What Writing Does After Loss
Transcript
This week I published an essay about grief, and after it went live I found myself thinking less about the content of the essay and more about the process of writing it. People sometimes assume that writing about loss is a kind of emotional release, as though the act of putting words on a page is simply a way to discharge feeling. That has never quite been true for me. Writing, especially after something destabilizing, has less to do with release and much more to do with reorganization.
When someone we love dies, what changes is not only our emotional state. Of course there is sadness, sometimes shock, sometimes a strange quiet. But underneath those recognizable emotions, something more structural happens. The person who occupied a stable role in our lives was not only external. Over time they became internal. Their voice, their reactions, their expectations, the way they fit into our understanding of ourselves and our history, all of that becomes woven into our psychological architecture. We do not simply remember them; we orient around them.
In the days after my mother died, I caught myself reaching for the phone to tell her something. It lasted less than a second. A flicker. But in that flicker, my nervous system was still organized around her presence. The internal model had not yet updated. That tiny moment held the entire disorientation.
When that person is no longer physically present, the external world shifts immediately. The internal world does not. The mind continues to anticipate. The nervous system still predicts contact. The identity structure still includes them in its map of how life works. That mismatch creates instability. It is not merely that we miss someone; it is that our internal representation of reality has not yet caught up to reality itself.
That is why grief often feels destabilizing in ways that are difficult to articulate. It is not just an emotion passing through the system. It is the experience of structural disruption. Something foundational has shifted, and the self must reorganize around the absence.
For me, writing becomes part of that reorganization. When I sit down to write after loss, I am not trying to produce something dramatic or cathartic. I am trying to think carefully. I am trying to convert a diffuse internal state into something symbolically precise. Language forces clarity. It slows cognition. It requires that feeling be translated into structure.
There is a difference between emoting and integrating. Emoting can relieve pressure. It can communicate need. Integration is quieter. It asks what has changed and what remains. It asks how the self must adjust in order to stay coherent rather than fragmented.
Of course, there are times when writing is not possible. When grief is too fresh or too heavy, language can fail entirely. I am not suggesting that everyone should write, or that writing is the only path through loss. But when the fog begins to lift, even slightly, writing can become a way of finding one’s footing again. It can provide orientation when orientation doesn’t feel stable.
One of the most important questions that emerges after loss is often quiet but persistent: “Who am I now?”
That question can feel threatening because it implies that the self is, in part, relational. It suggests that our identity has been shaped in dialogue with another person. And when that person is gone, the shape changes.
But the answer is rarely that we become someone entirely new. More often, we begin to see which parts of ourselves were always ours and which parts were organized around the other. Writing helps me perceive that distinction. It allows me to trace the lines of influence without confusing influence with erasure.
It clarifies continuity. Death removes a person from the external world, but it doesn’t remove their imprint. The values they reinforced, the ways they shaped our character, the rhythms of connection that formed over decades, those don’t disappear overnight. Writing makes that visible. It prevents the illusion that loss has erased the entire structure of relationship.
In the culture we inhabit, grief is often externalized quickly. It becomes visible, posted, shared, sometimes amplified. There is nothing inherently wrong with public expression. Human beings are relational; we gather around one another in pain. But there is a difference between expressing grief and organizing identity around it. There is also a difference between vulnerability and spectacle.
I tend to process privately first. Not because emotion is unwelcome, but because I want to understand it before I display it. Writing allows that understanding to take shape. It gives boundaries to what might otherwise diffuse into everything. Unprocessed grief can narrow perception, sharpen irritability, or quietly distort unrelated experiences. When something is unnamed, it spreads. When it is articulated carefully, it finds its place.
There is also the matter of meaning. After loss, there is often a rush to extract significance, to turn tragedy into reassurance or into a lesson. I am cautious about that impulse. Meaning that is forced too quickly can feel artificial. Genuine meaning emerges through integration over time. It comes from sustained contact with reality and from tolerating the discomfort of not having immediate explanations. Writing does not manufacture meaning; it creates the conditions in which meaning can gradually take form.
Over time, grief, it changes shape. The acute disorientation softens. The internal model updates. The person who was once anticipated in daily life becomes integrated as memory and influence rather than expectation. That recalibration does not announce itself. It happens slowly, through repeated contact with absence and through deliberate internal work.
For me, writing is one way of participating consciously in that recalibration. It doesn’t eliminate sorrow, nor does it dramatize it. Instead, it honors the reality of loss while protecting the larger coherence of the self. It ensures that grief becomes part of the architecture, rather than its foundation.
Loss reorganizes us whether we intend it to or not. Writing is how I participate in that reorganization. Not to erase the loss. Not to minimize it. But to ensure that what remains is built on something true.
Thank you for listening. I’ll see you next time.
