Writing Through The Wreckage | Diary of a Grieving Mother

Note from Mary-Jo: This entry contains honest reflections on traumatic grief, emotional despair, and the aftermath of losing a child. While deeply personal, my hope is that these words help others feel less alone in the complicated reality of surviving loss.

Looking back, I see the pattern.

Hindsight’s 20/20, right?

During high school, I began writing after some life difficulties started unfolding. I wrote almost an entire book of poetry. I still have it, shelved on my office walls.

Then years later, at twenty-six, I had a total hysterectomy. It was either that or die, and I chose to live!

During those weeks of recovery, I felt this sort of grief, a painful loss that I wouldn't be able to have more children beyond Gabriel and Aidan. I started writing a fictional novel just to keep my mind occupied. It was a terrible start at a book, honestly. Not even sure whatever happened to it.

At thirty-one, I was a towed jumper in an Airborne exercise, and was momentarily stuck walking off the back of an aircraft.

That single moment left me with:

• a broken jaw,

• shattered teeth,

• permanent vertical and horizontal double vision,

• convergence/divergence palsy,

• brain damage with migraines,

• and a spine yanked hard enough to rip the muscles down my back.

  
  

Yeah… that was fun.

But during those months where I couldn’t tolerate light, sound, or even walk from my bed to the bathroom, I discovered something strange.

I could write.

It was the only thing I could do that didn’t cause pain. I could do it with my eyes closed, and somehow outputting information didn’t hurt my brain the way receiving info did. So I wrote.

Eventually, those real-life writings evolved into fictional novels: my Prisoner Trilogy.

For the first time in my life, I kept writing. And for the last fifteen years, it’s remained a form of therapy for me. An outlet. A release.

But now, in my forties, after the worst possible thing that could happen actually happened…

I stopped writing.

In those early weeks after traumatically losing my son, my fingers stopped typing altogether. Wild swings of insanity and despair left me lifeless, confused, and disbelieving.

I wanted to write.

I needed to write.

But I couldn’t hold a thought together long enough to form words. I sat staring at a blank white page as the dark of night turned to day.

Another day further from the last time I touched his hand, kissed his stubbly cheek. Called out to him from the stairs to get out of bed for work!

Minute after minute, hour after hour, memories from those hospital days replayed in my mind.

I couldn’t sleep because my brain repeated them over and over like a loop I couldn’t shut off.

Then one morning, I sat sobbing at my computer, and my fingers began talking for me.

I began writing every minute from the moment I got that phone call at 3:33 a.m.

“Mary-Jo? It’s Leslie. Aidan and Brandon were in an accident. They’re at UNC Chapel Hill Trauma ER. We’re about to head up there now.”

Those words, above all others, changed our lives forever.

It took me a week to write day one.

A month to write every second I could recall.

Every conversation.

Every emotion.

Every detail my mind refused to release.

I reread it constantly, adding more when forgotten moments surfaced like ghosts demanding attention.

I sobbed as I wrote, often unable to see through my tears while letters blurred into words across the screen.

And when I finally finished…

I collapsed into uncontrollable sobbing for hours.

This was real. It really happened.

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But after that, I began journaling.

Words poured onto the screen describing this impossible weight of loss crawling across every inch of my skin, my heart, my soul. I wrote about everything:

• the despair,

• the memories,

• trying to find his smell,

• the insanity of things I was doing,

• the thoughts I couldn’t escape,

• questions to God; how could this happen,

• guilt at not being able to save him,

• the desperate attempt to piece together what was left of me.

Writing helps.

It gives me somewhere to put the despair, the rage, the confusion, and even the beautiful memories.

Though sometimes even those memories become nightmares when I remember there will never be new ones again.

Some of my writings describe pure moments of insanity. Moments I couldn’t share. Not yet.

Nine months later, I recognize grief doesn’t move in stages the way people describe.

At least mine doesn’t.

Mine feels like a tangled mass living inside my soul.

Minute to minute is still where I exist most days.

A great deal of my time is spent trying to avoid my own mind altogether. I bury myself in physical labor so I can focus only on the task in front of me.

And during those moments, my mind can almost pretend.

Pretend Aidan is still out on a landscaping job. Or out with friends. Or simply busy.

But then I’ll catch myself thinking:

“I’ll call Aidan and see if he can drop a load of stone off…”

And it’s like being physically struck.

I flinch from the pain as recognition crashes back over me.

I can’t.

I can never do that again.

And I’m broken.

I visit him every day in the fields of Broadway.

Sun or rain. Cold or the heat of Hades. I go.

It’s the only place I can feel my emotions without judgment.

I can talk to him without witnesses wondering if I’m insane.

I can rage. I can scream. And my voice simply disappears into the wind.

Most days, I feel like I’m faking my way through life.

Showing levity where I feel empty. Speaking positivity while internally feeling like the world is crumbling beneath me.

One foot in the present, my body still living in the day I lost him. Each smile or laugh counteracted with grief and guilt yanking at me from the back of my mind.

But I know what Aidan would want from me.

Or at least I think I do.

So I try to follow that path the best I can.

Finding moments to smile. To laugh. To be silly in ways I know he would’ve been if he were still here.

And maybe one day…

One day…

I’ll find the strength for those moments to feel genuine again.

—Mary-Jo

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From the pages of Diary of a Grieving Mother