Gentling the Wild Beast: Imagery as a Path to Grief Writing

By Helene Kiser

In my husband’s dream about a month before he died, he saw me seated at a table in a funky bookstore, a steaming mug of tea and a stack of books waiting to be signed. A line of people jostled in front of him, chatting, tugging off knitted stocking caps. Some clutched a book with my name on the cover, titled The Cancer Poems.

This book will never exist.

I went on a poetry-writing hiatus after the birth of our children. My husband, a fiction writer and essayist, also pivoted to a career that reliably paid the family bills. We’d planned to return to the writing life after the kids finished college. The old joke:

Want to make God laugh?

Tell him your plans.

Today, our children are grown and, while I’m writing again, I only write nonfiction. Mostly memoir. About grief. The trouble is, while enormous and all-consuming to those of us tentacled in its clutches, grief is unbelievably boring.

“My beloved husband died, and now I feel sad and angry because that sucks,” may be true, but it sure isn’t interesting for a reader.

“My husband was one of the most interesting, intelligent, humorous, and just plain loving humans I have ever known, and his absence is a chasm inside my soul,” is a great eulogy. But, for a reader, so what?

And on top of that, he died of cancer, the most banal cause imaginable. Everyone dies of cancer. Honestly, you’d think two writers could come up with far more original narrative.

Yet after each piece I publish or workshop, I’ll get some well-meaning version of, “Writing that must have been so therapeutic for you.”

Therapeutic, adjective, relating to the healing of disease.

I suppose it’s natural to believe that writing about a deepest grief or a survived trauma is somehow a de facto healing process. Therapy can be, after all, a way to “get something out of your system,” like an exorcism.

But there is no getting my grief out of anything. He was alive, and we were happy. Now he’s dead, and our life together is over. Full stop.

Writing memoir is a lot like shivering on display in your underwear while people stare and point. And dying is so completely out of our experience—until we experience it—that we have no frame of reference, no basis of comparison.

So I turned to what I knew best: sensory description and figurative language. A word-by-word struggle to say exactly what I mean, paint the picture in unassailable imagery. To allow the reader to see, smell, hear, taste, and feel everything that happened.

For myself, the surprising truth is how much memoir technique borrows from and even parallels the practice of poetry.

During the months of his illness, the only writing I could do was jot notes to come back to another time. Lists I’ve continued to add to as I fill in narrative gaps. Impressions. Images. My draft currently contains six single-spaced pages of such notes, waiting for me to be ready to tackle them. Such as:

• “Sack of potatoes”—way his still-living body was tossed onto the hospital bed by the ambulance-for-hire drivers rushing to their next paycheck.

• “Peppermint oil”—the scent from a vial diffuser brought by a nurse to mitigate the hospital room’s smell of decay, body odors, bad breath, death.

• “First fold, then tear”—the printed words on each end of an envelope I found on the ground when walking the dog after leaving the hospital, a metaphor for life.

I’m a slow and methodical writer. My lists have lists. Annotated, color-coded, the works.

In the initial draft, I started working down the list of the next-to-worst moments, those of vital importance but not in the category of what might literally break me before I even began.

The more I shaped coherent, concrete images, the more tangible every experience, and the narrative underlay, became. Moments stretched into paragraphs, pages. The writing was excruciating, regularly driving me out of my home to walk off the stress, trembling, talking out loud to myself to refocus on the images only, not what they meant:

What did that really look like? What did that really feel like? Be precise, I admonished myself. Stop holding back. Honor your grief with the true truth, no matter the ugliness.

In service to the images, I followed poet Theodore Roethke, whose practice was to pick an object—say, a door—and list comparisons. “It’s an elephant, a road, tall as a tree, noisy as a piano,” and so on. Only through such comparison did the object’s true nature become known.

• My Roethke-style list of the final brain scan images: “A mango, a gray mango, a hunk of Swiss cheese in the shape of a gray mango, or a close-up of moon craters, but the moon is a gray mango and the craters are haloed, hazy halos, cloud rings, smoke rings, pea-sized, marble-sized, period-sized, Kix cereal-sized, Pupil-sized, Oxford shirt button-sized.”

In my real life, I can only look at my loss sideways. But to write about it accurately and in full, I have no choice but to look at it full in the face. Direct and close-up as under an electron microscope. His death was a specific, simple past action. But in writing, I relive it as a continuous, present perfect progressive action.

Excavating each image to compare the incomparable puts me at a remove from the reality of my grief. But oddly, that remove is almost more personal than the actual experience. I feel it as myself and as a reader. Pain multiplied. Yet somehow, under control.

The process feels like horse gentling: work with patient consistency and the wild beast will submit to your will. May even nuzzle your hand.

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Helene Kiser is the author of Topography and is currently at work on a memoir. Her writing has appeared in dozens of literary magazines and been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Recent essays have appeared in HuffPost, Hippocampus, Next Avenue, The Keepthings, and Insider. Find her at www.helenekiser.com.