Nora Zilkie is completing the Master of Arts–Integrated Studies program at Athabasca University. She began her undergraduate studies at Arctic College in Yellowknife, NWT, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in writing from the University of Victoria in British Columbia. She currently resides in Sooke, B.C.

Introduction

In Poetry in Healthcare Settings, Diana Hedges (2005) states that “creating something—a poem, a picture, writing down your thoughts in a journal—strengthens your sense of identity at a time when you may feel you are losing it” (p.108). As I reflect on the major transitions in my life that have caused emotional blocks, I see that one of the things that has helped me cope with difficult circumstances is writing. Supportive friends and family have provided me with the social milieu I need; however, when I am alone, and thinking, writing out feelings by journaling or poetry writing has been a creative process invaluable for release and a kind of letting go. I remember who I am and regain a measure of strength.

Talking and writing about experiences forces some kind of structure to the experiences themselves. In Emotion, Disclosure, & Health, Pennebaker (2007) writes about this and says:

through language individuals are able to organize, structure, and ultimately assimilate both their emotional experiences and the events that may have provoked the emotions… talking both reflects and reduces anxiety… repeated disclosure over time gradually promotes the assimilation of the upsetting event, [and] brings about striking reductions in blood pressure, muscle tension, and skin conductance during or immediately after the disclosure (p.5).

The personal experience of talking and writing about trauma has contributed to my ongoing physical and psychological health.

A Chapter about a Northern Town

Life does not really have a beginning, middle and end…
that is the prerogative of literature, stories of experience… (Bolton, 2010, p.43)

I lived in the Northwest Territories for most of my adult life. I moved up there when I was single and 20, and left when I was 70. I love the north still, but it is a very difficult place to live as a widow, because of the extreme climate. One dark night I wrote this:

Leaving the north proved to be a hard thing to do, and to settle my mind I wrote about the things I wanted to remember. Bolton (2010) says of this, “writing a story or a poem is organic, synthesising elements from life’s muddles, weaving them to create a coherent communicating artefact” (p.75). The isolation of the Northwest Territories meant traveling long distances to visit friends and family and reach “civilization.”

When my sister and I drove that long stretch between Fort Providence and Yellowknife, we had to keep a sharp eye out for wood buffalo. They had free run of the area and the males were often aggressive. They were frequently on the road and hard to move off. We dreaded spotting them.

Driving back to Yellowknife, soon after spring break-up on the Mackenzie River, meant crossing on the Johnny Berens ferry.

In the text Writing & Healing, Anderson and MacCurdy (2010) report that psychologists Larry Dossey, Thomas Moore and John Bradshaw all identify writing as the single most effective therapeutic tool for healing. They further state that “translating events through writing affects the way we organize and encode experience in the mind, changing the memory of it and allowing us to more readily assimilate the experience and set it aside” (p.342). By writing about various events and reliving the feelings, I manage to use poetry as a fixative in memory and then move on.

My mother, Jenny, came to live with me in the Northwest Territories after the death of my father. She lived with me until her death in 1990. We had a happy relationship and everyone deserves to have someone like her in their life. She believed in me and trusted me. However, she refused to talk about her early life and her family. After her death, I got in touch with her youngest sister, Jessie, now the only remaining member of her family of origin. I suggested we take a trip together, and I hoped to find out more about the family. Jessie and I took a long bus trip across Canada and the southern United States and back. When I tried to get her to tell me about family history she would change the subject and say something like “Let’s talk about food” or “I taught school for 44 years and would still be teaching except I wanted to let a young person have the opportunity.” Once, at the end of the trip, she said, “When we go up North to play [she was in a band], the guys say ‘it gets pretty dark up there,’ and I feel bad.” She knew that I knew they were referring to ‘Indians.’ I wrote this after I got back home—about one leg of the trip, just outside of Yellowknife:

A Chapter Regarding Parental Loss

We learn about our culture by story, from history books to the news or bedtime reading.
Stories tell us how to see our place in society and its place around us, telling us what to expect of each other and ourselves, and enable us to communicate meanings, insights and articulate complexities. (Bolton, 2010, p.203)

A family story is one we treasure because it explains who we are. By constructing family stories out of experience we splice together the phenomena of our own existence. In Reflective Practice, Gillie Bolton (2010) writes that “a story is an attempt to create order out of a chaotic world, strong stories have unique power to make sense of issues. Stories penetrate human understanding more deeply than the intellect: they engage feelings” (p.9). The death of a parent is a world of loss to the child and leaves unanswered questions for life.

Our father, Lars, immigrated to Canada from Norway in 1930. After traveling across the United States and Canada, he ended up in a small town in the prairies called Robin Hood, where our parents met. Our mother, Jenny, was teaching school there and stayed at the boarding house our father visited while looking for a distant cousin. She was Cree on the maternal side; my four siblings and I are Métis. This poem was written to echo my feelings about being Métis, for my mother:

For my father, a poem on my “maiden name”:

When I wrote the following poem I was thinking of family dynamics—the changes, gains and losses, illness and death, and how they affect our relationships.

*The slow change in direction of Earth’s axis of rotation: one cycle takes nearly 26,000 years, or one Platonic year.

In Reflective Practice, Bolton (2010) continues: “the narratives we tell and write are perspectival, values and understanding can be widened and deepened…a creative leap is required to support this perspective, and the effective ability to mix tacit knowledge with evidence based or explicit knowledge” (p.16). These samples of what I have written are part of the mechanism of poetry I have used to cope with the deaths of irreplaceable people in my life.

A Chapter Describing a Marriage

There is a process within the experience of loss that impels people to follow some path of change. Things can never stay the same. (Hedges, 2005, p.114)

In Poetry in Healthcare Settings, Diana Hedges (2005) discusses the use of writing in healing, and states:

there are plausible physiological reasons for thinking that the calming effect of the literary arts and especially poetry, is related to an interplay between the left and the right cerebral hemispheres of the brain: the left hemisphere analyses and responds to language, the right visualizes images and responds to rhythm. This interplay could activate the limbic system at the base of the brain where thought meets emotion (p.119).

Writing of the loss of my marriage, which was due to the death of my spouse, turned into an exercise of imagining a picture of achievement rather than defeat. A word picture reflecting the beauty, harmony and movement of the stars developed to help me cope with bereavement.

In keeping with this imagery, binary stars are fascinating to me, and a study of them made me want to relate them to something I understood, or had a kind of grasp of: our marriage.

I was married for forty-three years. It was a successful and happy marriage; one of my sisters says it was a marriage made in heaven. I don’t know about that. What I do know is that it was very hard work because we were so very different.

In his preface to Emotion, Disclosure, & Health, Pennebaker (2007) asks, “why does translating an event into language affect physical and psychological health?” (p.xiii). He responds by explaining that “an important nonspecific feature of therapy is that it allows individuals to translate their experience into words” (p.3). I have found that translating what has happened to me into the form of poetry releases built-up tension and anxiety and provides emotional relief.

A Chapter Concerning a Man’s Death

…it is through the concept of oral medicine, a “writing cure” to paraphrase Freud, and the words of that process that we begin to reconnect. (Wilentz, 2000, p.170)

It took two and a half years in the final stages of my husband’s terminal illness for him to succumb. He died quietly, with no complaint of pain—but it was torturous for me. It took a long time for me to begin to want to live again in any normal semblance of order without that spectre hanging over me. I had to withdraw from the continued round of friends and well-wishers visiting in consolation. Eventually, I managed to order my day around reading and thinking about writing. Pennebaker (2007) states that “disclosure of traumatic and emotional experience can promote physical and psychological health. The underlying mechanisms for this phenomenon are cognitive, emotional, biological and social” (p.8). I talked it out and then I had to write it out:

He was getting weaker each day and I wrote about an incident that happened while he was becoming too weak to get up:

When I think of these things, memories keep flooding back. How difficult the last year of life was in the north. I would remember the horror of watching a strong, healthy man gradually waste away, becoming weaker with each passing day, and the inevitable decline to that “long-lasting house”¹ of death.

*from Beowulf

Rita Charon (2006), in the chapter “Telling One’s Life,” writes of narratives, or pathographies as they are sometimes called, that demonstrate how critical it is to tell of pain and suffering. The process of telling enables patients to give voice to what they endure and to frame illness so as to escape dominion by it.

Without the narrative act of telling and being heard, the patient cannot convey to anyone else—or to the self—what he or she is going through. More radically and perhaps equally true, without these narrative acts, the patient cannot himself or herself grasp what the events of the illness mean (pp.65-66).

This proved true for me, for it was only on reflection and writing that I could come to terms with the enormity, scope and severity of events. The moods of guilt as survivor, helplessness to stop what was happening, and resultant vulnerability could only be addressed by meditation and, later, expression.

¹from Ecclesiastes 12:5

A Chapter of My Two Sons’ Deaths

Our bodies are texts…clerking the records of what we have been through,
hoarding evidence of past hurts, remembering as only bodies can the corporeal stabilities
that keep us alive. (Charon, 2006, p.122)

On National Public Radio this morning, they played a poem called “Spring” by Ted Kooser that has been set to music by Maria Schroeder and sung by Dawn Upshaw. It has the lines “Spring, and the sky ripples with geese/the pond still numb from months of ice…” It is spring now, but it reminded me of that fall—we were driving to Blackfoot, Alberta, to identify my son’s body. We stopped for gas in some little town. As we waited, I looked up and saw wave after wave of geese flying south. No one was interested. A few years earlier, one fall, we had taken my son to Oak Hammock Marsh, north of Winnipeg, to see the major continental flyway for geese in Canada where they fly over for hours and days on their way south—one of the signs in nature that marks significant events. Later, I wrote this:

It has been said that the death of one’s child is the worst, the most painful loss that a human can face, and I have had to face it twice. Survivors need to tell their stories in order to survive. According to Anderson and MacCurdy (2000):

By writing about traumatic experiences, the dual possibilities of permanence and revision, the chief healing effect of writing is thus to recover and exert a measure of control over that which we can never control—the past. As we manipulate the words on the page, as we articulate to ourselves and to others the emotional truth of our pasts, we become agents for our own healing (pp.6-7).

I had two sons, both of them are dead now. Each was killed in an accident several years apart. The biblical story of Rizpah motivated this poem as I imagined her agony, reflected in my own:

*Rizpah, one of the concubines of King Saul of Israel; 1 Samuel 21:1-10

For KGZ:

For DZ:

Anne Hunsaker Hawkins (2000), in Pathography and Enabling Myths: The Process of Healing, writes:

the very act of writing about one’s illness experience seems to be an integral part of an individual’s healing process…the need to come to terms with a traumatic experience often involves the need to project it outwards—to talk or write about it; writing about an experience—any experience—inevitably changes it…these are things that enable human beings not only to live through severe illness or the death of a loved one but also to live beyond them… (pp.224-232).

Living beyond such losses seems insurmountable, but it can be done—with faith, family and friends, and a supportive writing practice. I know because that is what has happened to me, and I think I have heard…

Conclusion

Writing of the helpfulness of poetry in the healthcare setting, Diana Hedges (2005) says, “paradoxically, writing gives us the chance to both go towards the self, and to escape from it” (p.109). She explains that when we use writing for healing we “find places where we have been happy and confident—whole—and re-visiting those places as they have been experienced becomes an important part of the work” (p.113).

This work has been described by many writers in the course material for MAIS 621 (Narrative Possibilities: The Transformative Power of Writing, Story and Poetry in Personal and Professional Development)—Byron Katie (2002), Gillie Bolton (2010), and others. Each has provided necessary and practical information for use in assisting one towards resolution of the emotional turmoil that results from trauma in one form or another. Practical application of their suggestions does help one work toward regaining emotional stability and restoring inner peace.

References

Anderson, C. M., & MacCurdy, M. M. (Eds.). (2000). Writing & Healing: Toward an Informed Practice. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Bolton, G. (2010). Reflective Practice: Writing and Professional Development (3rd ed.). London, UK: Sage Publications Ltd.

Charon, R. (2006). Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. London, UK: Oxford University Press.

Hedges, D. (2005). Poetry in Healthcare Settings: Poetry, Therapy and Emotional Life. London, UK: Radcliffe Publishing.

Hawkins, A. H. (2000). Pathography and Enabling Myths: The Process of Healing. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Katie, Byron. (2002). Loving What Is: Four questions that can change your life. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press.

Pennebaker, J. W. (2007). Emotion, Disclosure, & Health. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Wilentz, G. (2000). Healing Narratives: Women Writers Curing Cultural Dis-ease. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.