Writing as a Grief Practice
Writing Before I Knew What Grief Was
Writing has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. The first poem I ever wrote was about a star twinkling in the sky. I was six years old. Even then, writing felt like a way to understand the world, and a way to understand myself inside of it. I was a deeply emotional child. Quiet and shy. Always crying over beautiful sad things. Nostalgia would hit me before I had even lived enough life to be nostalgic for.
Looking back now, I think writing became survival long before I had language for survival itself. Because grief also lives in loneliness, fear, and in being told “you’re too much”. Especially in a world that constantly asks us to stop feeling at all. Writing gave those feelings somewhere to go.
And I think that is what writing can become in grief: a place for emotion to move.
Grief Lives in the Body
So much grief becomes lodged inside the body. You can feel it there sometimes like a knot deep in the chest or throat, tangled yarn, pressure in the lungs. Ancient systems like Chinese medicine associate grief with the lungs entirely, they believe that unprocessed sorrow could settle there physically. And honestly, I think many of us understand this instinctively. We feel grief in the body long before we can explain it in language.
Writing introduces movement. The hand moving across paper. The rhythm of sentences. The repetition. The uncapping of the pen. The morning coffee beside the notebook. There is something profoundly somatic about writing by hand. There’s a ritual to it.
Thinking often keeps grief circling endlessly inside the mind. But writing externalizes it. The page becomes both witness and container. Grief can be placed outside yourself for a moment. And for many grieving people, that matters deeply, because grief is often not witnessed.
People disappear after the funeral. The casseroles stop arriving. The world asks you to return to productivity while your inner world has been completely rearranged. Grief becomes lonely. Isolating. It grows in the dark. Maybe it grows into shadows.
Humans Have Always Written Toward Loss
Maybe that is part of why humans have written grief for thousands of years.
Ancient Egyptians wrote letters to their dead on bowls, papyrus, linen, and tomb walls. Thye asked ancestors for help, protection, healing, and guidance. In Mesopotamia, some of the oldest surviving literature in human history are city laments: poems grieving destroyed cities, collapsed worlds, and communal devastation. The Book of Lamentations mourns Jerusalem through poetry. Greek mourners sang grief aloud. Egyptian mourners wailed, tore their clothing, beat their chests, and performed grief publicly because sorrow was understood as something that needed expression and movement.
Humans have always written toward grief. We wrote names into stone. We wrote letters to the dead. We wrote poems after wars. We kept journals beside sickbeds. We told stories around fires so memory would survive.
Grief-writing is ancient. And importantly, it was not always meant for publication.
Writing Does Not Need an Audience
Social media has complicated this. We are now so used to writing for performance that many people no longer know how to write privately. We assume writing must be polished, meaningful, aesthetic, or shared in order to matter.
But grief writing does not need an audience.
This is not school. This is not content creation. This is not productivity. This is conversation between you and yourself. Sometimes between you and God. Sometimes between you and the dead. Sometimes between you and the version of yourself trying desperately to survive.
The writing does not need to be good. It can be repetitive, messy, angry, confused, fragmented, or completely unhinged. It can be one sentence repeated for three pages. In fact, repetition is often a sign that something inside you is still trying to move.
Do not edit grief while it is leaving the body.
When Language Fails
And at the same time, in fresh grief, language often fails completely. I do not believe we should rush people into “processing” immediately after devastating loss. Sometimes the first stage of grief is simply survival. Staring at the ocean. Sleeping. Crying. Dissociating. Eating soup. Laying in bed. Staring at walls. Existing beyond language for a while.
The body understands before the intellect does. Writing often comes later. And if you cannot write yet, that does not mean you are grieving incorrectly.
Numbness is normal. Silence is normal. Confusion is normal. Sometimes survival itself is the grief practice. Sometimes all you can do is keep breathing long enough for language to slowly return.
Writing as Ritual
For me, writing became ritual during one of the hardest periods of my life. In 2017, I was a struggling single mother living in poverty trying desperately to create stability for myself and my child. Every morning before he woke up, I wrote. Morning pages. Stream of consciousness. Fear poured onto paper before the day began.
And something shifted when I did that. The anxieties stopped circling endlessly in my nervous system because they had somewhere to go. I could leave some of them on the page and return more fully to the actual life in front of me, to my child, to gratitude, to the day itself.
So many griefs later, I still do this. I pour it all out in notebooks before the world wakes up. Writing changes the way I carry grief.
The Stories Grief Tells Us
Part of what writing reveals are the stories grief quietly begins telling us. I should have done more. Life ended there. This broke me permanently. I will never recover from this.
Grief arrives carrying narratives with it, and in our pain we often mistake those narratives for absolute truth. Writing helps us witness them. It lets us step slightly outside ourselves and notice the shape of what we believe.
Sometimes we discover something startling on the page. Oh. I didn’t know I believed that.
And from there, something becomes possible. A reorienting of ourselves honestly within the aftermath.
“I should have done more” can slowly become “I loved them deeply, and I could not stop death.”
“This destroyed my life” can slowly become “My life changed permanently, but I am still here.”
Writing can help us build narratives that do not abandon us. That is very different from denial.
How to Begin Writing Through Grief
So if you want to begin writing through grief, begin gently.
Keep one notebook only for grief if you can. Date the entries. Write before checking your phone. Write by hand if possible, slow enough for the nervous system to catch up. Do not worry about chronology or making sense. Grief rarely moves in straight lines.
Write the memory before it fades. Write the smell of their clothes, the weather that day, the song they always played, the shoes they wore most often, the sound of their laugh.
Write the future that disappeared, what no longer gets to happen.
Write without rereading. Let the grief leave before the editor arrives.
And if you do not know where to begin, begin there. “I don’t know where to begin.” Write that sentence and keep going.
When You Cannot Write
If words will not come, make lists. If paragraphs feel impossible, write fragments. If writing feels overwhelming, stop for a while. Drink water. Step outside. Feel your feet on the ground. Grief practices should open doors, not drown you inside them.
And if nothing comes, let nothing come. Sit with the notebook anyway. Even silence beside grief is still a form of listening.
You do not need to become a writer to write through grief. You only need to become honest enough to let yourself be witnessed, even if the first witness is only the page.
The page cannot bring back what was lost. But sometimes it can help us carry loss without disappearing alongside it. Maybe that is all writing really is in the end: a way of listening closely enough that grief no longer has to scream to be heard.
Michelle Carrera is a Puerto Rican writer, grief worker, death doula, and cultural witness exploring grief, ancestry, ecology, spirituality, and belonging in a changing world. Their work has appeared in various publications and can also be found through Grief and Liberation.
Grief and Liberation is a creative ecosystem devoted to grief, pilgrimage, ecology, ancestry, spirituality, animals, and the search for aliveness in fractured times. Through essays, stories, and reflections, it asks how we remain open-hearted in a world marked by loss and transformation. www.griefandliberation.com