroke or dementia. Older generations are increasing their use of the internet, however, and some charities specific to an illness such as Parkinson’s UK have developed online forums where real life stories can be shared between younger and older people.

There are other subtle reasons for sharing the story of our final days: telling a story can be therapeutic and it can make you feel better to verbally share, write down or unload tales of the affliction suffered, and the resulting fear, anger, confusion or sadness. We have, it seems, a deep need to make sense of events and communicate this process through storytelling .

We turn to writing and to reading other people’s books, blogs and poetry when we are being put through the trauma of illness. We may wish to preserve some sense of normality again, to give voice to memories, and to search for meaning at the end of our lives. Importantly, reading the stories of others can offer support and comfort. To connect with others online and exchange notes about our illness with others in the same situation is to put trust in the personal anecdote over the impersonal official leaflet. Our stories are witnessed, and in this way we may feel some part of our story continues after death.

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Show, Don’t Tell: How to Write the Stages of Grief

by Ruthanne Reid | 59 comments

How do you make your readers cry?

I promise this post won't be a downer. What it will be (hopefully) is really useful advice on how to portray the stages grief—and in the process, maybe encourage you to continue creating even during your own personal sorrow.

“We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey,” said Kenji Miyazawa.

Well, my friends: it's time to break beautifully.

Breaking Beautifully

“When artists break, they try to break beautifully. Sit, smile, and enjoy the pieces of a shattered soul.” – quote from Tumblr

Most of us have read stories portraying grief so spectacularly that we felt it as we read, weeping alongside fictitious graves. Of course, most of us have also read stories with grief that utterly failed to move us, which (I think we can all agree) is something we'd prefer not to write.

The power of story largely resides in its power to evoke emotions. Our favorite works all tend to follow that path. We read about a heroine who succeeds against impossible odds, and we are bolstered by her courage. We read about the ridiculous antics of a teenage boy who's too smart for his own good, and we share both his embarrassments and his triumphs.

Empathy is the ultimate form of “ show, don't tell .”

But in order to portray the stages grief effectively, we have to observe it. Grief is weird. It lingers. It colors everything and its symptoms change over time. Most importantly of all, grief leads to a particular kind of storytelling: finding the “why.”

To Write the Stages of Grief, Find the Why

“He who has a why can bear any how.” – Dr. Viktor Frank, a psychologist and holocaust survivor

At our hearts, we are all storytellers. It's part of the human condition to explain the world to ourselves in a way we'll accept. We rationalize. We imagine scenarios to help ourselves understand.

If your character has experienced past grief, then one of two things happens over time:

They find a “why” of some kind and make peace with it (even if that “why” is “bad stuff happens and I accept that”).
Or they have no “why,” and cannot shed the weight of the grief they carry.

That “why” can be anything. Religious, scientific, poetic—we are terrific storytellers, down to our core. Here's a royal, real-life example:

“Grief is the price we pay for love.” – Queen Elizabeth II

There's reasoning in there, a why.

The story your character tells herself gives your character direction. Does she blame the deceased for his death? Does she blame someone else, or hold to a faith in cruel fate that could strike again at any time?

The story she tells herself can grow hope or prevent it from blooming. It determines the choices she makes in the wake of her grief.

Homework Assignment: what story is your character telling himself?

BONUS: By the way, this can give birth to a really great plot-twist. If a decade after the fact, evidence comes to light that blows the survivor's rationalization to bits, then that survivor has a whole new set of motivations to carry your plot along. Boom: story.

How to Write the Stages of Grief

Along with that story, there will be symptoms of grief. These symptoms vary over the various stages of grief, and you should be aware of them as you describe your character's grief.

Immediate Grief

Physical sensations (throat thickening, lack of appetite or increased appetite, nausea, a weight in the chest, trembling hands, swollen eyes, stuffed nose)
Thought patterns (denial, what if, if only, I didn't get to say goodbye, I wish I hadn't/had said That Thing, why-why-why-why-why)
Stress symptoms (inability to sleep, lack of desire to take part in once-loved activities)
Social symptoms (the insistence everything is fine, or the inability to hide grief in public; withdrawal from activities; irritability; over-booking activities to keep busy)

During the initial stages of grief, some or all of these might be present. Your character will not necessarily verbalize them; they could be happening “off-screen.” However, they will be happening, and that should make a difference how your character behaves – and how your readers empathize.

Homework Assignment: how does your character handle immediate grief? Socially? Physically?

Long-Term Grief

Long-term grief is very different from immediate grief. Even this short list is a little baffling:

Denial . Boy, can this take a lot of forms. Denial of the cause of death, of culpability, of grief itself – which leads to stress physically and emotionally, not to mention living in such a way as to prove that denial true.
Corollary: Gut-punch sorrow upon remembering that loss. It feels a little like losing the person all over again.
Corollary: Resulting gut-punch of guilt, as if remembering were a sacred duty that must not be shirked. This isn't as weird as it might seem. There's a reason most ancient cultures cherished numerous festivals and sacrifices to and for the dead. Remembering matters.
Living for the person . His mom was gonna be a dancer? And hey, looky there: twenty years later, he owns a dance studio, and he may not have even realized he's carrying on her dream.
The deceased made a statement or held a belief that the survivor feels is absolutely untrue.
Death prevented any kind of satisfactory conclusion to their disagreement.
The survivor then attempts to live in such a way that it proves that naysayer wrong. (“Oh, I can't be a great archeologist as a woman, huh? Well, now I'm the best in my field!”)
Rationalization . Remember that story we tell ourselves? Over the long term, that story usually gets set in stone. If you know what your character's story is, you will know WHY they do a lot of the things they do. It's a powerful writing tool.
Irrational fear of whatever it was that killed that person. (e.g., run over by a garbage truck, and therefore it is Horse And Buggy Time Forever).
Embracing whatever it was that killed that person. (e.g., run over by a garbage truck, and therefore the survivor now drives a truck to conquer that fear.)
Continued Physical Symptoms of Stress. High blood pressure. Ulcers. Poor sleep. Refusal to let anyone too close. If the bereavement was not dealt with and the “why” does not suffice, your character can go through a whole host of horrible symptoms.

Homework Assignment: How does your character handle grief in the long term? Do they embrace the cause of death, or run away from it? Has it shaped career choices?

Conclusion: Show Grief, Don't Tell It

If you want your character's grief to be powerful, you must learn to show it, not tell it .

You could say , “She cried,” or you could show that her nose is stuffed, that her eyes are simultaneously dry and leaking, and that her voice is hoarse.

You could say, “He had crazy thoughts of joining her,” or you could show by having him ask himself, “What if I'd been in the car with her? What if I had begged her not to drive while drinking? If only I'd taken her keys!”

When Grieving, Write On

Permit me to get personal before practice time.

The years of 2011 to 2012 were rough. One of my best friends died, followed by my grandmother, then the college professor who was basically a surrogate father, and finally, my own mother.

The causes varied wildly (aneurysm; age; hit-and-run; drowning). The timing was insane (February 2011; June 2011; December 2011; June 2012). It seemed I'd barely recovered from one loss when another would cut the corner to hit me head-on. To say it took a lot out of me is analogous to saying there are a lot of cats on the internet.

The thing is, I had a debut book to finish. The Sundered was due to go public June, 2012. I couldn't afford to take time off creatively. I had to write through it, and I did that by focusing on what I experienced and pouring it into the page.

I wrote like a madwoman. Was everything I wrote good? Heck, no. No one will ever see most of what I wrote during that period (and believe me, you would thank me if you knew).

But am I glad I kept writing? Yes. A thousand times yes.

If you take nothing else from this article, take this: if you continue to create while you are grieving, you will survive it better.

It's not a “why.” It doesn't make the loss less bad; but creation, like growth, only happens when we are living.

Keep writing. Keep creating. If you must break, break beautifully – and then your characters can break beautifully, too.

Has your character experienced grief? Have you? Let us know in the comments section .

It's time to practice writing your character through grief. Take fifteen minutes and dive into the story they're telling themselves about this loss (the why), then post it in the comments section . If you share a practice, please comment on the stories of others.

Ruthanne Reid

Best-Selling author Ruthanne Reid has led a convention panel on world-building, taught courses on plot and character development, and was keynote speaker for The Write Practice 2021 Spring Retreat.

Author of two series with five books and fifty short stories, Ruthanne has lived in her head since childhood, when she wrote her first story about a pony princess and a genocidal snake-kingdom, using up her mom’s red typewriter ribbon.

When she isn’t reading, writing, or reading about writing, Ruthanne enjoys old cartoons with her husband and two cats, and dreams of living on an island beach far, far away.

P.S. Red is still her favorite color.

59 Comments

She closed the door after she offered one last expression of gratitude, and he returned one last sentiment of condolence. She didn’t know what she had expected to happen next. Perhaps she thought she would slump down against the door, and sob helplessly, but instead, she found herself walking automatically back to the kitchen table. After all, she had been interrupted halfway through a meal, and they’d have wanted her to finish it. Starving children in Africa and all that. She took a bite of the leftover chicken breast, but didn’t taste it. Leftover chicken doesn’t usually have much of a taste, but today she probably could have chewed a fresh jalapeño without tasting it. She swallowed mechanically and picked up the next bite, her mind refusing to grasp anything consciously, until it seized upon a word. “Tragedy.” That was what the officer had said – it was a tragedy, her parents being killed in a hostage taking gone bad. Years of theatre training tumbled in her head as she thought about that one word. In a tragedy, the protagonist is tripped up by a tragic flaw. They have some character defect that inevitably leads to their downfall. Her parents aren’t tragic figures, they are – were – heroes. Philanthropists. They never had an unkind word to say to anyone, and had gone to the bank today to endow a scholarship. In fact, the only flaw that her parents could be said to have was her. She had applied to several colleges for theatre studies and dance, and her father had chided her softly about how she would change the world. She had heard the unspoken implication that she could be doing more, and had resented the guilt trip that she felt he was trying to place on her. Why shouldn’t she do what made her happy? Now, as she shoved another dollop of reheated mashed potatoes in her mouth, she felt the guilt anew. If this was a tragedy, she was the one with the tragic flaw. All of her parents’ kindness and money, and she was going to spend her days prancing gracefully around a stage, instead of doing something meaningful. Her eyes lit upon the business card upon the table; she had tossed it there carelessly after the officer had handed it to her, but now she studied it: the logo and name bringing back the image of the officer who had been given the unenviable task of bringing her the news, of his uniform, the haunted look behind his eyes of some tragedy of his own. Her parents were right. She could make a difference, and she knew how. She knew what she wanted to become. The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is that a comedy celebrates life, while tragedy highlights its futility. Her parents’ lives would not end as a tragedy, and certainly not through her own tragic flaws: her self-centeredness, her lack of ambition. Instead, she would take what her parents had given her and become a different sort of hero: one who could prevent evil from claiming innocent lives, like those of her parents.

I really like the little detail about her not tasting anything, and that she wouldn’t taste anything that day, I found the very effective. It’s also a nicely different take, having someone sit down and eat instead of throwing up or refusing food for days after the fact. Really well done, love it 🙂

Thanks for the feedback, and thanks for reading!

What a powerful piece! You leave me wanting to know more about what happened after this.

Once the diagnosis of cancer was made, he quit calling home. I didn’t have any communication with him after May 25, 2011. That was it. No more talks, no more reaching out, we were receiving texts once in a while.

It hurt. It hurt, more than anything else, to be shut out. I tried to tell myself; he was trying to protect me. But was he? I’m not sure. Four years later, as I write this, I wonder. When he stopped talking to us, my husband said something that has haunted me since. Roger said “Get on a plane before it’s too late.” I didn’t get on a plane. And, I regret it so much. I asked Christopher, “Could I come to take care of him?” He said “no.” Maybe, I shouldn’t have asked him. Maybe, I should have went without asking. These questions circulated my mind for years. They still do sometimes. There is no answer. In my mind by not being there at his bedside, and letting him die alone. I was a bad mother. Knowing that a good mother would have been at his side, I knew I was not a good mother. I was not there. After Christopher’s death, these thoughts were torturous. “How could a good mother not want to be there when their child is sick?” A mother is the first one to the aid of a sick child. A mother holds their hand, comforts them, and protects them. Knowing that Christopher died, and I was not present made me a bad mother. The good mother code had been broken. “How was I going to face my husband, my younger son, and myself knowing he died alone?” As a mother, I would have been watching over him. I know I would have noticed when he stopped breathing. As it unfolded, he stopped breathing, and was dead for a period of time. Before Britney came back into the room to find him dead in the hospital bed. Throughout this time, Bob and Jane, his friends, were watching over him while Britney was gone. They were in the room when he died. They never even noticed he was not breathing. It is inconceivable that they could be in a room with a dead body, and not know it. “Honestly, who does that?’ After his death, I chose to bury Christopher in South Dakota. His friends didn’t take this news well. I tried to explain away their behavior as being a part of their grief. Yet, the pain their behavior caused stays with me. The day after he died. Bob and Jane, the same two friends, who were in the room when he died, went to Christopher’s apartment. They told the landlord Christopher did not have any relatives. They requested the keys to his apartment. The landlord gave them the keys. They went into his apartment, and helped themselves to whatever they wanted. I found out days afterward, when I called the landlord, who told me what happened. I was devastated, and angry. “No relatives”, were they serious? He had a mother, a father, a step mother, a step father and two brothers, who cared about him deeply. He had grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles, who cared about him. It was a punch to the gut. When confronted, Jane said, “I was going to pack up his stuff and keep it in my garage.” I was furious, “how dare they mess with his stuff?” I wasn’t ready to say he was never coming back to his apartment. It had only been two days. Christopher wasn’t even in the ground yet. My husband said it best. He said, “Don’t mess with the baby bears stuff unless you want mama bear breathing down your neck.” The worst was yet to come, for his friends said, Christopher told them; I had not been a good mother. “I had not been there to support him except at graduation.” Another friend said, “Christopher had told her he hoped I was a better grandmother than I was mother.” “How did they know that was my weak point? How could they have known?” I told no one. It was a secret being a bad mother, I kept it to myself, and cried alone at night about it. Christopher’s “so-called” friend posted a message on my Facebook saying “Don’t think just because you came to his graduation that you were a good mother.” This message was left on my Facebook page for the whole world to see. I was exposed to be the bad mother, I was. A constant struggle from the time Christopher was born was making sure, I was a good mother. One hint, or one word that I was not a good mother would send me into a depression consistently throughout his life. My thoughts would race, my heart would pound, and I was exposed to be the bad mother, I was. After a few days, the loathing of myself would subside. Life interrupted forcing me to go forward. The perceived mistake, which had prompted the depression, would go underground to be relived in those moments of questioning: “Am I a good mother?” This fear of not being a good mother came, as most things do, through the interactions with one’s own parents. The relationship between my mother, and I has been rocky for most of my life. She is petite, blonde, and beautiful. I, however, am a carbon copy of my biological father. I have muddy blonde hair, blue eyes, with a stocky build. Not only were we different in appearances; we were different in personalities. Her every day interactions with the people around her always had a bite to it. I, on the other hand, was well liked, and personable including a strong sense of independence with a strong will. Interactions between us were clashes of dominance, which continue today. The strong will is both a strength, and a curse for submission is not allowed. In any interaction with my mother, submission was imperative for survival. My hypercritical mother was the one, who set the standards for parenting for everyone else except her. She insisted, she knew what a good mother was. “A good mother according to her never made mistakes” The problem being in her eyes, I was a giant, walking, mistake. Growing up, she often stated “Cristi, you have to live with me until you are 21 years. You are too stupid to make your own decisions.” Having Christopher when I was unmarried, and 19 years old did nothing to convince her; she was wrong. With the death of my son these images, and words came back to haunt me. Immediately, the old programming kicks in with the thought “I am a bad mother.” I had left my son in Louisiana. He had died alone without me by his side. The guilt kicked in convincing me, I was a bad person, a bad mother that is why he died. Every mistake I had made in my life came back to haunt me. My mother’s voice echoed through my head. “You are a bad mother. I need to take Christopher away from you” Always that fear was there, that she would follow through on her threats of taking him away. “Was I being punished for this mistake?” Or, maybe it was my biggest mistake of all; which was practicing an alternative religion which did not believe in Jesus Christ. “What was it?” “What made me so different than the other mothers who got to see their children grow up, get married, and grow old?” “How come me?” It was ever present in my mind, and never really left. “What did I do so wrong that I lost a child?” Having been a counselor for over 10 years, I saw many mothers, who did not necessarily like being a parent. These mothers were more interested in men, drugs, alcohol, or work. “How could they get to keep their children, and I could not?” It was a war between you are not being punished for your mistakes and you are being punished for your mistakes. This fear of not being a good mother is a major crisis surrounding the loss of a child. It is the fear, and the pain we keep in our souls. It is never shown the light, or shared for someone may say “you are a bad mother that is why your child died?”In retrospect, when I think about what would have happened if I had been 3,000 miles away from home, and lost my mind, what would have happened?” It scares me to think about it. I would have been wailing on the floor like a crazy banshee in a hospital; or I could have saved him by noticing he was not breathing. It is easy to look behind us into the past to do the “would have? Could have? And, should have? I judged myself more harshly than anyone else. But, this is what mothers’ do. We protect our children from the bad. We make them better when they are hurt, sad, or mad. Me as a mother, was supposed to make it better. I was supposed to be there to hold his hand as he died. I wasn’t there, and I failed him. Somehow in my irrational thinking process, I began to make a connection between my practices of an alternate religion with being a bad mother. The thought process became “I am a bad mother because I helped someone in the circle pray.” My friends endured endless questions asking the same thing. “Did I cause his death?” Over, and over again, I would ask. Despite the answer, I continued to ask. “Did I cause his death?” Alone at 2 or 3 am, this question raced through my mind. The logical mind would try to intervene. This emotion, this fear ran so deep; it could not be controlled with logic. This fear made his dying within my control. If it was within my control, I could have changed my behavior so he wouldn’t die. The unexpectedness, and uncontrollability of death, and its effects created havoc on my sense of self, my emotions, and my soul. If I could control death, then I could have prevented Christopher from dying.It looks like an easy process on paper, it was not. For months, this question was never far from my mind. I could be working. It would be a wiggle in the back of the brain. It woke me up most nights, and kept me awake for hours. I stopped asking others after a while. I finely figured out only I could answer the question. “Did I cause Christopher’s death?”The pain is an ache which never went away. It felt the same day or night, no matter what I was doing. Your brain doesn’t work right either when you have so much pain, and emotion inside of you. In order to think, I had to cut through these emotions, and pain to get to a place where thought would happen. Some days I didn’t have the energy to even try. My coping skills were overwhelmed when Christopher died. The emotional energy needed to cope with the thoughts of being a bad mother, or the emotions, and pain of death did not exist. Interestingly, it has been almost four years since Christopher died, and the intensity of my feelings are quite low compared to before he died. I tended to have powerful emotions that were difficult to control for years before Christopher died. Now, I don’t care about most things. The reality is I don’t have the emotional energy to care. I am completed drained of emotional energy. It does not seem to be coming back. In many ways, this is a blessing. Life is easier when the things you care about become a precious few. In some ways, it is a curse. There are days when I feel dead inside. I keep wondering “How come my give a dam is not working?” “When will it be fixed?” My “good mother crisis” has lessened over the years. “Do I still question myself about my parenting skills?” “Yes, I do” “I always will, because Christopher is not here to say, “You were a good mother” What has changed is the loathing, and self-hate, I flogged myself with which has been healed. I don’t have a formula that I can share which will help you heal. What I want to tell you, is you can heal. It takes time. It takes work. It takes believing in yourself. It is not something someone else can do for you. I can promise you, the journey will be worth it.

This is a combination of excerpts from a chapter in a book I am set to publish on July 1, called the Solitary Journey through the loss of a child. It took me 149 pages to answer your 15 minutes practice. There is so much more to grief.

Wow. This was incredibly emotionally raw. It got to the point, about halfway through, where I started to wince every time I read the words “bad mother.” In most things I read, I’d criticize such a repetition of two phrases (“good mother”/”bad mother”), but it was incredibly effective here, because that’s what grief and guilt do – they drive that same message into your head over and over. It was very moving. I would suggest you have someone go through it and proofread it before you publish it. There are a few minor typos (“give a dam” instead of “damn”, “baby bears”-missing an apostrophe, etc.) and I don’t know if it’s an artifact of it being a combination of excerpts, but you may want to improve the paragraphing, for readability’s sake. That stream-of-consciousness, one-thought-running-into-another effect works well here for a monologue on motherhood, but if it’s the same kind of paragraphing over 149 pages, that might get tedious. Once again, this was heart-wrenching, and it so powerfully answered the prompt and showed real grief. Thank you for showing us your beating heart (unless that was fiction, in which case, holy crap, that is even more impressive).

Thanks. I am having a friend edit for me. I started with a professional editor. It changed the story when she did that. I wanted it to be my words. Thanks for the edits. And not fiction that is my heart. There is less emotional content between those paragraphs. I left them out because it did not answer the prompt.

A professional editor shouldn’t change your words, they should make suggestions for how you might change your words and help you to change them, should you both decide it’s needed. The only words editors should change are ones that are simply incorrect – you’ve used an incorrect version of the same word, or affect instead of effect, inquiry instead enquiry etc. I say this as an editor myself – if the person you were working with was changing your words, they weren’t doing their job correctly. Don’t let it put you off working with someone else in future, you just have to find the right fit for you. Someone specific to your genre who has a track record of editing books you love is always a good start 🙂

Good points, Hazel. Also a good editor will do a sample edit so you can decide if they are the right fit. I had the opposite problem. I kept asking my editor for suggestions which he refused to do as he said he was not the author and that was not his place! Luckily he did two passes (for the price of one) so I finally accepted that I need to “find the right words” myself. That was my biggest fear when looking for an editor: that they would change my words. It’s ironic that I then turned around and was asking for suggestions. Sherrie Do you know a/b my debut novel “Secrets & Lies in El Salvador”? A young American woman goes to war-torn El Salvador: http://tinyurl.com/klxbt4y

I would also recommend a test section being done before you commit to anything for the sake of both author and editor – both need to know they are happy to work with the other and that they are a good fit, and the editor needs to know the MS is something they are comfortable working with and can do a good job on – a good editor will not accept anything that’s outside their remit. I’m happy to make suggestions regarding how to reformat a sentence, or restructure something if i’m copy-editing, but I’ll go no further than that. It really depends on what form of editing I’m doing – if I’m doing Line by Line or developmental editing I will make suggestions on word choice if I feel it’s necessary, or if the author asks for help, but under the strict understanding that I’m doing so as an EXAMPLE of what needs to be done in order smooth out that section. The Author should then re-work the section in their own words, bearing in mind what I’ve said. It’s not always easy for two different people to understand an explanation of the weaknesses of a particular aspect of a work without actually demonstrating it.

“Your brain doesn’t work right either when you have so much pain, and emotion inside of you.”

I LOVE this line! It’s so true, and something that people who’ve never been there often don’t quite grasp. I really like the fixation on blame and whether or not it was her fault – that, again, is a thing that often happens. Grief turns to obsession so easily, I’ve often wondered if it’s actually a coping mechanism – by pouring all your energy into wondering if (say) you were a bad mother and it was your fault, you don’t actually have to deal with the greater trauma. You’re too busy worrying over a relatively small concern to actually face the fact you’ve lost a child.

Really enjoyed this (if enjoyed is the right word), thanks for sharing!

Thanks Hazel. I am never quite sure if someone will get it. Yes, it is a coping mechanism I believe too.

It seems that God is trying to break through your doubt, if you will open your heart to him. I really admire that you were able to share this, and even more that you can write a book describing that worst moment in your life. I wish you all the best with your writing! “Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not unto men” -Reagan

Oh my, the what-ifs. I know them very well. My wife decided on a Sunday in 2008, when I was gone to end her life. I have spent the years since playing that what-if, and so many variations of that, game. What if I had not been gone? What if I had gotten her more involved in whatever? What if this, maybe that, but in the end I realized if not then, it would have been another time. In the end I realized I gave her twenty good years that most likely she would not have had. I loved her then, I love her now, and there are still bubbles of grief that inundate me over the loss, but I have moved on.

Cristi, I wasn’t able to read this for a while because of real-life grief. It’s evocative; you’ve tapped into the real regrets and questions we all do in situations like this. Thank you for sharing such a raw and powerful piece!

We were taking an intersection down Route 54 when this truck turned up on our left. The semi-trailer kept swerving closer to use with each turn so I punched the horn and honked the hell out of ’em. Nearly forced us into the barrier. Jimmy was in the passenger. Our aunt Kelly preffered the backseat with charlie. He was swell little pup–was to be a birthday gift for the nephew. But anyway, Jimmy started hollaring:

“Just slow down and wait for the douche to pass.”

“No way,” I affirmed, “I’m not letting this guy get ahead just ’cause he wants to. I follow the rules why-why can’t he, huh?”

“Sis, take a deep breath. We’ll make it to the party on time. Better safe than sorry,”–

“Sorry my ass! That fucker ain’t getting away with this.”

I don’t really remember the rest of the argument but Jimmy wouldn’t back down. Aunt Kelly eventually thought to bud in and said something stupid so I told her to, “Shut up! This is my car–my rules. What makes you think you can,”–

And then Jimmy called me an arragant fuck and that I ought to never talk to aunt Kelly like that, “Because she loves you! Get you’re head out of your ass!”

I think started to shut them out and just listen to Bastille play, ‘Pompeii,’ on the radio. Jimmy asked me to turn it down, so I turned it up. That might be why I didn’t hear the crash happen up ahead.

The nurse told me the report a little after I woke up in the hospital. The truck that tried to get ahead of me was blocking the road for some other dumb fuck, so they decided to speed ahead and fly-by a few others. They hit some minivan off course and then the whole highway turned into a wreck. Jimmy was right, that trucker was a duche. ‘Course, his vehical was largest so he was already pretty safe. I kept looking around the room to find Jimmy or Kelly in the bed next to me, but they weren’t, so I called for a nurse to ask where they were. It took a minute or two for her to spout, “They didn’t make it,” becuase before that she kept coming up with some stupid anology or metaphore to say that they were dead and I don’t like stupid sentimental shit like that- I like things real and punishing. I like the rain to hit my face, not blocked by some goddam unbrella and–and . . . and. *Sniff And now it’s not just my legs and heart that hurts, but my eyes are all red and sore so I can’t see straight. Waiting on my nephew to show up. Every time he sees me he perks up and says, “hey, you pretty thing!” And I smile and hug him tight. I just want to smile, you know?

Wow, Yitzchak – what a sad piece. Thank you so much for sharing it. This sounds like the jump-off for a bigger story of living with everthing that happened. Wow.

A very interesting article, with some excellent advice. I write about death, dying and grief an awful lot, so I thought I’d add my own thoughts on this one – I won’t add a practice as this is going to be too long already (sorry! do skip it if you’re uninterested!). Grief is perhaps the most devastating emotion a person can ever feel, yet no two people ever experience it in the same way, even if they’ve lost the same person, and were both there to witness it happen. They saw the same events, smelled the same things, heard the same things, perhaps even touched the same things, but their individual experiences will have been entirely different. Their reactions will be completely different. In my experience a well written scene about grief has little to do with the details of what is happening – the scene itself, the external senses – and everything to do with the internal. The bizarre way the world is suddenly muffled, as if you were in a soundproof room with the door open a crack. You can just about hear that there’s something being said on the other side of that door, but you can’t understand it, and even if you could you wouldn’t care. Your insides seem to have vanished, leaving nothing but a void within you, and its pulling at you and dragging you in. You can’t breathe, you can’t think, you can’t comprehend what is happening because it’s so unfathomable that you could continue to exist in the world when this person you loved is suddenly absent. Perhaps you cry, perhaps you scream, perhaps you grow so angry you kick the crap out of anyone else who happens to be in that soundproof room with you, but you’re not aware you’re doing it. Not really. It’s all happening to someone else, and you’re kind of watching it happen, but your getting sucked into this awful void, and pulled apart from the inside out, so it’s a little difficult to concentrate. I’ve known people not react at all for days, weeks, sometimes years, then suddenly they start crying and screaming that such and such is dead. It could have happened a month ago, it could have happened a year ago, it doesn’t matter. Grief has no rules. Your body and mind deal with it in whatever way they can, and if they can’t deal with it, if it’s just too much for them to bear, they block it out until they’re capable of handling it, or until something else happens that pushes you so far it all ends up coming out anyway. That’s the kind of grief that leaves people mad. Maybe not forever, maybe only for a little while, but grief can drive you insane. And there are no rules when it comes to insanity. Everyone experiences it in their own way and everyone deals with it in their own way. I’m incredibly sorry to hear of your losses, Ruthanne, but I can very much relate to your need to write through it – although in my case I kept writing because it was the only way to keep myself from going mad. The result of that was my debut novel. It’s perhaps not surprising that the main themes are death, suicide, and grief. That was what I was when I was writing it. It wasn’t what I was feeling, or seeing, or experiencing, it was what I had become, body, heart and soul. I like to think that the only good thing to come out of it is that I at least managed to write a character to whom people can relate, and a character people can understand even if they’ve never actually experienced what she had been through. Her husband had killed himself, she spends the majority of the books suicidal herself due to her grief over his death, and her friends – who were also his friends – are dealing with their own grief at the loss in their own ways. Thank you very much for the tips – I am always looking to improve on writing grief credibly.

Your words are so familiar. Reached in and pulled them out. Let me know about your book. I would like to read. So healing writing the story isn’t !

Thank you, Cristi. The book is available on Amazon, it’s called Chasing Azrael. I’d post a link, but I’m not sure what the policies are on posting links to our own work. Be sure to let me know when yours is finished too, as I’d love to read the full thing.

Well said! What a beautifully honest post. Yes, people do respond to grief in unique ways. My sister and I were both present when our mother passed, yet have dealt with her passing in remarkably different ways. The foundational belief system is challenged especially by death, affirmed for some, found insufficient for some. Writing about grief for a character to experience has given me opportunities to explore different reactions that keep the character’s response true to that character. Your story no doubt expresses the raw emotions of grief for your character and that honesty is what your readers respond to. Congratulations on completing what must have been a difficult work.

Thanks for this, Hazel. I had to cut a lot of it down; there’s so much that the grieving experience which reach outside “normal” everyday life. Everyone’s experience is different, but those things which are part of simple human grief are what make this relatable.

This is based on the characters of the novel I’m working on. The backstory is that he’s a doctor, and he lost his sister and both his parents 7 years ago. The girl he’s mad at is a patient at the hospital who is a Christian, and was injured in an accident.

Jacob placed a death grip on the railing, his palms sweaty. His pounding heart refused to slow its pace, despite his trying to logically calm himself down. How could seven years of struggling have been brought down so easily? He stared down eight stories to the street below, keeping his eyes open as wide as he could to prevent any tears from appearing. He didn’t see the street, though, and he didn’t hear the noise, despite how loud it was in metro Boston. He saw that fateful night, and he heard the phone call.

How long he had struggled to forget it. How many nights he had sat in his cold, lonely apartment, and how many longs days and hours working at the hospital had it taken to get to this point, only to be brought down in an instant, by that girl. That girl. That pious Alyssa Brenton, who thought the whole world was okay. Who didn’t even have the sense to know when she was beaten. You’d think that girl going through so many problems in her own life wouldn’t be so chipper. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but that was what got to him the most. There was no way a person could be so happy, not when he hadn’t even smiled since that tragic night. Why should he have to live through this agony, while she went happily through life like nothing had happened

But things happened. They happened to him. He breathed heavily in and out as the pain started to overtake him, and as he started to fight it. He leaned against the railing, weary. He would give anything to have taken their places. If he had only been there. If he had only told them how much he had loved them. But now, there was nothing. Not even work could distract him from this. There was no point to life, to living another minute. Slowly, he slid his body down the railing and sat against it. If seven years had done nothing to lessen his grief, nothing would. Nothing.

Hi, Reagan! I have to disagree with the idea that you’re not very good at this. 🙂 I found this scene really interesting, and I’m very curious to know more.

Thanks! I’m still learning, and ‘show don’t tell’ has always been something I’ve struggled with. This is from my current WIP, a Christian romance novel. He and the girl he’s thinking about (and hating) fall in love. I’m so glad you liked this scene!

‘whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not unto men’ Reagan http://www.fiction4hisglory.com

Whoa! Good one, Ruthanne. I’m saving this over to my special “writers stuff” file. You could make a good short book out of this material. Serendipitously, not 20 minutes ago I posted a piece about sorrow on my blog. But yours is seriously comprehensive. Pardon me while I check out your website.

Thanks, PJ! I’m really trying to share the things I’ve learned, and if any of it is helping others, then I call it a success. 🙂

My Mother Betty was like all others moms but the type of family living through my fathers harsh and abusive ways for all of my child hood , and everything mom took from her Husband was so horrific from the Alcohol and the beatings and the molestation she new dad with her own daughters and nothing she could do , father had gotten away with all of his ruthless ways on her seven children, and mom still stayed with her Husband.

But through all these years of fear ,I was so scared to even tell the truth or even tell a lie

so while I was being Molested by 12 Different men till I was old enough to run away from all of the above, I headed to the streets of Toronto Ontario trying to find love of some kind from someone,

My mind was full of distorted ways I could not even be a normal Teenager like others ,could not Communicate to any normal person , but on the streets everyone understood me just like my Mother, she would always tell me how Special I really was and mom also told me its not how many that Love you Robbie it is who Loves you, I could never Understand this until 55 years Later.

My mother took ill and I would take the Greyhound every weekend to see my mother at the Hospital and then she was sent home because Cancer set in , My mother suffered for 5 years , but one day I got a call mom is worse , I had no Money at this time so I decide to start walking from London to Brantford Ontario.

I proceed to walk on the 401 and walked all the way to Brantford and took me 17 hours to get to moms house, when I went in she grab my little face with two hands and tells me Robbie i love you so much , I see in her eyes like never before and she past away soon after , I watched her last breath with my father and that was it,

I could not even cry but loved her so dearly as we all did, but as I had to go back home I was given bus fare to get the greyhound back home , I sat on the bus and the tears came rolling down all the way to London , and for some reason I found peace I never ever Felt , I just hope you all understand this in some way Thanks

Wow, Robert. I can’t even begin to understand what this must have been like. Thank you for sharing such a painful, vulnerable piece.

This is intriguing, and now bookmarked. My main character, Carter Blake, has one more stage of grief when his beloved is killed: The unleashing of his Super-Powered Evil Side ( http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuperpoweredEvilSide ). That comes first and is the main driver of the sequel, Rise of the DarkWalker: The Chronicles of Carter Blake, Book II .

However, once the SPES is conquered, I’m gonna need these tips for the rest of the story. Thank you.

I wanted to try this one again. I got lost in my first attempt and didn’t follow the advice of the blog.

Now when Ruth walked the beach, the once-soft sand that cushioned her feet and squeezed through her toes felt hard; she could feel each little grain of sand attempt to slice through her skin. The sea’s breezes no longer made her feel refreshed, but punched her in the face and gut. Her once-proud gait was now slumped and slow; Ruth left long, shallow ditches behind her as she dragged along the beach.

Ruth’s beach walks were getting longer and longer as she tried to force herself to keep moving ahead. But she never got very far. She felt she was searching for something and hoped she might walk out of this nightmare back to the world she once knew when she walked the beach with Chloe. But whenever thoughts of Chloe entered her mind she began walking faster, pushing more and more sand behind. “She’s here,” she thought. “Just a few more steps.” And then would come the inevitable realization that she could never walk backwards, to the past. Then would come the inevitable collapse into the sand, her chest heaving, her wails deep and long.

She lost it all when she lost Chloe. She was no longer a mother, father, teacher, life-coach, friend. Now she was simply a repository for scattered memories that were too painful to relive for very long.

On a bright, sunny day, a little boy saw Ruth shuffling along the beach. He approached Ruth.

“Are you looking for something?”

Ruth looked at the little boy, his innocence evident in his open, shining smile. She wondered how to make the little boy leave her alone without being mean.

After a while Ruth answered. “Yes, I’m looking for something.”

The little boy looked up at Ruth, shielding his freckled face from the sun. “Is it your smile? My Aunt Dot said that when my mommy died, she lost her smile.”

Ruth looked out to sea, fighting desperately to stifle a scream churning up inside her.

Finally Ruth looked back to the little boy. “Yes, that’s what I’m looking for…my smile.”

“I’ll help you look.”

The little boy took Ruth’s hand.

Ruth’s throat tightened and she was unable to speak. She didn’t have enough heart remaining to have it ripped open again.

But the little boy gave a tug on Ruth’s hand, and Ruth began moving forward, putting one foot ahead of the other.

A good story of showing and not telling grief. I felt I was walking along the beach with Ruth. The end is perfect, of the little boy offering to help Ruth find her smile and taking her hand to lead her. Thanks for sharing.

Okay, now I’m reaching for tissue. So innocent this little boy. Going through my own grief myself this touched me deeply- wise beyond his years this one. Love reading pieces like this.

I love your use of imagery, great showing, not telling! Great story!

Wow, what a powerful scene! This really moved me. Thank you for sharing it!

Dear Ruthanne, this is a fabulous post. I ‘ll bookmark it right away to read over and over of the ways of ‘showing’ not ‘telling’ about grief. I’m writing a true story of a couple who immigrated to America. Your article comes in handy to help me ‘show’ the grief they encountered. Thank you so much.

Yes, the grieving of leaving everything behind. That has to be huge. Then to come to a country where people often don’t even know their neighbors? Whew, wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Though, of course, it happens all the time. Sherrie Do you know a/b my debut novel “Secrets & Lies in El Salvador”? A young American woman goes to war-torn El Salvador: http://tinyurl.com/klxbt4y

Thanks for your comment, Sherpeace. I’m looking up your novel as soon as I post this. If a person is forced to immigrate, he/she will not integrate fully. If a person chooses to immigrate, I think they will eventually fit into the new country and enjoy it.

Thanks, Lilian! That sounds like a really solid use of this. Wow – to have left everything behind, even one’s native tongue… wow. That’s a lot of grief.

I re-posted this on A Page A Day https://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Page-A-Day-Lets-all-write-just-one-page-a-day/103970129720405?fref=ts I can’t imagine what you went through but I do know that losing my mother-in-law, then my mother made my novel much richer. Since my protagonist was encountering death at ever turn, the deaths in the novel were better understood and felt by the protagonist. Sherrie Do you know a/b my debut novel “Secrets & Lies in El Salvador”? A young American woman goes to war-torn El Salvador: http://tinyurl.com/klxbt4y

Wow, I didn’t know about your novel! Thank you for sharing it, Sherrie. I don’t think anyone can understand grief until they’ve been there, but eventually, everyone DOES get to that place. It means this is important to write about. Thanks for sharing!

It’s actually quite intressting how you mentioned the forgetting the person point. In the story I’m planning, a character actually went through that. I was somehow worried it didn’t sound realistic or anything, but thanks!

You’re welcome, Aala!

I myself have experienced grief a few times with my dad and more recently my grandad – I suppose that’s one of the main reasons why my character has a minor storyline that revolves around her parents and the “replacement dad” she had as a teenager. But the grief that she has to go through in the main story is over a man that she was going to marry. I tried writing what it would be like for her, but I just don’t think I’m ready to go there, yet :/

I hear you, Forth’Wyn. Take your time. The story takes shape at the pace it needs to.

My father was from the first world war he was a gunner there was a self portrait of him a painted photograph that was sitting on the mantle piece I was cherished where I was seated there was always a reminder of him I missed the fact that there wasnt any attachment any more like sending me to school no more talks or any love . I had hunger pains in my gut and thirsted of the horrors he must have gone through when he was at war it made me sick to the stomach of how the man would have felt I wished that I could have said more when he was alive the guilt I felt at this moment time ticked on and on 15 years had passed since he died it was another hour that passed as I was getting tired for a afternoon nap I lay rested and realised that there was nobody to put me in bed

I especially like the very physical responses to grief. “…hunger pains in my gut…” The last line is especially poignant.

That’s powerful, Kim. Thank you for sharing such brutal and powerful thoughts.

Great article! I especially love the questions. They really help me identify the core issue for several characters in my works in progress. This particular practice is a early teen boy protag who has lost, not a person, but his way of life.

This place stinks. The cows stink. The chickens stink. The pigs stink. I am not one of the farm kids. I did not grow up on a farm. Never touched a cow. Never drove a tractor. Just because I’m here now, that doesn’t change anything. It’s temporary. Soon as Grandpa is better, we’ll go home. There’s no place to even walk to around here. No basketball court, no theater, no arcade games, no stores, no friends. There’s nothing but pasture fields surrounded by trees and narrow roads that lead to more farms, and snotty, stinking cows behind every fence. Even the school is dumb.

I’m so glad to hear that, Cathy! I can feel this kikd’s frustration. What a rough spot for your protagonist to be in!

Within 6 months time my brother’s wife died (on my anniversary) then my job was lost due to a merger, then my oldest son died in a fall at my home, and on the same day as my son’s death, another brother’s wife died. Although I didn’t write about my grief, I read countless other books about other peoples losses. As I digested the words about their great grief; their pain reflected my own pain. As their sorrow flowed across the page, I joined my hands and heart to them. Yes, we cried together. My tears wet the pages with such a deep ache for them and for myself. I was truly grateful for authors who shared their pain, which helped me to feel, cry and slowly come out of the darkness and into the light.

Oh, Marilyn; my heart aches for you. I can’t agree enough on the power of *grieving together* with others through their own written story. I hope someday you can write about your experiences, helping others to weep, too.

Did I never know pain before this moment?

Nothing can compare the hole that is within my chest right now. Not after everything that vile monster tried to do to me, the years of humiliation, fear and disgust. Not even after Marco and I discovered the truth behind my actual birth. Not even after I realized how much years I’ve lost, the pain I endured all to please the ego and pockets of a man who thought it was his god-given right to toy with my life.

Agony doesn’t drown you. It burns the internal core of who you are. It leaves nothing but ashes, not even broken pieces to help you piece something of yourself together. I didn’t lie there quietly as he died. I clutched his hand and begged to whoever, whatever I could ask. Doctors and nurses left the room, unable to watch the scene unfolding before them.

For the first time in my life I truly prayed to whatever higher being there was, because at this point I was so desperate. I prayed to whatever, bargaining my soul. I was ready to give up anything, my limbs, my eyes, my hearing, my own life just to give Marco another chance. From begging to bargaining, to complete threats I literally swore to myself that when I met God I’d punch him was because of the lie God told us he was, that he was so ‘almighty’ but at this moment when I can promise you, he could hear me right now and chose to do nothing.

What was worse was the silence that greeted me. The inevitable knowledge that you are going to be separated from someone you loved. That no amount of praying, begging or bargaining was going to keep them from leaving you. I wonder if this was what it felt like to have your soul ripped out while you were still alive. Physical pain cannot compare to emotional pain because at least you can see the wounds, assess and take painkillers, escape to some sort of high. But emotional pain is when you are killing yourself, and is inescapable.

Because agony doesn’t make you just cry. It makes you scream, and I swear the screams left me sounded so terrible that it seemed unreal. It wasn’t a small, feminine scream or moan. It was the animalistic, gut-wrenching roar that left my throat. The scream that you make when you feel as though you lost everything. That was what it felt like. A long, antagonized, never ending scream of grief that no words could ever describe.

My only light was extinguished from the world.

Oh, Salwa! This is written so well. I find myself weeping along with it; the desperation and pain are shown exceedingly well, and I find it impossible not to relate and empathize. Thank you for sharing this.

Thanks for the comment Ruthanne. Looking back at this after two months I do feel a bit mortified, it seemed a bit melodramatic, no?

Thank you for this blog and for the opportunity to learn and share.

Thank you for writing such an inspiring article, both from a writer’s point of view and person!

Hello, Ruthanne Reid, you have well described about grief. And we have described about stages of grief ( https://thewellnesscorner.com/Article/StayHappy/Seven-stages-of-grief ). All individuals dealing with loss go through these stages, not necessarily in the same order.

This is SO helpful! Thank you so much.

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Descriptive Essay: Grief freed me.

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Death, Loss, and Grieving Research Paper

To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Human experiences, grieving process.

Death of a loved one within the family, a distant relative or someone in the society is an irreversible loss that leads to grieving. Due to the diversity of cultural religious beliefs, different people respond uniquely to death, which causes loss and subsequent grieving. Although death has been occurring since the creation of the world, it has confounded the meaning and the purpose of living, and it still scares everybody even today.

Death is a mystery that human beings strive to unravel because; unfortunately no one can predict or control its occurrence in humanity. The death of loved one is a great loss that one can experience in life and it takes the process of grieving to accept the fact that loss has actually occurred.

Attig argues that, “…human experiences of bereavement and grieving … recur throughout our lifetimes and serve as lenses through which we can see many meanings of death, human existence, suffering, the life of the deceased, the life of mourner, and the love” (2004, p.342). Human experiences due to the death and loss of loved ones have different perceptions and responses in the society; nevertheless, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross gave a typical model that explains five stages of grieving.

Death and loss are constant human experiences that people encounter in the course of life. The experiences surrounding death and loss of loved one depend on religious and cultural beliefs, which define the nature of life and death in the society. Without religious and cultural beliefs in the society, the death would still be a remote and mysterious incident that strikes human beings obliviously.

Research findings revealed that there is “…ethnic differences in the character of death attitudes, with American whites reporting greater fears of a protracted and painful dying process, whereas American blacks were more fearful about what transpired after death itself, including fears of being buried alive” (Neimeyer, 2004, p.10). Such disparity in ethnicity and beliefs determines the perception and understanding of death in the society. Death is a scary reality in that people are struggling to deny and run away from it.

Human beings face great challenges in understanding the nature of death and accepting its occurrence. Since death is a mystery that has instilled fears into humanity across all ages, discussions regarding death or news about death are scary for they remind people that they are going to die.

According to Attig, death has diverse meanings and “…an expansion of focus within the field to encompass consciousness of death across the lifespan and to foster a vision of our place in the universe to guide us in facing and integrating the certainty of death” (2004, p. 341). Therefore, expanding death phenomenon for people to understand its psychological intricacies would help humanity to attain meanings of life, suffering, and loss associated with death.

When death occurs in the society, there are varied psychological and emotional reactions that the bereaved experience. These responses depend on the cultural and religious assumptions that form part of the grieving process.

Given that there are beliefs and assumptions regarding the process of grieving, Wortman and Silver argue that, “…depression is inevitable following loss; that distress is necessary, and failure to experience it is indicative of pathology; that it is necessary to ‘work through’ or process a loss; and that recovery and resolution are to be expected following loss” (1989, p. 349).

Therefore, for people to accept the reality of death and the loss that occur therein, they must pass through the process of grieving to receive psychological and emotional healing.

Grieving is the process of accepting and acknowledging the reality of death and the loss that has occurred due to death of a loved one in the society. This occurrence is the most crucial process that an individual must undergo for effective resolution of psychological and emotional conflicts associated with the loss.

Attig argues that, “…our lives are woven together with the lives of those we care about and love and we cannot change the event when one of them dies, bereavement challenges us to take constructive action in response” (2004, p.242).

The process of grieving is constructive response that enables the bereaved to come into terms with the loss and accept that the loss is real and irreversible, hence must continue with their normal lives in spite of the challenges. According to Kubler-Ross Model, denial precedes anger before someone enters into bargaining which leads to depression, but finally one accepts the truth and these are the five stages of grief that the bereaved must undergo during the grieving process.

Denying the fact that death of a loved one has occurred is the first stage of grieving that people experience. Friedman and James argue that, “in cases of sudden, unexpected deaths, it’s possible that upon receiving the news, a surviving family member may go into emotional shock, during which time they are in a suspended state, totally removed from events in the real world” (2008, p.39). At this stage, the shocking news of death triggers emotional and psychological responses that throw the bereaved family and friends in a state of disbelief.

Due to the shocking news of death, the bereaved become defensive against reality of death by denying that they have lost the loved one. They perceive that they are in a dream and what they are experiencing is not reality. The experiences of denial and unbelief are short-lived after which reality dawns on the bereaved.

When the reality of death dawns on the bereaved, they become angry about the cause of death; this is the second stage of grieving. At this stage, individuals direct their anger to people who appear to be responsible for the death of their loved one. For example, if death occurred due to accident, the bereaved direct their blame to driver for careless driving, or if death occurred in hospital, they blame the doctors for medical negligence.

Grieving is not a passive response to death as Morrow argues that “…we don’t simply react passively or automatically to death and bereavement, …we engage with the loss, come to terms with our reactions to it, reshape our daily life patterns, and redirect our life stories in the light of what has happened” (2009, p.16). Thus, anger is an active response that tries to attribute and justify the cause of death.

The third stage of grieving involves bargaining where the bereaved consult the Supreme Being to bless the deceased and give them hope and strength to cope with the challenging times ahead.

At this stage, the bereaved come to terms with the reality of death, and since they are helpless about the loss of loved one, they only look upon the Supreme Being for comfort and encouragement. After bargaining, the bereaved enter the stage of depression where they experience loss of concentration, weakness, loss of appetite and irregular sleep patterns.

Wortman and Silver argue that, “it is widely assumed that a period of depression will occur once the person confronts the reality of his or her loss and that the person must ‘work through’ or process what has happened in order to recover successfully” (1989, p.351). In this the stage, resolution of psychological conflicts pertaining to death occurs and proper resolution is critical for healing to be successful.

Acceptance of the loss and reality of death is the fifth and the last stage of grieving. Grievers at this stage have undergone denial, anger, bargaining and depression stages, and have finally realized that death and the loss of loved one is a reality that happens in life. The bereaved at this stage begin to perceive death as part of humanity and develop positive perspective about life, which make them to live normal lives despite the great loss they have suffered.

Concerning acceptance, Attig argues that, “it is about opening ourselves to and making ourselves ready to welcome unexpected possibilities and to pursue meaning down unanticipated pathways” (2004, p.355). Thus, acceptance is about realizing the meaning of death as an inherent part of life that needs endurance as life goes on in the world.

Death is a mystery that still scares people because no one has ever unraveled its nature and occurrence in the society. Different cultures and religious beliefs have helped people in ascertaining the meaning of life and death, therefore shedding some light to the purpose of life and living. The diversity of beliefs concerning death determines the perception of life and subsequent grieving as a way of defining the nature of life.

Thus, life is very complex because death of the loved ones makes people undergo a long period of grieving in a bid to unravel the mystery of death, which causes irreversible loss. According to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, grievers undergo five stage process of grieving in order to attain psychological and emotional healing.

Attig, T. (2004). Meanings of Death Seen Through The Lens of Grieving. Death Studies , 28, 341-360.

Friedman, R., & James, J. (2008).The Myth of the Stages of Dying, Death, and Grief. The Grief Recovery Institute Journal , 14(2), 37-42

Morrow, A. (2009). DABDA: The Five Stages of Coping with Death. Psychology , 1-27.

Neimeyer, R. (2004). Constructions of Death and Loss: Evolution of a Research Program. Personal Construct Theory & Practice , 1(2), 8-20.

Wortman, C., & Silver, R. (1989). The Myths of Coping with Loss. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 57(3), 349-357.

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How to write a descriptive essay | Example & tips

How to Write a Descriptive Essay | Example & Tips

Published on July 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

A descriptive essay gives a vivid, detailed description of something—generally a place or object, but possibly something more abstract like an emotion. This type of essay , like the narrative essay , is more creative than most academic writing .

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Descriptive essay topics, tips for writing descriptively, descriptive essay example, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about descriptive essays.

When you are assigned a descriptive essay, you’ll normally be given a specific prompt or choice of prompts. They will often ask you to describe something from your own experience.

Describe a place you love to spend time in.
Describe an object that has sentimental value for you.

You might also be asked to describe something outside your own experience, in which case you’ll have to use your imagination.

Describe the experience of a soldier in the trenches of World War I.
Describe what it might be like to live on another planet.

Sometimes you’ll be asked to describe something more abstract, like an emotion.

If you’re not given a specific prompt, try to think of something you feel confident describing in detail. Think of objects and places you know well, that provoke specific feelings or sensations, and that you can describe in an interesting way.

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The key to writing an effective descriptive essay is to find ways of bringing your subject to life for the reader. You’re not limited to providing a literal description as you would be in more formal essay types.

Make use of figurative language, sensory details, and strong word choices to create a memorable description.

Use figurative language

Figurative language consists of devices like metaphor and simile that use words in non-literal ways to create a memorable effect. This is essential in a descriptive essay; it’s what gives your writing its creative edge and makes your description unique.

Take the following description of a park.

This tells us something about the place, but it’s a bit too literal and not likely to be memorable.

If we want to make the description more likely to stick in the reader’s mind, we can use some figurative language.

Here we have used a simile to compare the park to a face and the trees to facial hair. This is memorable because it’s not what the reader expects; it makes them look at the park from a different angle.

You don’t have to fill every sentence with figurative language, but using these devices in an original way at various points throughout your essay will keep the reader engaged and convey your unique perspective on your subject.

Use your senses

Another key aspect of descriptive writing is the use of sensory details. This means referring not only to what something looks like, but also to smell, sound, touch, and taste.

Obviously not all senses will apply to every subject, but it’s always a good idea to explore what’s interesting about your subject beyond just what it looks like.

Even when your subject is more abstract, you might find a way to incorporate the senses more metaphorically, as in this descriptive essay about fear.

Choose the right words

Writing descriptively involves choosing your words carefully. The use of effective adjectives is important, but so is your choice of adverbs , verbs , and even nouns.

It’s easy to end up using clichéd phrases—“cold as ice,” “free as a bird”—but try to reflect further and make more precise, original word choices. Clichés provide conventional ways of describing things, but they don’t tell the reader anything about your unique perspective on what you’re describing.

Try looking over your sentences to find places where a different word would convey your impression more precisely or vividly. Using a thesaurus can help you find alternative word choices.

My cat runs across the garden quickly and jumps onto the fence to watch it from above.
My cat crosses the garden nimbly and leaps onto the fence to survey it from above.

However, exercise care in your choices; don’t just look for the most impressive-looking synonym you can find for every word. Overuse of a thesaurus can result in ridiculous sentences like this one:

My feline perambulates the allotment proficiently and capers atop the palisade to regard it from aloft.

An example of a short descriptive essay, written in response to the prompt “Describe a place you love to spend time in,” is shown below.

Hover over different parts of the text to see how a descriptive essay works.

On Sunday afternoons I like to spend my time in the garden behind my house. The garden is narrow but long, a corridor of green extending from the back of the house, and I sit on a lawn chair at the far end to read and relax. I am in my small peaceful paradise: the shade of the tree, the feel of the grass on my feet, the gentle activity of the fish in the pond beside me.

My cat crosses the garden nimbly and leaps onto the fence to survey it from above. From his perch he can watch over his little kingdom and keep an eye on the neighbours. He does this until the barking of next door’s dog scares him from his post and he bolts for the cat flap to govern from the safety of the kitchen.

With that, I am left alone with the fish, whose whole world is the pond by my feet. The fish explore the pond every day as if for the first time, prodding and inspecting every stone. I sometimes feel the same about sitting here in the garden; I know the place better than anyone, but whenever I return I still feel compelled to pay attention to all its details and novelties—a new bird perched in the tree, the growth of the grass, and the movement of the insects it shelters…

Sitting out in the garden, I feel serene. I feel at home. And yet I always feel there is more to discover. The bounds of my garden may be small, but there is a whole world contained within it, and it is one I will never get tired of inhabiting.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.

Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.

If you’re not given a specific prompt for your descriptive essay , think about places and objects you know well, that you can think of interesting ways to describe, or that have strong personal significance for you.

The best kind of object for a descriptive essay is one specific enough that you can describe its particular features in detail—don’t choose something too vague or general.

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Caulfield, J. (2023, August 14). How to Write a Descriptive Essay | Example & Tips. Scribbr. Retrieved September 11, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/descriptive-essay/

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Descriptive Essay Writing

Descriptive Essay Examples

Amazing Descriptive Essay Examples for Your Help

Published on: Jun 21, 2023

Last updated on: Jul 23, 2024

Descriptive Essay Example 5 Paragraph

5 paragraphs essay writing format is the most common method of composing an essay. This format has 5 paragraphs in total. The sequence of the paragraphs is as follows;

Introduction
Body Paragraph 1
Body Paragraph 2
Body Paragraph 3
Conclusion

Following is an example of a descriptive essay written using the famous 5 paragraph method.

5 Paragraph Descriptive Essay

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Descriptive Essay Example About A Person

Descriptive essays are the best option when it comes to describing and writing about a person. A descriptive essay is written using the five human senses. It helps in creating a vivid image in the readerâs mind and understanding what the writer is trying to convey.

Here is one of the best descriptive essay examples about a person. Read it thoroughly and try to understand how a good descriptive essay is written on someoneâs personality.

Descriptive Essay Example About a Person

Descriptive Essay Example About A Place

If you have visited a good holiday spot or any other place and want to let your friends know about it. A descriptive essay can help you explain every detail and moment you had at that place.

Here is one of the good descriptive essay examples about a place. Use it as a sample and learn how you can write such an essay.

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Descriptive Essay Example for Grade 6

Descriptive essays are frequently assigned to school students. This type of essay helps the students enhance their writing skills and helps them see things in a more analytical way.

If you are a 6 grader and looking for a good descriptive essay example, you are in the right place.

Descriptive Essay Example for Grade 7

Here is one of the best descriptive essay examples for grade 7.

Descriptive Essay Example for Grade 8

If you are looking for some amazing descriptive essay examples for grade 8, you have already found one. Look at the given example and see what a well-written descriptive essay looks like.

Descriptive Essay Example for Grade 10

Essay writing is an inevitable part of a student's academic life . No matter your grade, you will get to write some sort of essay at least once.

Here is an example of a descriptive essay writing for grade10. If you are also a student of this grade, this example might help you to complete your assignment.

Descriptive Essay Example for Grade 12

If you are a senior student and looking for some essay examples, you are exactly where you should be.

Use the below-mentioned example and learn how to write a good essay according to the instructions given to you.

Descriptive Essay Example College

Descriptive essays are a great way to teach students how they can become better writers. Writing a descriptive essay encourages them to see the world more analytically.

Below is an example that will help you and make your writing process easy.

College Descriptive Essay Example

Descriptive Essay Example for University

Descriptive essays are assigned to students at all academic levels. University students are also assigned descriptive essay writing assignments. As they are students of higher educational levels, they are often given a bit of difficult and more descriptive topics.

See the example below and know what a descriptive essay at the university level looks like.

Short Descriptive Essay Example

Every time a descriptive essay isn't written in detail. It depends on the topic of how long the essay will be.

For instance, look at one of the short descriptive essay examples given below. See how the writer has conveyed the concept in a composed way.

Objective Descriptive Essay Example

When writing an objective description essay, you focus on describing the object without conveying your emotions, feelings, or personal reactions. The writer uses sight, sound, or touch for readers' minds to bring life into pictures that were painted by words.

Here is an example that you can use for your help.

Narrative and Descriptive Essay Example

A narrative descriptive essay can be a great way to share your experiences with others. It is a story that teaches a lesson you have learned. The following is an example of a perfect narrative descriptive essay to help you get started.

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How to Start a Descriptive Essay? - Example

If you don't know how to start your descriptive essay, check this example and create a perfect one.

How to Start a Descriptive Essay - Example

Subjective Descriptive Essay Example

It is a common concept that a descriptive essay revolves around one subject. Be it a place, person, event, or any other object you can think of.

Following is one of the subjective descriptive, easy examples. Use it as a guide to writing an effective descriptive essay yourself.

Writing a descriptive essay is a time-consuming yet tricky task. It needs some very strong writing, analytical, and critical thinking skills. Also, this is a type of essay that a student can not avoid and bypass.

But if you think wisely, work smart, and stay calm, you can get over it easily. Learn how to write a descriptive essay from a short guide given below.

How to Write a Descriptive Essay?

A writer writes a descriptive essay from their knowledge and imaginative mind. In this essay, the writer describes what he has seen or experienced, or ever heard from someone. For a descriptive essay, it is important to stay focused on one point. Also, the writer should use figurative language so that the reader can imagine the situation in mind.

The following are some very basic yet important steps that can help you write an amazing descriptive essay easily.

Choose a Topic

For a descriptive essay, you must choose a vast topic to allow you to express yourself freely. Also, make sure that the topic you choose is not overdone. An overdone will not grab the attention of your intended audience. Check out our descriptive essay topics blog for a variety of intriguing topic suggestions.

Create a Strong Thesis Statement

A thesis statement is the essence of any academic writing. When you select the descriptive essay topic, then you create a strong thesis statement for your essay.

A thesis statement is a sentence or two that explains the whole idea of your essay to the reader. It is stated in the introductory paragraph of the essay. The word choice for creating the thesis statement must be very expressive, composed, and meaningful. Also, use vivid language for the thesis statement.

Collect the Necessary Information

Once you have created the thesis statement and are done writing your essay introduction . Now, it's time to move toward the body paragraphs.

Collect all necessary information related to your topic. You would be adding this information to your essay to support your thesis statement. Make sure that you collect information from authentic sources.

To enhance your essay, make use of some adjectives and adverbs. To make your descriptive essay more vivid, try to incorporate sensory details like touch, taste, sight, and smell.

Create a Descriptive Essay Outline

An outline is yet another necessary element of your college essay. By reading the descriptive essay outline , the reader feels a sense of logic and a guide for the essay.

In the outline, you need to write an introduction, thesis statement, body paragraphs and end up with a formal conclusion.

Proofreading is a simple procedure in which the writer revises the written essay. This is done in order to rectify the document for any kind of spelling or grammatical mistakes. Thus, proofreading makes high-quality content and gives a professional touch to it.

You might be uncertain about writing a good enough descriptive essay and impress your teacher. However, it is very common, so you do not need to stress out.

Hit us up at CollegeEssay.org and get an essay written by our professional descriptive essay writers. Our essay writing service for students aims to help clients in every way possible and ease their stress. Get in touch with our customer support team, and they will take care of all your queries related to your writing.

You can always enhance your writing skills by leveraging the power of our AI essay writing tools .

Place your order now and let all your stress go away in a blink!

Barbara P (Literature)

Barbara is a highly educated and qualified author with a Ph.D. in public health from an Ivy League university. She has spent a significant amount of time working in the medical field, conducting a thorough study on a variety of health issues. Her work has been published in several major publications.

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5 moving, beautiful essays about death and dying

My Own Life | Oliver Sacks

Before I go | Paul Kalanithi

As I lay dying | Laurie Becklund

Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat | Liz Lopatto

Letting Go | Atul Gawande

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1. ‘I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago’ by Rachel Ward

2. ‘Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat’ by Elizabeth Lopatto

3. ‘The terrorist inside my husband’s brain’ by Susan Schneider Williams

4. ‘Before I Go’ by Paul Kalanithi

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6. ‘My Own Life’ by Oliver Sacks

7. ‘My Experience in a Coma’ by Eben Alexander

8. “One Man's Tale of Dying—And Then Waking Up” by Paul Perry

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Writing About Death, Dying, And Grief With Dr Karen Wyatt

Transcript of Interview with Dr. Karen Wyatt

Tell us a bit more about you, Karen, and why and how you chose this path for your career in writing?

Give us a couple of the things that really stand out.

How do we balance doing our writing work, the work of our soul with that living in the present moment?

As writers, how do we tackle this difficult subject, either in memoir or in fiction? How do we bring ourselves to the page to even face that fear?

What do people get wrong with things like writing about death, with writing crime novels, with writing entertainment, that you see as is incorrect?

Which implies that we can imagine this even if we haven't been through it. Would that be right?

Do you believe that there is a different awareness or belief? Have you seen evidence that different people have different awareness of death that perhaps they have, even as children? And if you're a parent of a child who seems a bit morbid, that maybe you shouldn't worry?

What do you think about guilt and anger when it comes to dealing with grief?

Joanna: And in terms of writing as a form of healing, is that something you've seen work for people?

Is it the same with the grief in death process; you look back at those and do you recognize yourself?

Did you see that evidence that the physical body was no longer the person?

I don't think it matters what you believe, but that we're not left in that physical body is the important thing.

What do you think is changing in the death culture with this aging of the boomers?

Is this just mad? Or, do you think there is some life extension stuff?

Joanna: I don't know if you saw the very violent program, “Altered Carbon” on Netflix?

Tell us about that and how travel helps you and what you've been writing.

Joanna: I was just researching in Pittsburgh, you have a massive collection of religious relics.

What have you seen about the different cultures and different ways that cultures deal with death that seem more healthy than the west?

Tell us about your “End of Life University” podcast because I think it's very cool.

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