Lisa Geichman Prosek

Since late October, my family has been increasingly devastated by my sister’s cancer, which has continued to progress despite aggressive treatment.

When faced with such life-and-death crises, my first impulse is to shut myself off from the world, and this means that my writing stops. Like a flower that closes when the night’s darkness approaches, I often wait for the brightness to return to write again. But life’s most complicated cycles last longer than 24 hours, and I’ve no time to waste.

Though I’ve made some feeble attempts to write during this difficult time—telling myself I needed to write, that writing is therapy and healing—the page has been the last place I wanted to be. The page is the place for truth, and I didn’t want to face it.

We are losing Beth.

There: I’ve written it. It didn’t hurt to write it any more than it hurts to think about it. So, why am I running away from writing?

It seems to me, when I’m not running, when I’m thinking clearly—when I’m thinking as a writer—that the page is right where I need to be now that adversity’s fog surrounds me.

Most particularly, memoir provides an especially well-fitting outlet for times such as these. I can tell my page—myself—what I need to hear to get through and understand my feelings. I can share the harrowing experience of losing my sister with others so that when they face their own problems they won’t feel like they’re blazing a path. They won’t feel like they’re alone. They’ll know that others have been there and understand.

I think one of the problems with writing through adversity is that there are so many unknowns.

I tell my students every week that writing is a process of discovery, that they should have faith in the process, that they shouldn’t worry if the words and the story want to go in another direction from what they intended at the outset.

But now I find myself a hypocrite, unable to be willing to let the words go where they want. I think I’m scared because I don’t know exactly how this story ends yet. I don’t know how I’m going to feel. I’m afraid of what I’ll see and how it will affect me.

But isn’t all that scary stuff what writing is about anyway?

Isn’t being a writer about using words to make sense of the world, especially when it’s been turned upside down by a monster? Is there a more important time to try to make sense out of things than when my baby sister is being taken away forever despite her tenacity and courage and faith? Isn’t it important to describe and understand the terror I see in my dad’s eyes as he faces the prospect of losing a child? Shouldn’t I be willing to record how losing my beloved sister is ripping a gaping hole in my heart and how it feels to know the abject helplessness of not being able to do anything to stop the cruel process of destruction? And what about that awful feeling of knowing that at some point I’m going to be called upon to actually abet the process by helping to make final arrangements and writing my sister’s eulogy?

Yes, most certainly, I need to get started. But I’m going to need a mantra to keep me going through the darkness and tears.

Writing is therapy. Writing is healing. Writing is record. Writing is truth. Writing is life.