On writing mourning without comfort clichés, closure, or neat emotional arcs.
Grief has a public face, and it’s a liar. It wears black, lowers its voice, accepts condolences with gratitude, and knows when to leave the room. It behaves. It follows a schedule. It moves, in due course, towards something called ‘acceptance.’
It’s also easy to write, to understand, to articulate in a set, driven, orderly fashion that doesn’t require too much complexity or nuance—from the one writing about it or the one reading it.
Real grief doesn’t do any of this.
Real grief interrupts conversations. It ruins perfectly good days. It turns up at the wrong moment, says the wrong thing, and refuses to leave when politely asked. It is selfish, repetitive, obsessive, and often deeply embarrassing. It does not care about your dignity or anyone else’s comfort.
We don’t like to talk about that version. We certainly don’t like to write about it.
One of the things that struck me early on while writing Sometimes Goodbye was how little space we allow grief to be honest. In life, people tolerate it for a while, then gently expect you to ‘manage’ it, whatever that could mean. In fiction, it’s often tidied even faster. Grief becomes a phase, a catalyst, a hurdle to clear so the story can continue. In a way, grief becomes just one more piece of ‘character development,’ a trait some protagonist has until they get to the final act and shed that façade of mourning, so to speak.
But what if grief is the story? Not grief as wisdom or growth. Just grief.
The truth is, grief doesn’t unfold in a straight line. It loops and stalls and doubles back on itself. It convinces you that if you replay a moment often enough you might be able to alter it. It keeps score. Assigns blame. Invents alternate histories and punishes you with them.
And worst of all, it doesn’t make you better. That’s the part we’re least comfortable with. We like the idea that suffering improves us, deepens us, grants insight. Sometimes it does. Often, it simply diminishes us. It narrows your world until everything is organized around absence.
This is where fiction can become useful.
In real life, saying these things out loud can feel socially dangerous. You risk sounding ungrateful, bitter, self-absorbed, or cruel. You risk making other people uneasy, and they will let you know—politely—that you should stop.
On the page, there’s no such obligation. Fiction allows grief to speak without being corrected. It doesn’t have to arrive at a moral conclusion. It doesn’t have to reassure anyone. It can contradict itself from one paragraph to the next and still be true. It can be ugly. It can be funny at the wrong moment. It can admit to thoughts we’re not supposed to have: resentment, possessiveness, envy of the living, even anger at the dead.
Especially the latter one.
That anger rarely gets acknowledged, especially outside of the page. We’re meant to sanctify the lost, smooth them into memory, turn them into something pure. ‘Don’t speak ill of the dead’ is not an uncommon saying. But love and anger coexist far more often than we like to admit. Losing someone doesn’t erase the complicated feelings you had about them; it freezes them in place. Everything unresolved stays unresolved forever.
Fiction doesn’t have to pretend otherwise.
While writing this book, I wasn’t interested in grief as a journey or a lesson. I was interested in its texture. The way it sharpens memory and distorts time. The way it makes small details unbearable and large events feel unreal. The way it traps you inside your own head, replaying scenes that no longer belong to you.
There doesn’t need to be any eloquence in how grief is processed. Mutters, interrupt, fixate. Obsesses over trivialities and ignore the obvious. Resist narrative logic. It is precisely why real grief so often gets edited out of stories.
But when we do that, we lie—not just about grief, but about love.
Because if love is as consuming as we claim, then its absence should be equally destabilizing. If it isn’t, then perhaps we’ve misunderstood both.
But that’s just one man’s opinion.