This blog piece was written by Charlotte Luke, a writer from Inverness, who is also part of the RSE-funded DeathWrites network of 30 Scotland-based writers.
Last year, around 8 months after my dad died in a hillwalking accident, I heard about the DeathWrites Network, a group of writers tackling the subjects of death, dying and bereavement in their work. I applied to be part of the group, finding the idea of meeting other people who were in the same or a similar boat very appealing. It has been fascinating to track the process of how I have approached writing about my dad’s death, and how that process has evolved over time, along with my grief. When I was first part of the Network, I was determined to write as truthfully as I could about what had happened. I wanted to strip everything away to the bones and leave them gleaming. This, it turned out, was not easy.
When my dad died, I wished I had something to read written by somebody newly bereaved, like me. Not by seasoned ‘griefsters’ (to borrow a word coined by the wonderful Cariad Lloyd, whose podcast ‘Griefcast’ is now one of my best friends); people years and decades down the line. I was not interested in ‘this will get easier with time’, because I did not want to accept that ‘this’ was reality. I railed at what I perceived as their smugness. Time meant nothing to me when I was trying my hardest to crawl through a single day without my dad, when I visualised every minute that passed as a train taking me further and further away from him.
I wanted resources from people in the same boat as me; I wanted people to acknowledge how unwaveringly rubbish everything was. That would be DeathWrites for me, I decided. Fresh in my grief, I would write the words I wished I could have referred to in the desperate first few weeks.
Of course, when I sat down to do just that, I realised why there is a lack of resources by the newly bereaved. It is one thing to sit alone with a new grief, and quite another to write it down and engage with it on a critical level. My initial project was going to be a sift through my diaries from the time of the accident, commenting on each entry a year later. When it came to it, though, this seemed about as appealing as picking through a chicken carcass on the turn. Fiction, I decided, was the way to go.
In July it will be two years since my dad’s death. I wrote a story called ‘A Buzzard on the Wing’ last year which was accepted by Scottish Mountaineering Press’s ‘Creatives’ initiative. The story was inspired by my frustrations with the people I thought should have known better than to say some of the things they said after Dad’s death. I am now working on further fictional explorations of grief, and am grateful for how fiction can be a balm for reality.
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Charlotte Luke is a writer based in Inverness. She recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in English, and now works on the youth programme at Moniack Mhor Creative Writing Centre. Her work has appeared in various short story and flash fiction anthologies.
This blog first appeared on the DeathWrites blog.