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Recently the folks who have guest posted here have one thing in common: writing has helped them navigate pain. Brenda Boitson is no different. I met Brenda on Twitter, and then eventually in real life at Square One Coffee. Her husband died on October 28, 2008 due to a rare Angiosarcoma tumor when she was 24 and he was 36. Today she shares her reasons for writing with us.

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When I was “trapped” in the hospital at Johns Hopkins while Kevin was being treated for cancer, I was going stir crazy.  I was used to being in social environments, not stuck in a disinfected room, only able to talk to doctors, nurses and specialists.  I began the blog to not only keep everyone up to date on my late husband’s health, but to keep me connected with a world in which I had been cut off.

After Kevin died, I found myself unable to be in large groups.  I became claustrophobic to an extent, and I dreaded answering the phone.  I would text friends and send emails, but I did not want to talk to anyone.  It was too difficult.  So instead, I wrote.  When it was 2 am, I would get on my computer and just type out my feelings on my blog.  Sometimes I felt as if I was over-sharing, but I didn’t feel I could share these thoughts with anyone specifically, so I typed them to whoever cared to read.  I didn’t want to wake up my sleeping parents downstairs to bawl when I felt these deep emotions.  Frankly, I wanted to be alone in my grief, but I still needed a way to speak out.

It occurred to me, not quite a year after losing Kevin, and after I began becoming more involved on various social media platforms, that writing, whether it be a blog, tweet, or facebook status, allowed me to connect to the outside world.  If I didn’t want to deal with the feedback, it was a safe way to connect.  People had shared, in person, things that I didn’t want to hear.  I heard about their stories of grief and loss, their comparisons on my loss and theirs, and I knew if I heard another platitude, I was going to hurt someone.  If my friends wanted to reply to me, they could, and I could delete it, or ignore it.  Or I could reply back because it was something that I was ready and willing to accept.

Writing was and is my venting outlet.  Over the past 2.5 years that I’ve been actively blogging, I have diminished the content that I share with my audience, and I am hoping to change that.  I want to be real with my readers, but mostly, I want to speak the truth to others who are grieving.  I want and need to share my experiences with them, however intimate and intimidating they may be.  Writing has given me freedom, which is something that often fails me when I speak.  I become flustered when I speak: I choose the wrong words, and sometimes I make situations worse by speaking.  With writing, I can review what I am going to say, and weed out what I want my audience to be able to understand.

I do believe that if I was not able to write what I was feeling, I would still be in my old bedroom at my parents’ place, unable to connect with the outside world.  Writing was initially a safe place for me to reintroduce myself to society as a widow.  Now, as I adjust my roles and work to becoming Brenda again, instead of just a widow, I can write about those transitions and brace myself and the world for the new me.

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Check out Brenda’s blog (www.crazywidow.info) and follow her on Twitter @crazywidow.

The other day I was innocently driving along when suddenly I realized I had been arguing with someone in my mind over something that happened about a year ago, something I never brought up with them and never planned on bringing up. I was really letting them have it, and in my mind I felt vindicated because they were finally feeling terrible for the way they treated me.

I am a very, very disturbed individual.

Do you spend as much time as I do thinking about the future, reflecting on a recent rejection, regretting something said (or written) the day before, or wishing things could be just a little bit different?

If the brainwaves in your noggin are as overactive as mine, check out Henri Nouwen’s thoughts on thought and prayer:

Our minds are always active. We analyze, reflect, daydream, or dream. There is not a moment during the day or night when we are not thinking. You might say our thinking is “unceasing.” Sometimes we wish that we could stop thinking for a while; that would save us from many worries, guilt feelings, and fears. Our ability to think is our greatest gift, but it is also the source of our greatest pain. Do we have to become victims of our unceasing thoughts? No, we can convert our unceasing thinking into unceasing prayer by making our inner monologue into a continuing dialogue with our God, who is the source of all love.

Let’s break out of our isolation and realize that Someone who dwells in the center of our beings wants to listen with love to all that occupies and preoccupies our minds.

Join us this week at The Red as we talk about prayer.

The hallway is short: when I sit down, with my back against the strip of wall separating two bedroom doors, my feet stretch to the end of it.

To my right, an opened door. The bathroom. The sounds of splashing water: our youngest two children, nearly 3 and 18 months, giggle and dump water on each other’s heads. They suck on wash cloths. They stand up, then slip with that squeaking skin-on-plastic sound and fall and cry for a moment. They drink the water. I tell them not to. Then they play again.

Jon Foreman’s voice sings to me from my iPod in the next room:

I’m not sure why it always goes downhill
Why broken cisterns never could stay filled
I’ve spent ten years singing gravity away
But the water keeps on falling from the sky

And here tonight while the stars are blacking out
With every hope and dream I’ve ever had in doubt
I’ve spent ten years trying to sing these doubts away
But the water keeps on falling from my eyes

I pick up my book: Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down. It’s the first novel I’ve opened this year, who am I kidding, the first for a long time, and it feels good. It’s one of those fancy “Library of America” volumes, my favorite kind, with the sleek black dust jacket, the thin, heavy paper. And it’s a compilation, so I have Cannery Row, The Pearl and East of Eden to look forward to (even though I’ve read East of Eden four or five times, it’s my favorite book of all time to I’ll probably read it again when I get there, at the end of all the new things).

Steinbeck can say so much, with so little.

By ten-forty-five it was all over. The town was occupied, the defenders defeated, and the war finished. The invader had prepared for this campaign as carefully as he had for larger ones…

And from the other room, John Foreman.

And heaven knows, heaven knows
I tried to find a cure for the pain
Oh my Lord, to suffer like You do
It would be a lie to run away

***so as not to confuse anyone who knows my children, the picture is actually of our older two, when they were younger. How time flies.

Today I’m guest posting over at Janet Oberholtzer’s blog. It’s a post about prison, Andy Dufresne, and how spending time each day doing just one thing you love might set you free. But now Into the Heart of a City…

The National Rail trains from Wendover into London mostly had plush, cloth seats and white lighting. The people traveling in them wore suits and  ambivalent expressions. There was a smoothness to those trains as they cut through the English countryside and eased safely against the outer edges of the city.

But the tube trains, which we caught in Amersham (one stop closer to London), had yellow lighting, and the cracked vinyl seats oozed white, scratchy stuffing. The floors were stained, and at 5:45 in the morning most of the inhabitants were drunk or homeless. These tube trains limped along, clicking and clacking on tracks that, once in the city, vanished into the soot-filled underground.

Once, after living in the city for two weeks during a store’s grand-opening, we emerged into the countryside, amazed at the green, living smell in the air as well as the black mucus we coughed up for a week.

My train-ride into London during the early days of our business involved waking at 5:00am, showering, and driving twelve minutes to Amersham so that I could catch the 5:42 to Baker Street. I found a place on a side street where I could park without paying. I slept on that train every morning but only missed my stop a few times. It was a cold, ratchety, Inception-like experience.

At Baker Street I changed from the Metropolitan to the Bakerloo lines, traveled two stops south and changed again, this time boarding the Victoria Line at Oxford Circus. I was still mostly asleep, but walking. Two more stops to the south and I reached my final destination.

Victoria Station, even at 6:30 in the morning, heaved with people. Trains came and went, spewing their humans like blood being pumped into the heart of the city.

A warm breeze whipped up the stairwells from the tube to the street, smelling mostly of diesel fuel and urine. Pigeons strutted everywhere on their disfigured legs, some so twisted that they literally walked on the tops of their feet (I always imagined this resulted from their determination to perch on power lines and third rails, but I have no proof of this).

They fought over any crumb or bit of food dropped by the passengers, angrily flapping their wings at one another, their necks jerking and snapping to tear the morsel. Then, if someone approached, they rose up in a cloud of feathers and dust, up, up, up into the old iron rafters where they settled and stared.

My brother-in-law referred to the pigeons as rats with wings.

Given just as much attention by the travelers were the people discarded by the city, hoarding their own warm corners of the otherwise freezing cement and rock and brick. They stared in one direction, vacant looks, assuming the world held nothing more for them. Some had small tin cups or mugs or hats or instrument cases in front of them, littered with coins and the occasional five-pound note. They were worse off than the pigeons, who at least had wings, and hope.

Sometimes, at night, when we had leftover soft pretzels, we’d take them out to these people without wings. The prospect of food brought them out of nowhere, like spirits emerging from every crook and cranny, ever skinny alley and grated stairwell. They pounded their fingerless-glove covered hands together like muffled cymbals, smiled their toothless grins, held out eager hands. Their shoulders, clenched up around their ears in the cold, poked against thin coats.

They were amazed that someone had remembered them. I guess just being thought of, even by a stranger in a baseball cap carrying an American accent, has a way of stirring your soul.

“Thanks, mate,” they said, half a cinnamon-sugar pretzel already clogging their mouth. Walking away, they brandished the bag of pretzels over their head, shouting to their buddies. “Free pretzels!” followed by a choking laugh. Back into the shadows.

Such a small offering. Nothing really, just a bit of sweet dough.

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You can check out other posts about our time in England HERE.

Currently I live on two acres of Paradise. Literally – my town is called Paradise, zip code 17562. My views are unobstructed by man-made objects: to the north, a horse pasture; to the east, a grove of trees; to the south, a forest-covered hill, to the west, grass and some more trees (and a long stone lane which is, technically, man-arranged, but the stones are 100% earth).

Sometimes I crave the close confines of a city. Here are a country-dweller’s top 10 reasons for living in the city (feel free to correct my naivete in the comments section below):

1 – Walking is underrated. Living in the city would mean I could walk just about anywhere that I needed to go.

2 – Cars are overrated. See #1.

3 – Cities are generally 2-3 degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside (yes, right now it is winter – this may not be a benefit in the summer months).

4 – The guy in the coffee shop who has no good reason to be there. Which is, of course, the best reason of all to be in a coffee shop.

5 – Usually people in the cities are the ones that survive all the big disasters and end-of-the-world type catastrophes. At least, that’s what happens in the movies.

6 – I like getting lost in crowds of people and the feeling that I am connected to this mass of humanity.

7 – Manhole covers.

8 – Trees that spring up in the midst of sidewalks, growing out of four square feet of soil.

9 – Door buzzers, to which the person in the corresponding room says, “Yeah?” and you say, “It’s George,” and they respond, “C’mon up.”

10 – Using a broom handle to poke the ceiling, conveying the message to your neighbors upstairs that they need to keep it down.

So, city folks, what am I missing? We’re not going anywhere anytime soon, but you could try to change my mind…

Today’s guest post is brought to you by Andi Cumbo, a great writer and even better friend. Enjoy.

Grief. I don’t even really know what that word means. Before, I always used it to explain people’s odd behaviors in times of loss – sleeping ten hours a night; losing patience at an apparent nothing; times of blaring, deep silence. Yet, I didn’t really know what I was saying. How could I?

Apparently, this is a time of grief for me. My mom died, at the age of 63, on Thanksgiving Day. Not even two months ago. She was sick for three months with this bout of metastatic melanoma, but she carried the cancer around in her body and, I think, her mind for more than 36 years, since the year before I was born. In some sense, then, I had lived with the potential for grief for years.

Then, it bowled me over. It began before Mom died when she could no longer communicate. When her words passed away, my relationship to her seemed to die also. All I had wanted was more time.

Yet, all I had were words, so I started to write . . . just little snippets for my blog, at night when the house got quieter and most everyone else was sleeping or doing a puzzle or staring into space as we were all wont to do. I would write about the thing that had gutted me most that day – Mom’s lavender eyeglasses that she rarely got to wear, the way people’s kindness warmed my spirit, how Mom’s whispers reached my ears – and I could get through that day.

People – particularly my parents’ friends – would read my words and take comfort or find tears. They would tell me they appreciated my gift, my words, and I would take strength from their own language. We slogged through together.

I still can’t define grief, even in the midst of it, maybe especially in the midst of it. But each day, I define my experience of it that day through my blog or in my journal or in the book I’ve started about Mom. Each day I pull a tiny pebble of the pain out into the light, and I write it into a gemstone (or at least I try.) There’s a massive pile of rock to take from, a cairn of grief that I will never disassemble. Yet each day, word by word, I add a piece of glory back into the cairn, a ruby of words, a sapphire of language to try to transform the darkness of grief into the light that was my mom’s life.

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Andi Cumbo is a writer and writing teaching who blogs at http://www.andilit.com. Currently, she is working on a book about, well, she’s not sure yet. She lives with her patron saint, her dad, who has graciously taken her in so that she can write and grieve.