The Grief Diary My Therapist Assigned
Page one took a month; page forty saved my life.
My therapist assigned me a diary the way other people get assigned physical therapy, and I treated it with the same contempt. Twelve dollars at the pharmacy, teal cover, gold spiral, the word NOTES embossed on the front like a threat. She said, write in it about your mom. I said, sure... Then I put it in the trunk of my car for five weeks, next to the jumper cables, which tells you exactly where I ranked emotional honesty on my list of emergencies.
My mother died in October, on a Tuesday, at 4:12 in the afternoon, while I was in the hospital cafeteria deciding between two identical sandwiches. I have never forgiven the sandwiches. She had been sick for two years and dying for two weeks, and everyone kept using the word expected, as if grief checks your calendar first. Expected... I expected it the way you expect a wave you are watching walk toward you.
You still go under.
By December I was what my sister generously called functioning. I went to work. I answered emails with exclamation points. I ate standing over the sink so that no meal would feel like an occasion, because occasions were where my mother used to be. And every Thursday at six I sat across from Dr. Okafor, a calm woman with a voice like warm bread, and lied.
She saw through me around the third session. That is when the diary happened. Her theory, which I found insulting because it was accurate, was that I could not say true things out loud because I watched people's faces while I said them, and managed their reaction, and edited myself mid-sentence into someone easier to sit with. A page, she said, has no face. Journaling through grief works because paper does not flinch.
Page one took a month.
I am not exaggerating for effect. I sat with that teal notebook open on my bed maybe fifteen separate nights, pen in hand, the lamp making its small yellow circle, and wrote... nothing. Once I wrote the date and then closed the book like it had bitten me. The problem was not that I had nothing to say. The problem was that the first sentence was standing behind a door, and I knew that once it came through, everything behind it was coming too, and I was the only one home.
The sentence finally arrived on a Sunday in January, at 11 p.m., after I found her handwriting on a grocery list in a coat pocket. Buttermilk, it said. Stamps. Ask Nina about the good tomatoes. I sat down on the closet floor in the coat and I wrote page one in nine minutes. It said, in handwriting that got worse as it went: I am angry at her for dying politely. She spent her whole life not bothering anyone and then she did not bother anyone with her death either, and I wanted to be bothered. I wanted to be asked for things. She never once asked me for anything and now she never will.
I slept that night. Actually slept. That should have tipped me off that Dr. Okafor was onto something.
After that the diary and I developed a routine, wary at first, like two cats in one house.
A page on bad nights. Half a page on decent ones. I broke every rule of what I imagined a grief diary should be. I wrote grocery lists of my own just to feel my hand doing what her hand did. I copied out one of her voicemails word for word, including the part where she trails off and hums, because I was terrified the phone company would delete it and take her humming with it.
I wrote letters in there too, letters she would never read, which felt insane until I read somewhere that half the grieving world does this. Some nights I wrote about grief directly, and some nights I wrote around it in careful circles, and slowly I learned that the circles were also progress. You spiral inward. That is still a direction.
Now the part I do not tell people at dinner parties.
Page forty was February 19th. I know because it is dated, and because I have reread it more times than any page of anything. That week the wave I had been treading finally pulled me under. My sister was on a flight, my friends had returned to their lives the way people rightly do, and I had spent four days in an apartment so quiet I could hear the refrigerator thinking.
On the night of the 19th I was doing dangerous math, the kind where you start calculating who would actually be inconvenienced, and by how much, and for how long. I am being deliberately vague here and you are being kindly perceptive. I had a plan the way you have a shape in fog...
It was becoming a plan.
And then this is the stupid, ordinary, holy thing that happened: I thought, I should write that down first. Not a note. Nothing dramatic like that. It was just that after thirty-nine pages, writing things down was what I did with unbearable sentences, the way some people bite ice or run stairs. The habit reached out and grabbed me by the collar.
I opened the teal notebook and wrote the fog-shaped thing in actual words.
And in actual words, it looked different. In actual words it said: I do not want to die. I want the pain to die and I cannot tell us apart tonight.
I did not want to die. I wanted the pain to die, and that night I could not tell us apart.
I stared at that sentence for a long time. Then I wrote underneath it, in shaky letters, the number for the crisis line, and then, because my hand was already moving, I called it. A man named Doug talked with me until 2 a.m. about my mother, and about buttermilk, and at some point I laughed, a real one, ugly and loud in the quiet apartment, and the refrigerator hummed along like her voicemail.
Page forty did not cure me.
Nothing cures you; you renovate around the loss like a house with a room you keep. But that page was the load-bearing wall. Dr. Okafor got the whole story that Thursday, out loud, to her actual face, and her face did not need managing at all. It just did what faces do when they care about you.
The teal notebook filled up by summer. I bought a second one, red, and then did something my January self would have found unthinkable: I took one page, the buttermilk page, shaped it into a poem, and sent it to a monthly poetry contest run by a site for new writers. It did not win. I framed the rejection email, truly, because it proved the page existed outside my closet floor, out where my mother's humming could be heard by strangers. Lately I have even been stealing prompts to keep the pen moving on nights when the door is quiet and no sentence is waiting behind it.
People ask if the diary made me less sad, and the honest answer is no. I am exactly as sad as my love was big; the math there is fixed and I respect it. What the diary did was give the sadness somewhere to sleep at night that was not my chest. That is not nothing. Some pages that is hope, spelled the only way I could manage.
Buttermilk. Stamps. Ask Nina about the good tomatoes. Still the best poem I own.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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