We all deal with grief in different ways. Some of us bury it, although it tends to pop back up at unexpected moments. Some of us chart our way religiously through the five stages of grief delineated by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, from denial through acceptance. Some of us write about it.
Writing is the tool that has best served Greenfield native Gary Greene. Greene’s wife, Jean Fielding, died in 2018. He had done odds and ends of writing before then for work and as an English minor in college. Still, he had never immersed himself in writing as he has since the death of his wife.
His new book, “The Lonely Years: Exploring Grief Through Poetry” (Kelsay Books, 152 pages, $23) is a product of that immersion. It follows his earlier book, “Poems in a Time of Grief.”
I interviewed Greene last week and asked him how he started writing the poems. He explained that he began seeing a grief therapist after his wife’s death. As Memorial Day approached, the therapist asked whether he had a plan for “getting through” the holiday weekend.
Greene was not concerned about formulating such a plan … but then a fresh inundation of loss hit him over the weekend.
“It was a very, very difficult weekend for me in terms of grief,” he recalled. “I sat down and wrote a poem.”
He brought the poem to his next therapy session … and kept bringing poems to future sessions. “I handed these things to the therapist and told him, ‘This is the best way of saying how I’m doing,’” he remembered.
Eventually, the therapist remarked that he thought other clients might benefit from the emotional resonance of Greene’s poetry. And so a poet was born.
The poems in the book are varied. Sometimes Greene addresses his wife directly. Sometimes he touches on rituals he has invented to keep her memory alive. He writes from the perspective of a dog and a cat, and he moves from specificity to waves of emotion as grief itself does. Greene shares his vulnerability and his sadness.
If the book has a single message, it is that one shouldn’t expect to wake up one day and stop grieving for lost loved ones.
Greene told me, “One thing I’ve learned is my perception that societally or culturally we have about a one-year allowance for grief. Beyond that point, people don’t want to hear about it anymore.”
He added, “For the grieving, the process continues.”
I asked how he composed his poems.
“I have no formal training in poetry and writing beyond college English classes,” he explained. “The process for me was just, I would hear a word or phrase. Something would jump out at me. That phrase would serve as the seed for the next piece that I wrote. I feel like I’ve learned quite a bit.”
Greene stated that the process of writing his poems has helped him process his grief. He is proud to have heard from a number of people who have told him that the book has helped them express and deal with their own feelings of loss.
“My goal in writing the book was to provide a forum, to provide a framework for people to deal with the grief in their life. In a way it’s a self-help book,” he suggested.
“Just knowing there’s somebody else out there helps. There’s no wrong way to think about and conceptualize your grief. Grief is definitely not a one-size-fits-all process … I refer to my work as poetry with a purpose. The purpose is to provide people with help in expressing their own grief.”
In writing and reading his poems, Gary Greene clearly feels a mission not just to help the grieving but to some extent to defend the practice of writing and reading poetry.
“With most people, I have found if you say ‘poetry,’ the response is, ‘I don’t like poetry.’ And yet everybody loves songs, which are basically poetry set to music,” he observed. “That absolutely fascinates me.”
Gary Greene will read excerpts from “The Lonely Years” at the Buckland Library on Friday, Nov. 7, at 6 p.m. and at the Greenfield Library on Monday, Dec. 1, at 2 p.m. Books will be available for purchase.
The book may also be purchased online at Amazon.com or at kelsaybookx.com.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.