Giving Voice To Grief, A Journey of Love and Healing - Book Review

(Giving Voice to Grief is written by a local writer, under the pseudonym Penelope Pope. The writer chose to user a pseudonym because her daughter was not comfortable with being identified in the book)

“Giving Voice To Grief” began its long journey to becoming a published memoir as a journal that Penelope’s began to keep in the face of her late husband’s illness and eventually death. She continued to write it as she navigate s through the grief that consumed her life after his death, and found her path to a form of recovery and a new life.

“I wrote the journals because I was drawn to it. I had to write what I was thinking at those times, and I also was driven to write poetry as well. I decided to make it into a book and publish was done because I know how many people go through their own version of the same challenges, and I thought it might be helpful for some,” she told the Frontenac News.

Giving Voice to Grief, which is written in a direct, personal style with little or no pretense, begins with a description of the start of her husband Brian’s rather sudden decline in health.

The couple met in 1968, and had 50 years together. Starting in 2016, something had been wrong with Brian, but none of the appointments and tests that he had undergone had shown anything.

Until June 14, 2018, that is, when an ultrasound showed a mass in his liver. Penelope began her journal on that day.

The first section of the journal outlines what she experienced during the next two and a half months, until Biran’s death at the end of August, through Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID)

The book is immediately compelling, even as it is clear from the first sentence that Brian will die, and later that Penelope will suffer through painful and protracted grief and the loss of the identity she had spent 50 years of her life happily building.

The appeal of the book comes from its clarity and honesty, and lack of embellishment. The poetry that punctuates the book is similarly plaintive, if more guttural than the prose.

And the part of Brian’s illness and death is the easy part of the book. The void when he is gone is even harder to take, but that is what makes the book hard to put down.

On June 24, 2019, a year and ten days after the diagnoses that changed both of their lives, and just under ten months after Brian’s death, she wrote: “I am having trouble finding meaning in anything that used to be important. I can’t understand this flip flopping back and forth in my moods and thinking.”

On July 13, she wrote “I wake up every morning and I think of Brian. Instead of thinking about him less each day, I am thinking about him more. I think I should be letting him go, but …”

The poem she wrote a few days earlier ends with the lines “I am not OK/

I cry out, I am not OK/ I scream, I am not OK - I’M NOT OK! I’M NOT OK”

Slowly, as the book progresses, and with the help of her friends, and help from friends is a major theme that she explores throughout, she begins to realise that in order to move on she not only has to let Biran go, but has to discover herself. She sees that she had lost part of herself over the years of her marriage and now has an opportunity to bring that back

Giving Voice to Grief is a powerful read because it is an honest account of a particular experience, and is not sugar coated. Penelope slowly moves forward with her life, slowly learns what she is really all about. Penelope Pope will be promoting her book at the Sharbot Lake Farmer’s Market this Saturday, from am to 12noon