GRIEF HAS A LONG TAIL: Dealing with Loss, Trauma, Friendship, Love, and Joy Through Storytelling

At the age of five, my eldest son was diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. He was smart and good-natured with a distinctive sense of humor but the world often rubbed him the wrong way. When it was all too much for him, he had epic tantrums. His grandfather, my dad, was the picture of patience with his first grandson. He was a storyteller and would tell my son just the right story at just the right moment, turning an afternoon’s melt down into laughter. One of my son’s favorites was the joke my dad told about Henry, the boy with the golden bellybutton. Henry, like my son, was different from the other boys-- but that was okay because if you took a good look at that golden bellybutton, you would see that it gave off a pretty spectacular glow!  

When my father died, I decided to write a memoir about his tender relationship with my son. I needed a record of the way they had been together. That was the beginning of my new novel due out from Abrams this April: THE GIRL WITH MORE THAN ONE HEART. At that point in time there was no girl. And the only heart in the story was my own, which was grieving for the loss of my dad. 

My wonderful editor, Tamar Brazis read the book at that early stage. It made her cry. She encouraged me to turn it into a novel. I hadn’t a clue how to do that or where to start. My last novel, SIGN OF THE QIN had been a fantasy.  I didn’t know how to write a story with characters so close to home. So I put it aside for awhile. 

On the anniversary of my dad’s death, I couldn’t sleep. At three in the morning, I sat down at my desk and wrote: 

“The day my father’s heart stopped I discovered an extra heart deep in my belly below my right rib. It talked to me. I wasn’t crazy. Before that day, I had just one heart that never said a word.” 

Suddenly, there was Briana, the heroine of my story. She was thirteen years old, a budding writer who, like me, needed to channel her talents and imagination to get through a crisis—the death of her dad, her favorite parent. She had a little brother on the spectrum prone to tantrums. And yes, she had a Grandpa Ben who resembled my father. 

In THE GIRL WITH MORE THAN ONE HEART, Briana navigates her way through a family crisis by writing what’s in her heart. We all need help making sense of what our hearts say to us during a time of sorrow. Briana imagines that she has an extra heart that speaks to her in her dad’s voice. It gives her some mysterious commands like “Find her” and “Be Your Own.” In the process of working out what those directives mean she starts to find and trust her own voice.  

My hope is that my book will help those who feel alone after a crisis of loss discover their true friends, their voices, and the power to tell their own stories. 

For the past two years I’ve been a mentor at Girls Write Now, a non-profit organization that helps girls from under-resourced schools and neighborhoods tell their stories, I’ve been moved, sometimes to tears, while listening to what the talented young women at Girls Write Now have to say about their lives. 

Today more than ever, young people are on the front lines, witnesses to a world filled with tragedy and loss. The news demands that children and teens deal daily with grief and loss. As parents and teachers, as writers and artists, as humans, we need to help our kids make it through. 

America wept and cheered to hear 11 year old Naomi Wadler rise and speak to a crowd of hundreds of thousands during the #March for our Lives in our nation’s capitol. She spoke about death, about determination, about resilience. “I urge everyone here and everyone who hears my voice to join me in telling the stories that aren’t told,” she said. 

To help my mentees and my students tell their stories, I developed in partnership with First Book and Abrams,  a #Be Your Own teen writing workshop with prompts based on my book. Here’s one of those stories:

Saradine Nazaire came to the United States from Haiti in 2010, after an earthquake had destroyed her home. She and her little brother were buried under rubble and rescued by neighbors. She was nine years old at the time. 

One of Saradine’s goals when she joined Girls Write Now was to write about the day of the earthquake. She had started to tell the story many times, and just as many times had stopped. 

“It amuses me when people say goodbye, sometimes they say: ‘there’s always tomorrow,’ she said at the end of one of our weekly meetings. She didn’t look the least bit amused.  “It’s such a cliché.” 

“Why does it amuse you?” I asked. 

 “In a sense,” she explained, “We all have the possibility of seeing tomorrow. But tomorrow represents that which has not yet come. We can’t prepare for it. We must, but we can’t. Tomorrow isn’t yours or mine. You and I can’t count on it. Nobody can count on a tomorrow.” 
I showed Saradine some of the writing prompts from my “Be Your Own!” workshop. “GRIEF HAS A LONG TAIL,” she read. “If grief were an animal, how would you describe it? How about other emotions? Joy? Fear? Write a paragraph that describes an emotion as an animal.” 

Saradine picked up a second prompt card: “ SAY GOODBYE: Write a paragraph or a page on the theme of saying goodbye to someone or something you love—a parent, a friend, a pet, a place.” 

“You could write about saying goodbye to Haiti,” I suggested. She nodded, and read the next: “ HURRICANE: … After her father’s death, Briana thinks about other catastrophes—crumbling buildings, highways caving in, trees toppling, hurricanes and tornadoes. Write about a disaster, imagined or real, as if you were in the middle of it. Or write about it as if it happened a long time ago.” 

Saradine wrote the story she had started to tell many times. She wrote about January 12, 2010, the day when “every part of my life that was stable and familiar crumbled around me.” Like Naomi Wadler, she told her story in a strong voice. Hearing it, I could picture her experience that day. I could picture her , a nine year old girl, crouching under the fallen bricks of her home “like a frog before taking a leap.” I could hear her calling out to her little brother. I could hear them praying. Saradine took me there with the power of her words. 

She called the piece “Tomorrow: ” It will be published by Dutton this Spring in Generation F, Girls Write Now’s 2018 Anthology.   Please take a moment to listen: 

Not all the prompts in my #Be Your Own workshop are about grief. Most are emotionally open-ended (STARRY BALL; GREEN EYE/ BROWN EYE; LIGHTS ALIVE, CLOTHESPIN ANGELS etc.)

Some are romantic (FIRST KISS; BEAUTIFUL IS A NAME HE CALLED ME.)

I like to think there’s at least one just right prompt in the deck of 30 cards for everyone -- like my father’s just right stories for my son.

This Spring and Fall when THE GIRL WITH MORE THAN ONE HEART finds its way to preteens and teens across the country, I’ll be traveling with it, talking about my book and offering my #Be Your Own writing workshop to young people who need and want to tell their own stories. 

Write Now! is a motto I’ve had taped to my mirror since 2008 when I left my job as the publisher of Laura Geringer Books, HarperCollins and became a writer full-time. I hadn’t yet heard Briana’s “dad heart” telling her to “Be Your Own!” but it didn’t surprise me when I first heard that voice in my head.

It’s such a privilege to join now with my publisher, Abrams  and with First Book, the award-winning organization that has delivered over 170 million  books to children in need in an effort to deliver a Be Your Own! message of empowerment to young people all over America who sometimes need that one suggestion, that one small nudge, that one brief prompt to help them tell what needs to be told.  

For more writing prompts from my Be Your Own! Workshop, write to me at CONTACT LAURA.