By Rita Malenczyk
My son Nick died by suicide four years ago; I've written and published several personal essays and poems about his death. One essay, about me trying to recover from the loss while teaching and writing a scholarly article (I'm an English professor), moves back and forth between my memories of Nick when he was alive and my actions in the present. The descriptions of my actions, Nick's death, and my memories of him are not outwardly emotional, though I do occasionally mention crying; for the most part I allow the actions to telegraph my feelings. Another essay, a flash piece, describes a trip a friend and I took to Italy a few months after Nick died, during which I try and fail to escape visions of his death. The thoughts themselves are minimized while my actions—exploring the Italian town where we stayed, eating local specialties at restaurants—are foregrounded; thoughts of Nick's death sometimes enter my head while at other times they remain at bay. The essay is, like the first, about moving through loss and grief while at the same time trying to function normally.
What interests me about my experience writing and submitting these two essays isn't their success—the first essay has been published while the second hasn't—but the range of reviewer responses. The first piece, which I submitted to one journal, had two reviewers. While the first reviewer felt that the essay effectively conveyed the composure I needed to maintain in order to get through life after tragedy, and that my restrained approach was a strength of the essay, the second said I should "go deeper" into what was already there. (I managed to convince the editor to leave the essay as it was, in accordance with the first reviewer's opinions.) The second piece, which I submitted to several outlets, was returned by one editor with a comment that turning it into something longer than a flash essay would allow me to, yet again, go deeper.
My response to these reviews is: Go deeper into what, exactly? And why?
I obviously can't know what goes on in any individual reader's head. But injunctions to say more—to express emotions more explicitly—are often puzzling to me.
I recently participated in a workshop in which one writer, a mother, wrote a beautiful and wrenching essay about her teenage son's mental health struggles and suicidal ideation. In this first draft she wrote mostly of what was happening in the present, her son's suicide attempts and her seeking treatment for him. I found the draft astonishing in the way her straightforward description of the events suggested the (metaphorical) clenched fists and fierce determination of a mother fighting for her child's life. In the second draft, however, the writer added interior thoughts about: how the child had been so loving during his pre-teenage, pre-illness years, how much she missed that part of him, how he had been her baby and now he was something else, how unsettled she was by the new person he had become. While the other workshop participants loved the revision, to me these additions, while I could sympathize with the writer's reasons for putting them in, diluted the considerable single-minded power of her first draft.
Here's where I say, "Maybe it's just me." To some extent these things are matters of taste, and that second (so-far-rejected) essay probably does need some revision. But I wonder about the legitimacy of telling someone who is writing about a horrific experience to "go deeper" and how, exactly, going deeper makes an essay better.
One could argue that writing about grief and loss benefits from restraint. Note, for example, what Rachel Dickinson does in The Loneliest Places, her memoir about her son's suicide. When writing about her son's wake, she describes not her emotions but what is happening around her. Dickinson writes, the funeral director gave her the guest book and
...told me this was the largest crowd he had ever seen during a three-hour period. Seven hundred and twenty-six people signed the guest book....Many of them had to wait in line for two hours on a dark, dreary, cold afternoon that turned into a dark, dreary, cold evening just to get inside the building. I stood—dressed in black and wearing dark glasses—at the end of the receiving line as far away as possible from Jack's closed coffin...
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In these sentences we see how the events one has to get through after a tragic death happen without our consent in spite of our profoundly altered universe. Dickinson's matter-of-fact description of the attendees at the wake, and the observation that she stood "as far away as possible" from her son's coffin, show her feelings of grief and the detachment she is forced to maintain to get through the evening.
I'm not arguing that restraint is the only way we should write about grief. Others have done it in other ways, and effectively. But I don't think "go deeper" is always wise advice to writers whose topic is sorrow and loss. There are excellent writers who would prefer not to reveal the depths of their psyches, but to write instead about how losing someone often brings us up short and renders us mute and silent—and about how that silence can keep our fragile selves centered in the world even as the world has changed around us.
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Rita Malenczyk is a writer, painter, and printmaker living and working in Connecticut. Her essays, poetry, and visual art have appeared in JMWW, Beyond Words, Cathexis Northwest Press, HeartWood, and elsewhere. She is professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University.
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