I think a lot of people have felt that - it spoke to memories they had. And they’re all very clearly rendered in the book. When I was sort of reeling from the loss, I had the nastiest, most poisonous, bitter thoughts I probably ever had in my life. Q. As you have what have other grieving parents connected with?Ī. The stuff about the shock really speaks to grieving parents, as much as I can tell. And then you can both sit in that together. If they momentarily flare up, and you have the strength to absorb that and sit there with it and allow them to work through it, the chances are that they’ll probably vent at you and then soften and say that they’re sorry. And if they get mad at you, just take it as part of what you can be there for, but they’re processing a lot of feelings. The only thing you can really, truly offer - the only true currency you have - is yourself. all that much, because they are grieving something so much larger than you, or your concerns about what to say. If you’re talking to someone who’s just lost their kid, you saying something dumb is not going to matter. And that’s also not the worst thing that happened to that person that day. The other thing I would say to that person who’s worried about what to say, is that you might step on a landmine. I always try to say that you’ll never say the right thing because there is no right thing to say what’s most important is that you listen to the person, and that you’re there for them. I remember thinking about my grief as a massive wound, even right in the days after the accident, My mind seized on this metaphor of wound care - the idea that I had massive life-threatening wound on my body, and if I didn’t spend every single day cleaning it and tending to it, and changing the bandages and applying salve that it would infect and kill me. Healing has been a word that’s meant something to me.
And that’s basically what I spent my life doing is assigning words to my feelings, I’ve thought about it maybe a little bit more intensely, because it’s been my focus forever. Q. What does it mean to be a writer finding the right words and language to convey the vast and continuing consequences of grief?Ī. As I’ve talked to people, I have learned a lot about the words that we assigned to our feelings. She always seemed to be smiling at a private joke. And she had a really developed sense of humor. But it gave us a chance to hear a lot of what she thought which was very, very meaningful.
ONCE MORE WE SAW STARS HOW TO
She learned how to talk really early on, around 13 or 14 months- words and some sentences -which was startlingly early. What would you like people to know about Greta?Ī. She was very talkative from a very early age. So in some ways promoting this book has been healing. There are a lot of people who will listen to me talk about her life, how much we loved her, how much we still love her. And there’s a receptive audience for stories about Greta.
I am grateful for the fact that I’m able to talk about my Greta all the time right now. And through the sort of conduit of a book, and I’ve written the book, and it’s out there, and people are asking to speak to me. I’m doing what most grieving parents do in a somewhat different set of circumstances. Sometimes you yourself forget the degree to which you are always grieving that person. And you know, every time you do that, it’s a way of acknowledging that you’ve been marked, because people might sort of intellectually know, ‘oh, yeah, there’s, there’s Jayson, that horrible thing happened - they lost their daughter, and how tragic.”īut in the course of a regular day, it’s not exactly at the surface of your interactions with people. One of the things that you do when you go to a grief support group is - because there might be somebody new there every time - you retell the story. Telling the story of what happened to Greta is a way of testifying.
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