Why Keep Writing in the Midst of Grief?

What it feels like to have a book launch after a funeral

This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Karen Stiller

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Against all writing advice ever given, I never start something until I know it’s going somewhere. When I signed a book contract with NavPress, I was at our cottage where I anxiously awaited the paperwork’s arrival in my inbox so that I could start writing.

Despite the fact that I'd read a thousand books on holiness, and even had a project journal full of notes on the topic, the discipline to write the actual book was not within my reach until the moment of the electronic signature. For ceremony’s sake I invited Brent—husband, bestie, muse and self-proclaimed “biggest fan” (out of my five fans)—to come from the kitchen and share the moment. He kissed the top of my head. “Way to go K!”

Stillleben Mit Samovar by Max Schödl (1869)

I considered an “author signs her contract and shows everyone she’s writing a new book!” photo. I could begin to drum up the interest authors are supposed to drum about. Then, I read the paragraph in the contract where the publisher reminds the Eager Writer that they have the right to not publish the crappy book she will submit instead of the great one she intended to write and foolishly promised.

My doomsday-oriented posture—and my pride—did not allow me to post a thing. I had also recently heard of an author whose contract had just been cancelled by the publisher, even after signing. No thank you. “Oh, brother,” Brent said, as I dismantled joy with worry.

I composed a writing schedule instead of a Facebook post. It was early July 2022, vacation time I had set aside for writing. Three chapters by the end of July. Two by the end of August. Five on page by end of summer and I’d be halfway through. This was possible. Halfway means the project’s back is broken. Sounds awful. Feels good. One chapter to follow each month until the agreed upon due date in January 2023 and this book would be written.

I crushed July and conquered August. I jogged through September. October delivered one more to the bank. None of this was easy of course, even though my verbs make it sound so. But I know well the contours of my own process. If I can do the work, the work can be done. It’s not magic. Work long enough and hard enough and keep doing that same thing over and over and eventually you can write a book. Don’t you stop. Unless you have to.

Rare things are rare only until they happen to you. That’s what one doctor said to me when my husband, a kidney transplant recipient, was struck down with a rare side effect called post-transplant lymphoma. It took him down. It brought us to our knees. He went to emergency one afternoon at the end of November and did not return home again. He died on Jan. 13, 2023.

I am not writing to you a story about grief. Grief is a given in this story—and such a fierce taker—and is my constant companion. Grief is the bear who crawls onto your back and reaches around, and rips open your chest, as it chooses. Occasionally, a little over a year into this very sad story, the bear has better manners, usually. It lumbers beside me with rippling fur or beside me on the couch. Me and my bear.

But obviously, that awful November, I set my chapter 8 down and forgot all about the book. Later, I considered setting my writing life down forever. That’s the way you think when you are losing almost everything. Take the rest too why don’t you. But I could hear my husband say: “Don’t be stupid.”

My publishers sent me flowers. I placed the vase on my dresser. That was the only bouquet I carried upstairs to our bedroom. I think I was reminding myself that my very self still existed, and that this mangled self was, deeply, a writer. Here is the hard math: Him + me = such a beautiful we (– my greatest companion in all things) = somehow it is just me again, and I am a writer.

I decided to try to finish the book. My agent told me if I could complete it by a certain date, yes, it would be a very tight timeline for editing, but we could still get it out in Spring of 2024. In the Winter of 2023, the Spring of 2024 felt like a different country, a flight to the moon, an impossibility.

Everything was a decision back then. The daylight hours were a series of hard choices. Drink this water. Walk this block. Don’t go four days without a shower. A mustering was required for every task. It was all hard work. So, why not work hard?

I trusted my writer instinct. I also trusted writer friends to whom I emailed the manuscript. Will you read it, I asked. Will you tell me what is wrong and remind me what is right? And wonderfully and beautifully, they did. We may write alone, but we rarely publish alone. Make deep dear friends with other artists. You will need them.

Also, trust your editor. Believe them. Revision is when good goes to great. When I submitted my long first draft to my editor, I did it as a lump of clay, an underpainting, a cake yet to be baked. We need such sweet surrender to do our best work. Our posture of humility knowing we are not there yet makes our practice of writing stronger.

There’s a lot I don’t remember. Death and grief take so much. We can hardly begin to believe it. First, I finished the almost-finished chapter 8. One more to go. And a new one, unplanned, called Sorrow.

“Write from your scars and not your wounds,” Nadia Boltz Weber said at her keynote at the Festival of Faith and Writing, back when I was whole. I had heartily agreed back then. Now, I’m less certain. I think you can write from your wound, if you are aware you are doing it and you proceed with extreme caution. My husband the priest lived on my pages. I wrote about him, often. We helped form each other. I was a priest’s wife, and he was a writer’s husband. I couldn’t not write about his death. Carefully. Carefully.

Deadlines are lifelines. Most of us need them to do anything. Having a writing deadline gave me structure. Also, my writing was like a little campfire I sat around in my room. Looking back, I see that it comforted me. It gave me a shape to some of my days and some warmth. I had a squad of cheerleaders in our three children who told me I could do it; that dad would want me to do it. Do it Mom.

Please remember that you are a small and self-contained garden. You are all you need to write, you and your little garden gate. You are your own writing life. Peace and quiet and cheerleaders are wonderful, but if you don’t think you need them, then you don’t need them. Also, everything that gets put in your soil can help your work grow. It can shape you. Let it. Don’t fight that. Don’t waste the pain. Don’t build compartments in your heart. Let it all seep and stew. Assume everything that goes in is adding levels and layers and flavors and shades of violet.

Try to let it all make you more beautiful on the inside. This will feel impossible. But that’s what people can do. This is our magic. This is how we are made, wonderfully. Built for resilience, as it turns out. Don’t let life rob you of your work as well as your great loves. One you can control, one you can’t. Control what you can control. Keep going, tender soul.

What if you’re a writer who is Christian and your Christian-ness takes a beating? What if your three-quarters of the way through a book on holiness when the assault happens. This is a tough spot to be in. During revision, I read every pre-death sentence again and again and asked myself: Do I still believe this? Can this still stand, and with me beside it? This was a new, uncomfortable revision lens. I reworked some statements into questions. Crawled back in from some limbs and edged further out on others. I took both less risks and more risks. My advice to spiritual writers has always been, unless you’re an apologist trying to convince people of stuff: Ponder, don’t preach. Explore, don’t explain. Share true stories and let them stand. This is partly because I’ve always been most certain of my uncertainty, but also because I just think it’s better writing.

So, as I sat in the ruins of my life wondering what the specific benefits actually were to trusting God, I made sure there were no lies in my work. We must not lie. Being the wife of a priest, I had many priests to call, plus a few bishops, and I did that, over and over. Explain to me what happened to my husband, I would ask. Tell me how faith can help me. Tell me why. Also, what is heaven like? I asked one poor guy. What do people do there? No one will go on the record on that one. To their credit, every call I had was gentle and no one said anything too stupid. There are a lot of us that don’t know a lot, and when pressed, can admit that.

Then, an epiphany that helped me keep going in the unknowingness. I thought of a Bible verse that always felt very certain and non-debate material to me: Then we will know fully, even as we are fully known. Whatever is happening, or not, at this very moment in heaven, I realized my husband pretty much had to know fully now, even as he was fully known. I can’t really explain this. But my confidence that my preacher-love now knew the mysteries of the universe and had all his questions answered, somehow made me better able to live with my own. And to keep working on a book about holiness.

Start making a list and you will soon find that there is no end to the reasons not to create, write, or form anything from scratch. There are fewer reasons to move ahead. But you really only need one good reason to actually do it. During this time, on some of my long, long walks, I listened to Oprah’s Master Class podcast. Just believe me on this one. Dip in and out. Find a name of a great artist or world-shaper who interests you and listen to them talk about journey and process. Billie Bob Thornton, as it turns out, knows grief. It is there, the actor says, in his work, even if he never talks about it or touches on it directly. It is a shaper and a sifter. And the actor Jeff Bridges says that when you’re a professional, you do it when you don’t feel like it. Yes.

That is the kind of discipline that creates art in the trenches of our lives.

How did you manage to finish it?

So many people asked me that question. “I don’t know,” I said, at first. But when I gave it some thought, I did know. I finished it slow word by slow word, tiny bird by tiny bird. One foot in front of the other, which is how widows remind each other to do everything. It’s the only way forward. I finished it because I did the work, again and again, but in shorter, sacred shifts. I couldn’t be mean to myself. That would not have worked. I finished it softly.

Also, the truth is that if I had been a chef, I would have roasted things, eventually. If I had been a musician, I would have played my oboe. Runners run. Bakers bake. Painters paint. Writers write. This is also, always, a part of it.

It is not amazing that I finished my book in the early months of grief. I finished it on purpose, like I did almost everything then. In the first months of my first endless winter, I knew in my heart that in the spring that followed I would be glad to have a book in full bloom at the same time as the daffodils. This has turned out to be so.  

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Karen Stiller
Writer & Editor

Karen is the author of the newly released book Holiness Here and The Minister’s Wife: a memoir of faith, doubt, friendship, loneliness, forgiveness and more. What did you think of this essay? Share your thoughts with a comment!

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