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.