Coming Home

The air was cool and damp in the converted church basement – a welcomed change from the August heat. Tea and store bought cookies were situated on a card table against the dark blue wall with “This is where the magic happens!” painted in gold block letters. Six chairs were positioned in a circle with a pad of paper and pen nestled on each one. The chairs were less comfortable than Brooke had imagined – older and smaller – but aside from that, joining the Grief Writing Group was exactly what she’d expected from Melrose’s description:

“It’s like a cult of sadness at first, but then all of that pain means something. You realize you’re not alone and you’re part of a community – a community of mourners – and that’s transformative. A sort of conversion happens. A community builds. You’ll love it. Strangers don’t stay strangers when you share something that painful in common.”

Exactly three weeks earlier, she’d met Melrose at a discount champagne hour. She’d just moved to Denver, and seen a flyer advertising Monday night specials. When Brooke arrived, she immediately realized why the event was on a Monday. The business was slow. She imagined the same bar crowded with a post-work happy hour crowd – lively and buzzing – that’s what she wanted. She could pretend she was waiting for someone and get lost in the crowd. She could feel invisible. But instead, she stepped into a group of five friends who clearly knew each other well. Brooke scanned her eyes back the door wondering how easily she could escape before she was trapped by an eccentrically waving middle aged woman who she’d quickly learn was Melrose. “Are you here for the Champagne Hour?! Come, sit, sit!”

Brooke sat reluctantly, smiled to accept a glass of red wine, and listened, “We’re admiring Anna’s latest work – look at this color!” she swiveled a laptop around, revealing a photograph of a young couple positioned in a field of lavender with a pink sunset sky. Without waiting for a response, Melrose continued, “Liv’s the photographer, and Amy is the poet of the group, and I knit, like, really terribly. But everyone needs a hobby, a thing. Do you have a thing?”

Brooke hated this question, “I’m not sure I do. I’ve always wanted to write…”

“So do it!” Melrose said. Only then did Brooke realize she’d just offered her most vulnerable life wish to a total stranger and she’d been validated and critiqued in the same breath.

She sipped her wine idly with the declaration hanging in the air, hoping the focus would naturally shift to one of these other women. But that never happens when there’s a new person in the group.

“Have you ever thought about a writing group?” Melrose proposed. “I know the best one, but it’s a grief group. I joined after my wife died.”

It felt a bit like fate, hearing this, since Brooke’s wife had, in fact, died three years earlier. She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, checking her wine for tannins and trying to contain her emotions to the base of her throat where they’d been bubbling up ever since the word ‘loss’ was uttered approximately fifteen seconds ago. It was too many emotions at once: that shared grief, that shared experience of being Queer, and that shared experience of recognizing a feeling of belonging inside a community.

She wanted to communicate all of this gratitude to Melrose, but she didn’t have to say anything. Melrose smiled knowingly: that ingrained community formed through pain is hard to hide.

“You must join us.” Melrose declared. And, three weeks later, here she was, trying to pick the chair that looked the most comfortable, even though they were all, as previously noted, smaller and older than she’d imagined.

The only problem was, Melrose hadn’t arrived.

 “Alright. Well, it’s good to see some new faces tonight. You’ve done something brave just by showing up for yourself, and I’m so glad you’re here.” The patronizing tone was neither comforting nor motivating. “We’re going to start with some introductions, and then I’ll give you a prompt, and we’ll write for just thirty minutes tonight, and then we’ll pass and read for thirty minutes.”

The instructor singled to the board as she spoke:

·     Welcome, 5 minutes

·     Introductions, 20 minutes

·     Writing, 30 minutes

·     Sharing, 30 minutes

·     Conclusion, 5 minutes

“I’ll start,” the instructor said in the same breath, “I’m a licensed therapist and published writer. I’ve written about eating disorder and relationships, but I never had a transformative writing experience until I started writing about grief. My brother died unexpectedly eight years ago, and I held onto so much pain and guilt and writing about it felt so impossible. But when I finally did, it was such a relief. I was freeing all of those feelings – spilling my emotions on a page. I don’t think I even realized I was feeling guilt – exactly – until I started writing. I’d labeled everything as sadness up until then. So I started this group to offer everyone that opportunity: free yourself of whatever restrictions were on you when you came through that door!

“I think, instead of introducing ourselves, I’d like you to just share your first name and then introduce the person who you’ve lost. Their name, your relationship, and a few things you’d like to share about them. We’ll begin there and then I’ll give you tonight’s prompt. Let’s start to my left.”

Brooke felt a thick lump form in the back of her throat. She was barely prepared to share about her wife on paper, she hadn’t planned on talking about her aloud. She tried to assemble some coherent sentences in her head, but quickly realized she was surrounded by other people with painful life stories who were putting their difficult feelings to words in front of strangers. It’s amazing what you can learn about someone from how they talk about someone who they love.

As her turn approached, she felt so much anxiety. No one had talked about a queer relationship yet. But she had to say wife. She had introduced Lauren just as “Lauren – my rock.” Or “Lauren -my human” – words that could imply ‘best friend’ or ‘roommate’ so many times during their marriage before and she had promised she’d never do that in her death.

“I lost Lauren – my beautiful and incredible wife who I think about every day.” She paused, to let the wife part hang in the air, still afraid that someone in this church crowd may disapprove, but the immediate reflection of love and familiarity was exactly what she needed to keep going forward. “She was sarcastic and funny and she always talked through her feelings as she felt them. And I miss that. I don’t know how to do that.” She paused again for feedback, saw the same sympathetic watery eyes that she’d been seeing for five minutes, and continued on, “We were married for three years before she died, and it’s been three years since. I don’t like this life without her in it.”

Brooke felt a profound relief when her turn was over. She kept thinking about that three year mark and comparing it to other stories. She was jealous of people who had more time together. She was heartbroken for everyone, but especially the man in his sixties who said this, “I’m here because I realized I can’t remember all of the details anymore. I read something I wrote a year after she passed, “I miss the muffins!” and I don’t know what it means. I’m here because I want to write down everything I do remember. I don’t want to lose anymore.”

The instructor was also clearly touched by his story, because she changed out the prompt for the evening, “Write about a moment that you felt the most seen and loved by your love one – something you never want to forget.”

When the writing timer began, Brooke froze. There were so many, many moments, but sitting there with her bones against the back of the chair, she couldn’t think of how to explain any of them to anyone else. Five minutes had moved from the timer with only two crossed out lines on her page. Pens danced around her, tears were being wiped, she had nothing.

Suddenly, there was a distraction. The creaky door opened and Melrose walked in, simultaneously exuding confidence and an apology for her tardiness. There wasn’t an available chair left and Brooke immediately felt responsible for taking something that wasn’t hers, but without hesitation, Melrose plopped onto the floor and leaned against the legs of another woman in the group. Their comfort was sweet, sincere, and familiar. And Brooke immediately missed that feeling. She also envied Melrose’s confidence in finding her own space and refusing to sit in the tiny, uncomfortable chairs.  

Finally, at a loss for any other idea, Brooke began writing about a time when she fled into the comfort of Lauren’s frame after a difficult day. She wrote about the time she had her first real professional failure. Brooke had neglected an important task and was mortified when this was brought up during a meeting. She promised to take care of it after – and brought home hours of work that night. She sulked home with her computer and said she wanted to quit her job. She was embarrassed to tell Lauren what had happened – to recount the mistake and the embarrassment – but after she did, she said, “You forgot something. You’re human. I love your humanness. And it’s just a job – it doesn’t define you. You’re so much more than this bad day.” And then Lauren got to work making spaghetti and brownies – her childhood favorite – while Brooke finished her work.

She wasn’t finished writing when the timer buzzed, and she wasn’t thrilled with what she had written, an incomplete story of about filling pain with love and seeing a broken person as a whole, but she scribbled a desperate question for her readers, “What else fits here?” passed the pages to the writer at her left, and got to work reading and commenting on her neighbor’s piece as instructed.

Over the next half hour, she read the most unexpected and beautiful stories. Some of them were memories that were decades old. Many of them were funny and self-deprecating. In all of them – whether sibling relationships, mother-daughter relationships, best friendships – their loved one was the hero of the story. Even though they were all autobiographical pieces of a time they felt most like themselves, everyone felt most like themselves in the company of the person who was missing. They were all connected by this invisible love.

When the timer signaled that the last round of passing ended, Brooke examined her own story, back in her hands, now unfamiliar and covered with the marks from the writing circle. There were comments about the imagery and the description, and ideas for re-ordering and re-phrasing, but the prevailing feedback was how seen everyone felt seen in this story. Brooke read through the comments and beamed with gratitude for all of these strangers. The kind of love that she had with Lauren was summed up in the margins, “We all deserve this!”

The question she’d written at the end - “What else fits here?” – was answered with the prevailing theme of, “more stories about coming home!” One commenter had written, “Failure is a human experience. Embarrassment is a human experience. The idea of coming home and feeling safe and loved and seen – that is true love.”

She thought of all of the times that she’d come out to friends and family and co-workers about her sexuality, and all of the times she’d shared something vulnerable about herself, but how she’d always felt so nurtured every time she came home to Lauren. Brooke was flooded with memories of times when she felt brave and safe and seen fully as herself. Lauren had instilled a love and confidence that hadn’t existed inside her before.

She walked away from the circle feeling more whole than she had in years. And she felt less alone on her walk home. It was a beautiful reminder that love is universal.