We are all made of stories...

... so tell yourself the very best ones.

Have you noticed how stories with happy endings inevitably involve sad starts? Or at least sad middles. Otherwise, there is nothing to conflict with the end happiness. No conflict means no change and without change there is no real story. Harry Potter begins with his horrid Muggle relatives, Cinderella starts out sweeping ashes and avoiding her cruel step-sisters, and the Israelites live in slavery far away from the Promised Land. Then all comes good in the end. All of which I tell you, not as a lesson on storytelling, (although this is a piece about the power of creative storytelling) but so I can prepare you not to be alarmed as I start this essay here:

Fourteen months ago my husband was told he had eighteen months to live with an incurable form of cancer.

My usual reactions to emergencies kicked in. I planned and I organised and I called up the reserve troops knowing my resources alone were not going to be enough. One of those forms of support was a fantastic charity that sent a reflexologist to the house and gave me Zoom appointments with a grief counsellor. At some point in our early conversations, the counsellor said, “There is nothing that can prepare you for grief.” At which point another of my usual reactions kicked in and I started to want to stress test the assertion.

Was that true? Clearly, you could prepare for the practical effects of bereavement, getting wills and medical directives together, checking finances and so forth. But bereavement is a fact and grief is an experience. Was it true that there was no way to prepare for it? I didn’t mean could you avoid it; I didn’t expect that. Nor even was I asking if you could minimise it. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do that. It seemed like you would first have to minimise the love that led to the grief. But I thought, surely you could consciously equip yourself now with knowledge or skills that would help you cope a little better with the loss in the future.

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

Presenting Google Scholar with the question didn’t throw up anything particularly relevant from research journals. Pursuing blogs and grief books made me even more afraid. My counsellor kept repeating her view that there was no way to prepare for what was coming. I stopped bringing the question up in our sessions and filed it away under a tab labelled awkward issue to be avoided for now.

Then in the process of my husband’s treatment, a radiographer spotted some peculiar-looking bone marrow and we were told that there was a distinct possibility that he had a second form of cancer. Not a secondary presentation of the first cancer but a coincidental and separate form of cancer. Which could also be terminal. If experiencing one miracle seemed like a fragile hope, asking for two seemed like pure chutzpah. I was no longer able to avoid the present by focusing on some interesting theoretical situations that I would encounter in the future. Full-blown anticipatory grief kicked in.

I began to find myself awake at 3 am, lying in the dark, unable to return to sleep and gripped with fear that a crushing life experience was coming my way and I would be left to face this tsunami of tears without so much as a pre-packed teaspoon to scoop then away.

To deal with the insomnia a friend recommended the BBC World Service radio played very softly, the theory being that the voices would be soothing company and fear thrives on loneliness. Unfortunately, my wakefulness tended to coincide with programmes about the destruction of the world via climate change or the danger of nuclear weapon use due to the derangement of Putin. One night I accidentally rotated the dial on the BBC Sounds app a notch too far and landed on the Scottish Gaelic service. The rhythm of a gentle and utterly foreign tongue was much better but still, the soothing sibilant syllables would be rudely interrupted by worrisome, untranslatable words like Trump or Kharkiv.

I switched to a white noise app that let me bespoke a calming mix of waves, rain, cicadas and Tibetan gongs. I lay there lulled into meditative relaxation, right on the edge of drifting off and then - pow! - a thought would shoot into my mind. Less a thought really than a fully formed story, all of which started with when you are widowed then… All of them started sadly. All of them ended sadly. None of them sent me to sleep.

Which is when I thought: isn’t one purpose of storytelling to prepare us for the unknown? And isn’t the fact that as an author I can tell the story in whatever way I like? And can’t I therefore prepare for this bereavement by telling myself the fantasy stories I need, not the ones that reflect the dire predictions from the true-life blogs and grief books I read?

So I started to tell myself bedtime stories. Wild stories with plot holes the size of the Batagaika crater, stories with a quick sad start and very long happy endings. I couldn’t imagine not having the overwhelming grief so I didn’t try to construct tales that elided or solved that problem. Nor could I ignore it. I imagined an Afterwards and told myself stories of what I could do not despite the anticipated grief, not after it had ended, but tales of what I could do because of it or with it.

I thought of the possible lives that would not happen while we lived as a couple, each supporting the other but at the same time living within the jointly formed boundaries of what each of us could contemplate as a good life. I imagined myself emigrating to places he had no desire to live (glibly dismissing the practical complication of inconvenient immigration laws) and constructing a whole new life in my head in Cape Town or Canada.

I’d start by tugging the curtain back a bit to use the street lamp outside as a child’s night light then, literally whispering words to myself, I’d drift off to sleep, entering deep satisfying dreams of the fantasy new lives I had constructed around my unfilled creative desires. I made art from a wooded cove on Vancouver Island, I wrote a novel by the crashing waves of Cape Town. I conjured up everything I needed - colours, water, words - weapons to counteract the dark devil of grief. The stories had to be Narnia-like to work because I knew that anything realistic would be overwhelmed by the prosaic facts of the future that was coming.

The very last time I did this my plot revolved around the hugely unrealistic concept of me selling art to the Jewish community in, of all places, Florida. (There was a lot of geographical escape involved in these stories!)I tossed into the dreams an art patron who made it all possible. I know no one in Florida. I have no connection to the Jewish art market in the USA. I had no prospect of meeting anyone remotely likely to be an art patron. It was utter make-believe. But I got to sleep.

Then the situation changed. The haematologist told us that the bone marrow had been placed under a microscope and was healthy. The lesions that had led to the original terminal diagnosis had not changed between scans which meant that they were probably not cancerous after all. The oncologist decided that the haematologist’s advice meant he could have a good go at curing the cancer. Suddenly I could sleep again.

Refreshed, I attended a Jewish event. Across the aisle, I saw a man with a handwoven prayer shawl with a similar unusual artistic design to mine. I went to say hello. He was from Florida and his tallit came from a weaver at one of my favourite galleries. Friends told me later he had a history of donating significant works of art to Jewish institutions. Later that week I chose a a podcast at random. In the middle, the interviewee mentioned in passing that Canada has a little-known visa for artists. A few days after that I saw an article online about retirement visas in South Africa which had a much lower financial investment than anywhere else I had ever looked at and for which I could qualify.

The oncologist turned out to be right. The treatment worked and as of the last scan, there was no sign of cancer. So I cannot tell you if it is possible to prepare for grief. I’ll let you know on that one but I hope it will be many years from now. What I can tell you, however, is that you can lessen anticipatory grief considerably by at least attempting to prepare for the real thing.

That’s not the point of this story though. The point is that what seems impossible - twice over impossible - isn’t always. I don’t mean that we should never anticipate disaster, or that we can fairytale away harsh realities. No. People die. Worlds fall apart, grief is very real. There are deeply hurtful, greatly unfair things in life that we cannot control at all. Scary, unimaginable world-scale traumas as well as everyday personal tragedies. We cannot use stories to evade the reality of life. Wishing on a star does not bring everything we hope for. We can, however, use our creativity to change our experience of those difficult times whether they relate to death, illness, financial woes, divorce or loss of a job and the identity that goes with it. We can use creative storytelling to open up imagined possibilities in ways that change our experience of the here and now.

The technique I used is a coaching skill that in itself is an adaptation from solution-focused brief therapy. You can try it yourself: in a situation that seems impossible ask yourself: If a miracle happened while I was asleep and when I woke up the problem was solved, how would I know? What would be different? What would I be doing, saying? Usually, there is at least one small element from that story that you can enact right now. In that way, although we cannot move the block right now, we can reach over it and find a piece of the emotions we wish to feel and bring them into the here and now. Doing so leads to actions and a different way of noticing the world that in turn leads us to potential options we might have missed. Those options can help us face an obstacle or give us ways to go through, over, under or around it. If the obstacle shifts of its own accord we have still identified more clearly with what matters to us and can take steps to live by those values right now.

That’s why this Substack exists. All my fantasies involved creative living in some way, usually huge ambitious projects, canvases the size of people, big fat novels, and a website full of educational resources. But even after the good news that radiotherapy could start, I was emotionally drained, distracted and busy driving to and from clinics. I was not up for starting a low-res degree abroad or even starting work on another large gallery show here at home. I reckoned however I had energy for two posts here a month if I was determined. And so I started. I figured out the focus of my newsletter and jotted down ideas for early posts in a journal while I sat on a sofa at the wonderfully supportive Maggie’s Centre in Clatterbridge Hospital.

And so, here we are.

I do not need a Canadian visa a South African university place or a Floridian art patron at the moment. But I know now with certainty that I can create the ability to find what I need in the world and that reduces my fear of the future. I will be choosing other creative paths and walking on them here in the UK with my husband by my side for the foreseeable future, but I will still encounter obstacles and seeming impossibilties and I will still need to self-soothe and encourage myself. Now I know that storytelling is not only the end product of my creativity, it is the very beginning too.

I don’t know if preparation for grief is possible but I do know that I am no longer afraid of being unprepared because I have practised what to do when that happens. Moreover, I know from your comments and emails to me that the blocks and fears - the things that make us human and vulnerable - are the things that connect me most deeply to other people and remove the loneliness that fuels the fear. A fear of isolation, disconnectedness, of having no role, no impact. Of being useless. Even if we don’t create artefacts that directly speak to our struggles, if we let them drive our creativity, if we use the darkness to spark small things of light then others will be drawn to that glimmer and will come to stand alongside us.

This then is the true happy ending of this story. Not only the disappearance of cancer but the appearance of the community. The arrival of you into my life.

Shalom,

Helen