Writers

There are a couple of women writers that when I read them I just open up. Don't ask me what that means. I can't explain it. It's just that they say what's in my heart, and I know there's someone else in the world like me. One of them is Anne Lamott who writes in a very funny way about the most godawful serious stuff. She is in recovery. The other is Melody Beattie. She became famous from just writing about her experience with addiction and co-dependency. I read her first book almost 25 years ago and understood for the first time what was wrong with me. The other books on that subject just lost me. But Melody is writing from her heart and I get it. Her son died in a ski accident when he was 12, which was more than 10 years ago. I totally get why she says she was in grief and unable to function for years since I struggled with the death of my son for more than 20 years before I began to be in acceptance. What I get from these writers is that I am not an "isolated incident" that no one can possibly understand. My reactions and struggles are not something to be ashamed of. At my advanced age it feels good to let myself off the hook.

"We need to tell the story of our loss repeatedly to make it real and to believe that it happened. When we're telling the same story over and over, what we're really doing is working hard to integrate and accept something that's not yet acceptable to us...Is there something we could have done differently? Would that have prevented the loss? We make peace with the senseless by telling the story ten, twenty, one hundred or one thousand times to anyone who'll listen. Obsession is part of the path to surrendering to loss." Melody Beattie. The New Co-Dependency.