Writing for Bliss (eBook)

Preface

Most writers will confess that they write because they have to write, not necessarily because they want to write. They write out of necessity because either it makes them feel better or they want to share their story with the world. I fall into both these categories: writing makes me feel good; when I don’t write, I feel as if something’s missing from my life, plus I also yearn to share my stories with others in the hope that they will resonate in a way that brings healing and a deeper way of knowing and understanding.

My beginnings as a writer began when I was ten years old, writing in my journal to help me cope and heal from the suicide of my grandmother, who had also been my caretaker and had lived with us in my childhood home. I was the only child of immigrant parents who worked all day tending their retail dry-goods store in Brooklyn, New York. On Labor Day in 1964, I was at home with my grandmother. In many immigrant families of the post-World War II era, children were reared by their extended families, particularly grandparents. My grandparents lived with us, and while my grandfather spent much of his time in New York City becoming culturally acclimated, my maternal grandmother, Regina, stayed home to take care of me.

It was a hot Indian summer day common to the season. We lived in a suburban community along with other immigrant families, and I had many playmates in the neighborhood. I was excited when a friend invited me to go swimming in her pool. With a child’s enthusiasm, I knocked on my grandmother’s door to ask for permission.

There was no answer. I tried several times, but still no answer. I called to her, but there was only silence. Trembling with fear, I phoned my parents at their store. I sat with my nose pressed to the front bay window until they drove up the driveway in Dad’s pink car that matched the house’s shingles—the color he had painted them the day I was born. My parents dashed out of the car and up to Grandma’s room. Before I knew what was going on, my beloved grandmother was being carried down our creaky wooden stairs on a stretcher and put into an ambulance. I never saw her again.

Like most children, I took the experience in stride and did not think too much about it. There was no doubt that I missed my grandmother, Regina, the only grandmother I ever knew. My father’s parents had perished in the Holocaust. I was lonely for my grandmother’s company and her love. After all, she had been the one who had taught me how to type short stories on the Remington typewriter perched on the vanity table in her room. Her loving attention was something my mother was unable to provide in a meaningful way. Now in addition my mother, who had also been an only child, was dealing with her own grief over losing her mother.

My mother knew I was grieving and wanted to help me through the trauma of having lost my grandmother. Reaching out to therapists was not done in those days; and even if it had been, we would not have had the money for it. Others might have seen therapists, but it was certainly not something anyone ever talked about. My grandmother had been a journal keeper. After some contemplation on how to help me cope with the loss of this important person in my life who had also been my caretaker, my mother went to the nearest stationery store and bought me a blank, red leather journal with a saying by Kahlil Gibran on the top of each page. I had many favorites, but in coping with the loss of my grandmother, this is the one that helped me: “If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don’t, they never were.”

One thing I learned from my grandmother was the importance of having love in my life. At the top of one page in my red-leather journal was Gibran’s saying, “Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.” In this page I wrote about how much my grandmother’s love meant to me and how, after losing her, my life felt so empty.

For many months after my grandmother’s suicide, my mother continued to encourage me to write down my feelings about my grandmother. Having been an English major in college, my mother thought this was the best way for me to deal with my grief.

In those days, children were unwelcome at funerals, so I was shipped off with my journal to my aunt’s and uncle’s apartment in New York City. I guess everyone thought that the funeral experience would be too traumatic an experience for me. Certainly things would be different today, at a time when kids are exposed to a lot more than funerals. For days on end after my grandmother died, I sat at my small birch desk or in my walk-in closet under the hanging clothes, writing about my grandmother and how I missed her.

Little did I realize that my mother’s seemingly mild gesture of buying me a journal would set the stage for my lifelong passion for writing. As I grew into adulthood, each time I encountered difficult times—including my turbulent adolescence in the 1960s, my daughter’s drug addiction, and my battles with cancer—I wrote about what I was going through. Not only did I explain my lived experience, but I also wrote about how the experience made me feel.

It was more than four decades after my grandmother died, when I was forty-seven years old, that I received my first cancer diagnosis (about which I wrote in Healing with Words: A Writer’s Cancer Journey). After healing from the physical and emotional trauma of that experience, and of course chronicling my journey in my journal, I decided to follow my dream of returning to graduate school. I pursued my MFA in writing, and when the time came to consider a subject for my thesis, the story of my grandmother’s life occurred to me.

Coincidentally, around that time my mother gave me my grandmother’s hand-typed journal telling of her early life as an orphan in Poland during and after World War I. When Mother handed me the journal, I felt as if I had been given the biggest gift a granddaughter could ever receive. I devoured every word and realized that my grandmother had shared my passion for journaling. My MFA thesis, which involved studying her life, turned into my first published memoir, Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal.

In this memoir, I dealt with the two major turning points in my life: losing my grandmother—whose loss had been all the more traumatic because she had also been my caretaker—and then discovering her sacred journal. The journal was sacred because of its role in my understanding of my grandmother and why she might have committed suicide. It was also sacred because it was another chance for me to get close to her intimate and private thoughts. I realized that writing about my grandmother was healing, as it allowed me to honor her and keep her alive, and it was also a way to come to some resolution about her suicide.

I had always been a seeker, but the experience of reflecting upon my grandmother’s life and then finding her journal led me on a path of discovery and further transformation as I tried to understand why she had taken her life at the age of sixty-one—the age, in fact, that I am now as I write this book.

Studying my grandmother’s life leading up to her suicide helped me to understand, grow, and become empowered by her experience to take on the role of a woman warrior. I realized that she had been a survivor for most of her life. She had survived the trauma of being orphaned, she survived two world wars, she survived an emotionally abusive relationship, and she survived long enough to see me go to school. I learned from my grandmother that no matter what happened, I too wanted to be a survivor and a fighter. I wanted to become empowered by my experiences and also to help others become empowered by theirs. Thus, my grandmother had left me with a huge gift.

My MFA was not to be the end of my pursuit of education. It seemed as if whenever a life-changing event occurred in my life, I returned to school for another degree. My MFA was initiated as a result of my breast cancer diagnosis; and six years later, after being diagnosed with smoldering multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow, I returned for my doctorate in psychology. About that time, I was approaching the age of sixty-one—again, my grandmother’s age when she took her life—and had begun reflecting on my own life and on how I felt there was so much more I wanted to accomplish. Having had two cancer diagnoses and dealt as well with numerous losses of loved ones, I fully realized the fragility of life. By returning to school, I hoped to merge my passion for understanding the psyche with my great passion for writing. Thus, the subject of my dissertation research was the healing and transformative powers of personal narrative, which became the impetus for writing this book.

Basically, my research examined how life-changing experiences have inspired some well-published authors to write the narratives of their lives. I interviewed writers such as Maxine Kong Kingston, Alexandra Styron, Kim Stafford, Monika Wesloweska, and Mark...