Writing About Your Mother After Her Death

I've written about grief in prior articles, including grief after parents die (see the end of this article for a list).  In this article, I'm focusing specifically on a mother's death and how writing can help you to heal. Although I'm focusing on mothers, you can, of course, apply what I've written to fathers, brothers, sisters, a spouse or any relatives or close friends.  I'm choosing to focus on mothers in this article because, for most people, it's usually the closest relationship you have from before your birth until death.

Writing About Your Mother After Her Death

Losing a mother is one of the biggest losses that anyone will ever face.  Even if you didn't have a good relationship with your mother, you might grieve for the aspects that were positive, if there were positive aspects to your relationship with her, and also for what you wanted and didn't get from your mother.

If your mother died and you were fortunate enough to say goodbye and express your feelings before she died, afterwards you might remember something you wanted to say and didn't or a question you would have liked to ask.

If you didn't get a chance to say goodbye, you probably feel a need to say goodbye and that much more after your mother died.

Writing About Your Mother After Her Death

It's common to feel regret about unexpressed feelings or questions after the death of your mother, and you might feel despair because you can no longer express these feelings or ask these questions.

But there are other ways to deal with working through grief and dealing with unresolved feelings.  One way is to spend time writing about your mother.

Writing can be an integrating process where your thoughts, feelings, memories, dreams and daydreams come together.

Writing About Your Mother After Her Death

• Keeping a Journal: Keeping a journal of whatever feelings, memories, dreams and thoughts you have is one way to use writing to heal yourself.  The journal would only be for you to see, unless you choose to share it with people close to you or with your psychotherapist.  Write whatever comes to mind and don't censor yourself.  What comes up won't always be loving thoughts.  You might feel angry for things that happened during her life or that you feel abandoned since she died.  You might also have other feelings that you weren't aware of until you start writing.

• Writing Poetry: If you enjoy reading and writing poetry, you might find it healing to write one or more poems about your mother that capture the essence of who she was and your relationship with her.  The use of metaphor and symbols in poetry can also help to express deep feelings as well as provide a healing experience for you.

• Writing Letters to Your Mother: If there were things you would have liked to say, but you didn't, writing letters to your mother in which you express your feelings can be helpful.  You can write one letter or a series of letters about different topics.  These letters won't all necessarily be loving.  There might be letters that are angry, sad, frustrating or express whatever feels unfinished to you.  Since your emotional relationship with your mother continues to grow and change over the years, you might have different, even contradictory, feelings at various times.  For instance, at one point, you might write a letter to "tell her" about a happy occasion, like your daughter's wedding and at another point, you might write about something you're experiencing where you wish you had her support, for example, if you're going through a divorce.  You might even imagine what your mother might have said about these situations and write letters from her perspective back to you.

• Writing a Short Story: If you grew up with your mother and had an ongoing relationship with her, you probably know a lot of stories about her life and your relationship with her.  Some of them might be sad and some might be humorous.  Capturing these experiences in a short story or two can help you to relive those experiences and to heal emotionally.  Even if you have to fill in certain parts of the story because you don't know what the whole story, you can imagine part of it and write about that part of it from your imagination.  

• Writing a Collection of Short Stories:  If you have many stories that you want to remember, you can write a collection of stories that you either keep for your own private use or share with family members and close friends.  How you use these stories is up to you.  If you write a collection of short stories, it can include stories that you know about from the time your mother was an infant (maybe she told you stories that she heard from her mother about infancy) until her death or you can choose certain significant milestones of her life to write about.  Each chapter can be about a different time in her life.  Although this might sound daunting, you don't have a deadline, so you're not under any pressure to complete this project by a specific date.  You can write these stories whenever you feel like it and you have time.  Once again, capturing these stories in writing can be a healing process.  

• Writing a Memoir:  Maybe you want to focus specifically on your relationship with your mother from your point of view and your relationship with her rather than about her personal life.  Writing a memoir doesn't have to capture her whole life or your whole life with your mother.  It can include whatever experiences are meaningful to you that you want to write about.  Once again, if you're doing this for yourself, there's no rush and no pressure.

Overcoming Obstacles to Writing
You might read these suggestions and say, "But I'm not a writer..."

Even if you've never kept a journal and never attempted any particular writing project, you can still write.

The problem that most people have with writing is getting started because they think their writing won't be good enough or that it should look and sound a certain way.

But, remember, you're doing this for yourself to help you with your grief, so no one will be judging your writing, except maybe you if you happen to be particularly critical of yourself.

To overcome this obstacle, I usually recommend that people do free associative writing to get the words to start flowing before you begin any of the writing suggestions above.

Just like in free association in the psychoanalytic sense, when you do free associative writing, you're just writing whatever comes to mind and you keep going.  You're not stopping to fix punctuation or grammar.  You're just letting it all pour out.

The intent is to help you to relax and get into the flow of writing.

If you have some time before you get started with your day, the best time to do free associative writing is in the morning before you're completely awake and before your defenses and fears take hold.

If nothing comes to mind at first, choose a word, any word, and write whatever comes to mind.  It can be any word at all, even if it seems trivial at first.  For instance, if you've just woken up and you're staring at your box of corn flakes and you can't think of a word, write down "corn flakes" and keep going from there and don't stop for at least 5-10 minutes.

Don't go back to critique it.  That's not the  point.  What you wrote might appear be a word salad.  That's okay.  Let it be whatever it is.

If you happen to come upon an idea that you want to include in your writing about your mother then, by all means, go back and use that piece.

In Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, she has suggestions about a form of free associative writing that she calls the morning pages.  You can follow this method or any other free associative method that feels right for you.

You might also want to look at a book by Marion Milner (pseudonym: Joanna Field) called A Life of One's Own where she writes about her own personal growth process and how she used a diary for self exploration.

Conclusion
There are many different approaches that you can take, possibly even ones that I haven't included in this article, to express your grief in writing or memorialize your mother.

Writing about grief is usually an integrative process so that it helps you to bring together the many different feelings you have about your mother and your relationship with your mother.

When you're ready to write about your mother, it can be a healing experience that gets you through the mourning process and beyond.

Getting Help in Therapy
As I've mentioned in previous articles, losing your mother is one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, loss that you will experience.

If you've having problems grieving for your mother or you're stuck in the mourning process, you could benefit from seeing a licensed mental health professional to help you through this process (see my article: The Benefits of Psychotherapy).

Grief and mourning are unique for each person.

A skilled psychotherapist can help you to work through this loss so that you can work through the loss and heal (see my article: How to Choose a Psychotherapist).

About Me
I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist (see my article: The Therapeutic Benefits of Integrative Psychotherapy).

I work with individual adults and couples.

I have helped many clients to work through their grief.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Also see:

Inconsolable Grief About a Mother's Death

Grief in Waiting After a Parent's Death

Allowing Room For Grief

Grief: You Continue to Have a Relationship With Your Parents Even After They Die

The Theme of Complicated Grief For a Mother in the Movie, Phantom Thread

Writing to Cope With Grief

Coping with grief can be challenging.  Many people find that writing is helpful during times of grief and loss.

Coping With Grief

I've written about grief and loss in prior articles, including:

Coping With the Loss of a Loved One
Coping With Complicated Grief
Grief in Waiting After the Death of a Parent
Allowing Room For Grief
Holding Onto Grief as a Way to Stay Emotionally Connected to a Deceased Loved One
Inconsolable Grief After a Mother's Death

There are many ways to cope with grief.  In this article, I'm focusing on one particular way to cope with grief, which is to write.

Coping With Grief

Coping with grief is personal.  What works for one person might not work for someone else.  One way to cope with grief is to write.

Journal Writing
In a prior article, I wrote about journal writing to cope with stress and anxiety (Journal Writing Can Relieve Stress and Anxiety) and how journal writing can help to cultivate a sense of gratitude (Keeping a Gratitude Journal).

Writing to Cope With Grief

Keeping a journal during times of grief can help you to explore and release all the emotions that can come up when you've lost someone close to you.

At different times, you might feel sad, angry, confused, anxious or all of these feelings combined together.

Writing down your feelings in a journal helps to clarify what you're feeling, especially when you're caught up in a storm of confusing feelings.

The flow of writing can help to release feelings that you might not even know that you were having.

It can help you to get to some of the underlying emotions that are under the surface.

For instance, you might feel angry at the person who died, but you might not realize that underneath the anger might be sadness (see my article: Discovering That Sadness is Often Underneath Anger).

Writing Letters to a Deceased Loved One
Often, after a loved one dies, surviving family members realize that there are so many things they want to say that they went unsaid.

Writing to Cope With Grief

Many people find it helpful to write letters to a loved one that they keep.  These letters can be written in a stream of consciousness, writing whatever comes to mind. As a alternative,  each letter can be about particular emotions or subjects.

When you write stream of consciousness, you write whatever comes to mind without censoring yourself.

Many writers, who feel blocked, write stream of consciousness to get ideas and emotions flowing.

In the same way, if you're struggling with your emotions about someone close to you who died, you can use this method to allow your emotions to flow.

Writing Down the Milestones of a Deceased Loved One's Life
In an earlier article, Writing the Milestones of Your Life, I wrote about how making a list of the big events in your life can help to give you a perspective about your life.

Writing to Cope With Grief

In the same way, writing down the milestones of a deceased loved one can also give you a different perspective.

For instance, if you thought that your loved one had only sad times in his or her life, you might remember certain big events in his or her life that brought joy and happiness or was meaningful in a certain way.

Usually, after someone who was close to us dies, we tend to remember only the final days, which are usually sad, challenging and, possibly, traumatic.  But to put everything into perspective, in most cases, there were usually many more days in a full life that weren't sad, challenging or traumatic.

Even if it's not a milestone, like birth or marriage, there might be an event that you remember that you know was meaningful to your loved one.  Write it down and it will help to put your loved one's life in context and, hopefully, provide you with some relief in your time of grief.

Writing a "Memoir"or Story
The word "memoir" sounds so formal.

When we think of memoirs, we think of famous people, like presidents, actors or other important people in history.

But anyone can write a memoir or story about him or herself or about someone else.

Writing to Cope With Grief

The type of memoir that I'm suggesting is more personal and informal and not for publication (unless after you write it, you want to do so).

After you write down the milestones in your loved one's life, you might want to write a page or so about one or more of those milestones in order to expand upon it.

There's no pressure about doing this because it's only for you.

In the same way that you might speak about a deceased loved one at a memorial service, writing a memoir or story is essentially a dialogue that you have with yourself.

There might be parts of your loved one's life that you don't know about when you're writing.  Maybe you'll choose one particular day to write about instead of trying to write about more than one event.

Since this is only writing that you're doing for yourself, you can do your best to guess what might have happened during that period.

The purpose of writing a memoir or story is not to get all the facts right.  The purpose is to help you during your time of grief by seeing the totality of your loved one's life, the good times, the hard times, etc.

Having a Dialogue in Writing
Aside from journal writing, letter writing and writing a memoir or story, you can use your imagination to write down a conversation that you would like to have with a deceased loved one.

Similar to writing a letter, you might have things you would have liked to have said but you didn't get a chance before s/he died.

By writing a dialogue, you have an imaginary conversation with your loved one.  If s/he was close to you, you can imagine how s/he might have responded to you.

Another way to use having a dialogue in writing is to use your imagination to rewrite an actual conversation that you wish had gone differently.

For instance, maybe you have regrets about something you said or maybe you wish your loved one would have responded differently during an actual conversation.

You can't undo what has already happened in the past, but you can experience some relief by using your imagination to write down the conversation that you wish you would have had.

Very often, people are amazed at how healing this can be.

Conclusion
Writing can be a healing when you're struggling with grief.

People often say that they're not sure how to begin or what to write.  If you feel stuck, use the stream of consciousness method where you just write the first thing that comes to your mind without censoring yourself.

These writing exercises can be done at any time, whether your loved one passed away today or 50 or more years ago.

Allowing yourself to express your feelings in writing can be a great relief and help you in your healing process.

Getting Help in Therapy
Psychotherapy with a licensed psychotherapist can also help you through the grieving process.

Having a place that is private and comfortable for you to talk can be a gift that you give yourself.

A licensed mental health professional, who has expertise with grief and mourning, can help you to heal your sadness and grief.

About Me
I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

My specialties, among other areas, include trauma and grief, and I have helped many clients through the grieving process.

To find out more about me, visit my website:  Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.