As I waited for the Toronto Courts to finalize my mutually-filed and straightforward divorce, I thought writing a novel based on my marriage was a good idea. By that time, I had done enough bad writing to know that my characters had to be three-dimensional, even the villain should have a past that garners empathy towards his actions. Later in life, my coaching experience will teach me that this is not merely a storytelling technique. It’s the absolute truth, except in the case of extreme cases like psychopaths.
So, I began by looking at the time we started dating at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. How we used to crave time with each other, how many classes we bunked, how I tasted my first Affogato with him at a cafe called The Barista, closer to the university. Our first movie together. How I had wolfed down Biriyani in his presence with not even a thread of self-consciousness. How I told everyone that we were different, like I had won the jackpot.
As you may already be intuiting, this novel wasn’t a good idea. I was too raw, too teary, too sticky. 60,000 words on my crashed love dreams was not a goal I could traverse towards at that time. This is still a faraway goal for me. But as a true-blue Capricorn, this is a mountain I will climb, one day.
In her memoir, Hear After, Amy Lin takes on the mountainous task of grieving for her late and young husband, who passed away unexpectedly while running a race. I’m not comparing our griefs; I don’t think any two griefs are comparable in any way. But she got the approach right: she writes in tiny chapters, just the way we can grieve big grief without collapsing out of everyday life, no matter how long it’s been since the loss.
There is no other way to grieve except for bite-sized grief. The book inspired this blog post series, which takes apart the grief echo system in my life and makes sense of it, one inch at a time.
I may not still be ready to write a novel based on my (first) marriage, but I sure can look at one aspect of it and grieve it.
Besides, there are many, many other griefs in my life, too. So, my grieving has to be an ongoing practice because by design, we lose little and big things every day, one inch at a time. When we don’t grieve at least in bite-sized fashion, we carry these losses along like cans of rotten meat.
