Lisa Geichman Prosek

Perhaps I need to make a public declaration so that I can come fully back into the light of a literary life.

Maybe I should finally openly admit that I haven’t written properly in a year. That, after my sister passed away in 2012, my writing died a slow death.

Maybe it happened because there were too many moments I wanted to record about losing Beth. After all, I had promised her that I would write about her experience. About our experience, as a family losing each other. Then the memories of Beth’s battle with cancer came so quickly that I sometimes felt like I would drown in them. Beth happy and struggling to live, then her realization that she wouldn’t survive. Seeing her after she’d passed away, with my stricken father standing just a few feet away, not knowing what to do.

There was no place I wanted to be less than in a room alone with nothing but a blank page and my thoughts.

The mere thought of writing made me sick to my stomach and twitchy with fear. I lit the candles to welcome the Muses, sat down to write, and immediately popped back up. The dishes needed to be done. There was grocery shopping to do, student papers to grade.

But those things could have waited. The truth is that words wouldn’t come.

It terrified me. Words have always come, even if they weren’t poetic or representative of exactly what I wanted to convey. At least images conjured up by my brain came through my hands in the form of words and landed on the page.

I found not being able to write so disorienting that I lost my sense of self-identity and connection to the things that made me happy about myself.

Writing used to help me transcend problems. I wrote for hours without realizing that time had passed, that I needed food or anything else. It helped me figure out what I felt and why and how to live with that or how to change it.

Not being able to write made me feel dirty and ashamed, and I hid it. It felt like more than a personal failing. Rather, it felt like an act of failing every instructor who ever taught me or anyone who ever believed in me…including my sister.

I’ve come to understand that I couldn’t write because the stories about Beth were too dear to me. Because I feared the prospect of imperfectly recreating my sister’s last moments and the indelible imprint she left on our lives.

And does that make me a hypocrite? Every day I teach I tell my writing students not to fear imperfection, but rather to expect it, to embrace it. It’s what writing is. Writing will never be perfect no matter how we try to make it so. Seeking perfection can be the last huge stumbling block, and it must be gotten over.

Now it’s come to the point where I simply have to write something–anything–so that I’m no longer an imposter and so I can find my balance again. While I eventually need to try to find the parallels in the story, to discern the meaning, and to bring my reader along with me through the experience, right now I just have to write.

Like Thurber said: “Don’t get it right, just get it written.”

Even that is imperfect: a comma splice. But no better advice ever came to the page, and I will take it.

I declare that I will move ahead to strive to remember and experience again the joy of writing and jettison the dread, failure, and remorse for not showing up.

That’ll be a grand and appreciated beginning. But in the distance, as I write, a mourning dove coos, reminding me that there will still be more work to be done.

So, I will also take on the joyous and yet dreadful job of remembering my sister, bring the feelings forward, let Beth breathe again…even if just on the page, and then I’ll finally let her rest, so I can rest more easily, too.