Grieving Author Writes Book to Son
Part One
By Luke Schmaltz, VOICES Newsletter Editor
For the artistically inclined, grief tends to land and expand in one’s chosen form of self-expression; musicians play, painters paint, and writers write. When author and artist Luna Jaffe lost her son, Hunter, she found ongoing connection, sanctuary, guidance, and healing through words and images.
The result was an extraordinary tome of prose, poetry, art, and insight entitled Look Mom, I Can Fly: Notes from the Wide Skies of Grieving My Only Child.
Most of the passages in Jaffe’s book are addressed to her son in a sequence of letters, diary-like entries, personal notes, and poems. Other sections include “journey” entries about meditations and visualizations. All are interspersed with Jaffe’s paintings of Hunter and photos of mandalas and earth altars on his grave. In the introduction, Jaffe writes, “The book you are holding is the record of my excruciating and transformational grief journey as it unfolded after Hunter died on August 28, 2020.”
Struggle and Loss
“My son was struggling with cannabis addiction,” Jaffe begins. “But I never had any fear that he was in a life-threatening situation. I simply did not see it that way. I also was not aware that he was utilizing codeine-based cough syrup. That’s what he overdosed on and died from. He had just returned from treatment for cannabis, and six days later he was dead. Not only was I shocked, but I was also dealing with profound shame and guilt.”
“I had a bit of a leg up – or an advantage – with grief because I had experienced the sudden death of my father when I was 31” Jaffe says. “That’s what began my journey of understanding grief, how to grieve, and how to honor grief. Then in 2016, my mother was diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). She was very conscious about dying. The situation introduced me to some incredible writers and teachers about grief. That enabled us to walk through the process of her death with awareness and consciousness.”
“Unlike cancer, where there is a lot of uncertainty based on what treatments could possibly reverse the situation, there is none of that with ALS. It is a death sentence. The advantage is that you have to face death rather than being torn between hope and despair. We had to say, ‘OK, you’re dying, how are we going to live that? The experience taught me a lot.”
Emotional Words
“When I started this book, I had a 30-year practice of writing every day,” Jaffe explains. “My stipulation is that it doesn’t matter what you write or how good it is, it just matters that you do it. Oftentimes, people judge themselves by thinking they are writing crap or just complaining.”
“To that notion, I always defer to something Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way encourages – the practice of writing morning pages – which I did for many years. In it, you simply dump out all the crap that is in your brain onto a piece of paper and then never look at it again. The purpose is not to make great art; the purpose is to clear your head.”
“My book came out of the fact that I had developed this deeply disciplined, daily practice of writing. Every day, I wrote letters to Hunter, I wrote raging posts on Facebook about how shitty and illiterate people are around grief. I said things like, ‘If one more person says I’M SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS, I am going to punch them in the throat.’”
“The reason I decided to arrange this book the way I did was because I was looking for books that could help me navigate grief and understand what I was going through. But none of the books I found were written in the moment of your day-to-day experience with grief. They were all written from a retrospective of several years after the fact, where an author is summarizing their memories of what they went through in those first couple of weeks after their person died.”
One Day at a Time
“Since I was writing every single day,” Jaffe continues, “This book allows the reader to experience everything I was thinking and going through from the day I buried Hunter, the day after, the Shiva practice we went through, how intensely excruciating yet comforting that experience was, as well as all of the difficulties due to the fact that this was in the middle of the pandemic. There was something horrific about standing at a grave, with everybody else so spread out, and feeling so alone.”
“I was committed to giving people a chronological experience of grief. For the first month, I did these exercises called journeys; I found a book entitled Where Did You Go. The author, Christina Rasmussen, explores a process of creating a visualization which helps you connect with your loved one on the other side.”
“Typically, I suck at visualizations. Interestingly enough, I was so broken open that I read her descriptions of how to implement the process, and I listened to a soundtrack accompaniment that goes with the book – it sounded like a shamanic drum. I would go into these visualizations, have the experience, and come back and write about it. I did it every day for four weeks and then I never did it again.”
“The truth of it, which is hard to get to, is that you have to arrive at a point of acceptance. One of the lessons that stands out to me was asking, ‘Why did this happen to me? Why did this happen to my child?’ – all those ‘why’ questions are so devastatingly unhelpful. It becomes like a torture device. It was important that I change those questions to, ‘What now?’ This realization came as part of my daily practice of writing.”
Secondary Loss
“One of the hardest parts of grief is that you lose people who are still alive,” Jaffe says. “You lose friends and family – people who don’t get it or don’t even want to try to get it. It becomes an irritant to be around people who won’t or can’t hold space for you.
“What doesn’t get talked about a lot is the grief of the secondary loss of the people whom you thought were close. Not only those who couldn’t show up for you, but also those who were unwilling to simply say, ‘I don’t know what to do, but I’m right here,’ Or ‘I don’t know what to say. I am probably going to say the wrong thing, but I’m right here.’”
“The other side of that is that people who I barely knew before Hunter died became very important to me. They could hold space for me while I was mired in the total shit show of it all. I found that fascinating but also very painful. I lost some dear friends, partially because I just wasn’t tolerant of someone who called themselves a friend but completely ghosted me.”
“I had friends whom I had been close to since high school, my oldest and longest standing friends who had been through so much with me. We used to meet every year, and we maintained all these connections, but when my son died they were just so absent. Finally, after a year, I wrote to them and said, ‘This is not what friendship is. If I can only be connected to you when my life is good, I don’t want that kind of friendship. Life is too short.’ I know that I didn’t do anything wrong. I was in a situation that people are really uncomfortable with.”
“One of the most painful things about losing a child is that there are so few people in our current environment who understand anything about it. It takes time to find those people who do understand. Thankfully, there are organizations like SADOD. Finding people and places where you can talk and be heard is vital.”
Gratitude and Change
“One of the themes in my book that someone who has lost a child will appreciate, is there are people who don’t know what to do and there are people who show up in a beautiful way,” Jaffe says. “The book contains plenty of expressions about the things I am grateful for as well as expressions about things that are undeniably painful.”
“Through the rewriting, editing, and recording of the audiobook process – every time I went through the book I discovered new layers of my own grief. I found it fascinating and it was such a gift. It became evident that, as I was writing every day, I kept focusing on what I was grateful for.”
“Part of the message in my book is that how I was coping with grief was going to keep evolving,” Jaffe concludes. “What suits your grief process is going to keep changing, but writing was the constant. Other creative expressions took different forms as my grief emerged.”
In Part Two of this story, Luna Jaffe shares more tools and resources for facing grief, the benefits of attending a grief retreat, and the therapeutic power of expressing grief through visual arts. Please stay tuned to the February issue of VOICES for the rest of the story. In the meantime, you can learn more about Look Mom I Can Fly here.