Grief Writes in Short Sentences
After she died, my paragraphs broke into the truth.
My sister died on a Tuesday, and by Friday I could not write a compound sentence. I found this out at her kitchen table, trying to draft the eulogy while her cat watched me from the counter like a landlord inspecting a bad tenant.
The room still smelled like her. Coffee gone slightly stale, cheap vanilla candles, the lavender hand cream she bought six tubes at a time because she was convinced every product she loved was about to be discontinued. I opened the laptop and typed, Claire was the kind of person who... and then I stopped.
The cursor blinked at me like it knew something. I deleted the line and wrote instead: Claire burned toast on purpose. Five words. All of them true.
You have to understand what kind of writer I was before. For eleven years I wrote sentences that ran like rivers, all commas and clauses and tributaries, sentences you could canoe down. Workshop friends used to time them. A teacher once handed back a story of mine with one note in the margin: you hide in your clauses. I laughed, because being seen is easier to laugh at than to fix, and then I went home and wrote an even longer sentence out of spite.
Claire used to read my drafts on her phone during her lunch break at the clinic and text me things like, babe I love you but I fell asleep inside paragraph two and woke up still inside paragraph two.
Then she was gone, forty-one years old, an aneurysm, no warning, no cinematic hospital vigil... just a phone call from her neighbor while I was standing in the cereal aisle holding a box of the brand we both hated.
And my sentences snapped like dry spaghetti.
That first week I tried to journal because a pamphlet from the funeral home told me to. The pamphlet had a watercolor dove on it. I wrote: She is gone. The kettle still works. I hate the kettle. I read it back and thought, this is not writing, this is Morse code.
At three in the morning I searched how grief changes writing, as if the internet were a night nurse, and found forum posts about brain fog and a neurologist explaining that grief hijacks the part of the mind that plans ahead.
A sentence, it turns out, is a plan. Subject, verb, and the faith that you will still be there by the time the object arrives.
I had lost the faith... I could manage subject, verb, full stop. Anything longer and the floor gave out.
An editor I liked emailed a month later, gently, the way you talk to someone holding something breakable, and asked if I wanted to write about Claire. I said yes because saying no required a longer sentence. I sat down and tried to summon the old voice, the river voice, the one with the canoe. I wrote a paragraph about sisterhood and memory and the fragile architecture of the ordinary, and it was the worst thing I have ever produced, and I have produced a limerick about a coworker's divorce. It sounded like a sympathy card that had gone to graduate school.
I deleted it and wrote: She called me every Sunday. I let it ring once so she'd know I saw it. Then I picked up.
That was the essay. That was the whole register I had left.
The Diary on the Bed
The turn came in October, when I finally cleared out her flat. I was braced for the big griefs, the wedding dress she never wore, the half-finished crossword. What undid me was smaller. On her unmade bed, where she must have left it that last morning, was her diary, a cheap blue notebook with a pen still clipped to the cover, lying on the duvet like she had just stepped out to answer the door.
I sat down on her bed and read three years of my sister.
Rain today. Fed the cat twice, she lied to me. Mum called. I let it ring. Bought the good bread. No regrets. Saw a heron by the canal and said hello out loud like an idiot. Tired. Good tired. The bad kind of tired. Toast again. Perfect. Burnt.
Every entry was like that. Four words, six words, eight. My sister, it turned out, had been writing in short sentences her entire life, while I built my cathedrals of subordinate clauses two hundred miles away. And sitting there on her bed with her pen in my hand, I understood something that rearranged me.
I was not broken. I was quoting her.
The voice that had moved into my writing the week she died was not damage... It was her, arriving.
Grief did not take my language. It took my punctuation, and what was left standing was the truth.
I think now that my long sentences were a kind of hedging. If you never finish the thought, you never have to stand behind it. A clause is a place to duck.
Claire never ducked.
When our father left she was fourteen and she wrote, in the diary she kept then too, Dad's gone. We still had dinner. Pasta. I found that entry the same night and laughed and cried in the same breath, which sounds impossible until you have done it.
My mother noticed before I did. You sound different, she said on the phone in November. Pause... You sound like her. Neither of us said anything for a while after that, and the silence was not awkward, it was crowded.
I started writing poems that winter, which surprised nobody more than me. Poetry is what short sentences become when you stop apologizing for them. I found a prompt about writing to someone who cannot write back, and I filled a notebook in a weekend. Later I finally wrote about the grief instead of around it, which is the only direction that ever works, and then about memory, which is where she lives now, in the burnt toast and the heron and the once-rung phone.
People ask if the long sentences ever came back... They did, slowly, the way hair grows back after a bad year, and I let them, because a voice is not a cage. On her birthday in March I wrote one long sentence about her, a real river of a thing, about the Sunday calls and the lavender hand cream and the way she said my name when I was being ridiculous, and it held. It held because there were short sentences underneath it now, holding it up like pilings under a bridge. She taught me that. It took her dying for me to take the lesson, which is the kind of tuition I do not recommend.
Her diary lives on my nightstand now, pen still clipped to the cover. On nights when I cannot write, I open it anywhere and copy one of her entries into my own notebook, just to feel my hand make her shapes. Last night it was the last thing she ever wrote, dated the Monday before the Tuesday, three words at the bottom of the page, and I copied it out and closed the book and turned off the light.
Toast again. Burnt.
Perfect.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.