I didn’t think I had any role models for grief, but I gave it a good thought and I realized I have two: Sarah Mason and SJ (Susan) Hodges.
Sarah was married to a fella, Curtis, who I had had a very short relationship with before we realized that we were better off friends. Sarah and Curtis married in 2005 and he passed away in May of 2011. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury and spent something like a year in rehab, but he never was the same. There was a surgery that was performed to try and replace the missing part of his skull, but that surgery failed.
I have only met Sarah once or twice, and I honestly don’t recall much about the meetings. I think it was in passing when I might have run into Curtis at some point with her, but I really don’t recall those meetings at all. I had become friends with her on facebook prior to Curtis’ accident and then I had the opportunity to bear witness to everything that happened to Curtis after his accident and how she dealt with her grief and suffering over his decline and then death. On top of dealing with Curtis’ accident and everything that happened after, Sarah had their child, Andy, at home. I think Andy was maybe 3 or 4 when all this happened. Memory is foggy for me these days.
But what I remember the most about Sarah and her posts in the days and years that have followed the accident and Curtis’ death is the honesty with which she wrote about Curtis and their life together and how hard it was to see him in the condition he was in. She poured her heart out onto a blog that she also posted on facebook, and I was struck by the depth of honesty she approached her grief. It’s been 11 years since Curtis has passed, and she still writes about him on anniversaries and when posts come up in her facebook memories.
Sarah had a way of writing about her grief that honored Curtis, Andy and herself, and made whatever she wrote feel like it came from an almost holy place. And I felt lucky to be able to bear witness to her pain and grief. I know writing those posts and living those moments were not easy, but she made writing about it seem so easy. Based on writing about my own grief, I know it must not have been simple.
Susan has a similar way of writing about the grief that she and her daughter felt over the loss of her husband and CeCe’s father to brain cancer. Clayton, from what I have read, was an amazing human being and Susan and CeCe were so lucky to have him, but what a loss to suffer. Clayton died in 2019 after having brain cancer for a year, and Susan and CeCe relocated to Hawaii just before COVID hit in 2020. I haven’t met Susan–I found her on facebook through some theatre friends, and she sounded really cool. She was going to have a writing retreat in Hawaii but that ended up being canceled due to her mother’s health. I had hoped to attend, and if it happens in the future, perhaps I will actually get to meet her.
Susan is a professional writer; she and Clayton were in Los Angeles prior to his death. And her writing about Clayton had a white hot rage about it. And the same kind of honesty that Sarah had also written with, but there was something so blazing and angry about her writing. Her grief clearly stood in a storm and screamed, and she recorded everything that happened. It was an interesting contrast to the beauty I would see in her pictures and videos of their lives in Hawaii.
So I have been quite lucky to have such amazing women in my life to be my lodestars for my journey into grief, and I didn’t even realize it until I was given this prompt.
I hope I can do something similar with my grief–I hope I can give it the honesty and honor that they both gave theirs. I know that in the moments, nothing was easy for them, that nothing was as beautiful probably as their writing about it, but I feel honored to have been a witness to what they were experiencing.
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