A grieving heart needs stories

The author Sharon Blackie wrote that “grief is an element of enchantment”. I only understood this curious and mysterious sentence when I began to write my new book, The Whale’s Last Song.

It slipped out of me while I was grieving the death of my mother, who died of cancer during COVID-19. Unlike anything I’ve ever written before, it is a fable about a little girl in medieval Spain who goes on a mission to find a cure for her sister who is deathly ill with the pox. Her mother is long dead, and her father has been imprisoned by the evil Marquis. Out in the depths of the ocean, a whale is dying.

The story has all the lures of ‘enchantment’, it pulled me from my heartache, as the characters came to life: Shems Halevi, the toothless gravedigger; Rodrigo, the stuttering poet who loves the forest; Graviel, an enormous, dyslexic, wounded soldier who has just become a father; and The First of Eyes, an old midwife in the forest, blind and all-knowing.

The voice came from somewhere in the fathoms of my childhood. I was writing for a little girl, perhaps the motherless child I had just become.

I needed language and storytelling that could approximate, but not directly address my grief – it was still too raw. This story did just that, drawing on poetry, imagery, imagination and mystery.

Creativity, like dreaming, is an alchemical brew of experience, impression and imagination. Trying to grasp it is a retrospective act of interpretation, it is not a code to crack. Things easily explained are diminished the way a magic trick loses its allure once it’s understood.

Sometimes we are ripe, suggestable – often when we have given up on a version of ourselves we are ready to discard, especially in the wake of loss. And then it is poetry, song and myth that offer us footholds as we wonder, ‘how will I go on?’

My story became a rumination on leadership and corruption during a pandemic. The evil Marquis is based on Joseph Goebbels, who was a philologist, a master of propaganda. But it is also about family and sacrifice, intergenerational trauma and the pattern of how things fit together. Far beyond the human tragedies that are playing out is a whale coming to the end of its life. Its impending death is not a catastrophe, anything but.

I came across the concept of whalefall in Rebecca Giggs’ astonishing book Fathoms: The World in the Whale and it offered itself up as the central metaphor of the book.

Throughout history there are times when we have no control over the events in which we are caught up. We cannot halt or interrupt ‘runaway’ political, environmental and technological consequences. As we look helplessly, powerlessly and hopelessly out at the world, what is left for us? What gives us courage?

I sat in a small circle with Ariel Burger some weeks ago, as he told us about Ellie Wiesel’s love of Rebbi Nachman of Breslov (1772 -1810), a dreamer, storyteller and philosopher who used creative parables to teach spiritual truths. He believed it was only stories that could awaken us. His magical tales are filled with all the elements of enchantment and are often left radically unresolved, so the reader has to grapple with the paradox of a world that has no neat answers or solutions.

This was a timely blessing, almost offering me an explanation about why I had written this book.

Some year ago, I read the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch writer who died in the Nazi concentration camps. I cannot shake the thought that Etty knew she was going to die and yet she still made meaning of her life, right until the end to be the ‘thinking heart of the barracks’. She tried to calm those who were suffering around her. One of the last things she ever wrote was, ‘we left the camp singing’ as she and her family were being transported to the gas chambers. She also read Rilke’s Book of Hours during her time in Westerbork labour camp – a book of poetry I have returned to in these dark months since 7 October 2023.

Etty understood in her powerlessness that she was integrally part of a greater pattern of history. She knew that no matter what she did, she couldn’t halt the Nazi machine. She had several opportunities to escape her death, but she chose not to. She reasoned that if she somehow slipped through the knot of fate, somebody else would have to go in her place and she did not believe that her life was more important than anyone else’s.

I wanted to incorporate this idea in my book, so I wrote characters who risk their own safety to safeguard others and protect a world they will likely not benefit from. The whale is the ultimate symbol of this generosity – when it dies, it gives everything back to the ocean so more life may continue.

The holy question at the centre of my story is, ‘How do we save the people we love?’

I could not save my mother. But The Whale’s Last Song, through the language of wondering and enchantment, addresses this longing, obliquely and symbolically.

In times of grief, when there are no apparent answers or solutions, the heart needs a container in which joy and heartbreak can co-exist. Stories help us to keep our wounded hearts open when there seems to be no medicine that will heal us. They are how we borrow joy and sorrow from elsewhere, a mythic past or an imagined future.

Inside fairytales and fiction, secrets of the soul are buried like prayers, and are silently passed to us, like an imperceptible whisper, so that we feel touched by something larger than ourselves. This is why they offer solace when nothing else can.

My hope for The Whale’s Last Song is that it lands soft and comforting, like a hand on a reader’s shoulder.

The Whale’s Last Song (Harper Collins) will be released on 2 October 2024. Copies are available via Gertrude & Alice Cafe Bookstore or online. The Sydney launch of The Whale’s Last Song is on 10 October at the Paddington Uniting Church.