Writing Through Pain
February 26, 2016 § 19 Comments

Lauretta Zucchetti
By Lauretta Zucchetti
It started with the discovery of a sock.
I found it in the garage, tucked behind a box of empty Pellegrino bottles I’d been meaning to recycle and several books that were overdue at the library. Just one baby sock, its partner lost, this teeny thing no longer than the length of my index finger, no wider than my palm. Pale blue, with a bright goldfish embroidered on the heel.
This damn sock socked me in my heart.
It was a fragile time, every morning as delicate as glass. My daughter Isabella had just left for college. Life had taken on an unfamiliar routine in her absence, meaning there was no routine at all. With her arrival in the world, I had given up my career and had essentially taken on one role: that of a mother. With her departure, I was jobless and irrelevant. Adrift.
Hour after hour of unstructured time awaited me when I woke up. Rising from bed seemed pointless. Getting dressed felt futile. I was no longer needed in the demanding way I had known for over eighteen years.
I floated through the house, shuffling through the rooms with the hope of hearing Isabella call out my name, asking what was for dinner or where her cleats might be. Hearing nothing, I lumbered to the next and searched for her in an oblique way as I cleaned and organized my way through loneliness and angst.
The pale blue sock I found in one of my cleaning frenzies did not belong to my daughter. It belonged to the ghost of my son, whom I had lost in childbirth. I had known him for less than a handful of minutes, when the nurses finally obliged and allowed me to hold him. I had named him Luca—which means Bringer of Light in Italian—when he was still in the womb. He died on his way out. His death brought a darkness so complete you could have pointed out a star in a clear night sky and I wouldn’t have seen a single thing.
Loss overwhelmed me as I stood there in the garage. I had lost my son. I had lost husbands, friends, lovers, car keys, investments, jobs, homes. My daughter had grown and flown, and was lost to me in the way I had known for so long. And somehow along the way, I had lost myself—the child I once was, and the woman I had known to be me.
Not knowing what to do, I drifted back into the house. I opened my laptop. I created a new document. I started with the beginning, and wrote a single sentence: “My mother was the first woman in Florence to own a car.”
From that moment on, I began writing furiously. I wrote as soon as I woke up in the morning, and just before bed. I wrote during those long, unstructured hours in the middle of the day as my marriage ended and my dog passed away and my uncle committed suicide. I kept notes on my phone, and a tape recorder in my car. Sometimes I scribbled down no more than a sentence or two: An image of my grandmother Ida holding her hand-embroidered purse as she went out for the evening, a ribald joke my father once told, an insight I’d gleaned from watching a child mature and leave home, a snatch of a scene that detailed my mother, obliterated by addiction, in the final hours of her life. I examined my life and the events that had shaped me from every angle—backwards, forward, sideways, and upside down. Word by word, and brick by brick, I began understanding the foundation of myself—of where I had been, and where I would go—from previously unseen angles. In the process, I learned to be mindful of details, blessings, discoveries. And in the process, I felt the raw pain of loss loosening its grip on me.
“We exit ourselves to locate ourselves,” memoirist Beth Kephart remarked in her keynote address at the Bank Street Mini Conference. “We journey beyond so that we might know the delirium and triumph and ache and wonder of return.”
I had exited myself—from knowing who I was, from knowing where I was headed—when I left my career, when I became a mother, and when I endured tremendous loss, but through writing, I was returning to someone I didn’t know existed. And I was happy to meet her.
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Lauretta Zucchetti, a former award-winning executive at Apple and Xerox, has a number of brag-worthy stamps on her passport and a set of drums in her office. Her work has been featured on Scary Mommy, The Shriver Report, Literary Mama, Tiny Buddha, Purpose Fairy, Blog Her, Lifehack, and in NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH SO HELP ME GOD: 73 Women on Life’s Transitions. An author, life coach, and motivational speaker, she splits her time between Italy and San Francisco. To learn more about her, visit www.laurettazucchetti.com.
Beautiful!
I am happy to meet you also Lauretta! I too lost a son. I am so sorry for the loss of your son, Luca. I had not written for over 30 years, and one morning about 18 months after Justin’s death, it just started to spill out. Thank you for sharing your journey of discovery. Wishing you a peace filled day.
Thank you for this, Lauretta. It’s beautiful. I never had children, but I know that lost feeling you describe. You inspire me to get back to writing.
Thanks so much for this well written and moving piece, you rock
I can tell Lauretta made the right decision. She writes so well and her thought flow like an unimpeded stream. Brvo!
Despite the painful memories, this is so hopeful, Lauretta. I love your last lines about meeting yourself through your writing.
Nice to make your acquaintance, Lauretta. My condolences on the loss of your son. I too, experience a loss that for years left me wounded and scared and drives me still to tell my story, if even for me. This was so beautifully written, I felt the emotions as you knelt down and picked up the tiny, precious sock. @sheilagood at Cow Pasture Chronicles
Reblogged this on Playful Memories and commented:
I love this. It moved my heart and inspired me to write more ❤
The pain of loss is devastating. Writing, for me, has always been a therapeutic way to work through it. You can write of other outcomes or of the actual events and work your way through it. Keep on writing.
So amazing!
Reblogged this on The Literary Life.
This is beautiful. Your writing is one of my new addictions.
So glad to discover you and your writings.
We find and lose socks all the time in my house. Sometimes we are convinced that the washer and/or dryer consumes them. Some just disappear of their own free will. Or?
This is such a beautiful, honest, inspiring piece. Thanks for writing it.
Nicely written. I understand writing to stay connected to self. When I recently finished a large project and undertook the “tasks undone” as I called them, I cleaned the basement, not wanting to reach the last box I’d stored under the stairs which held the last pieces I’d collected from my mother’s room at a nursing home. But collect it I did, washed and folded the pieces gently, and donated them for some other tiny and a little crazy woman to find. A gift from my mother to the world.
Your writing touched a deep place in me. There’s never really an end to the letting go is there…. J.
My children are with me only part time now, one more change in my own life due to divorce. So I know about having lost that reason to get our of bed in the morning. That’s me on those “child free” days right now. Sometimes needing to blog away some of my thoughts is the only activity that brings structure and comfort when they are not here. Loved this.
Lauretta, this is a beautiful piece. I’ve been thinking about you lately as I walk past your house everyday taking the girls to school. I hope you are well and are enjoying your time wherever you are! (Italy?)
All the best,
xo Sarah
Reblogged this on Notes from An Alien and commented:
Today’s re-blog has one of the best written and moving accounts of what writing can do in our lives that I have ever had the pleasure to read………