Injured Beavers See Each Other For The First Time and Fall Instantly In Love

On the problem of writing through grief and complex heartbreak + how to write without writing + to hell with imposter syndrome

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My heart hurts. It’s our foster grandson, Z, and the way in which his near-term future hangs so precariously in the balance. It’s the way in which our hearts are caught in the teeth of fate.

It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

We took Z to the cabin this weekend—something I promised him we would do because he loves the cabin so much. And it felt so special, so fragile. We cooked and baked and ate and did puzzles and hiked and hiked and hiked and sat on the dock and watched the beavers swim and looked at the brilliant stars and had fires and told stories and sang songs and said out loud how we wished we could stay forever.

Then, first thing this morning, another meeting with another one of the people involved with his future, and she sounded so discouraged. She still does not know what will come next for him, or when it will come. For new readers not familiar with Z and Billie, you can catch up a little here.

Anyway, suffice it to say, I’m just not getting any of my own creative writing done. It sure does make me feel like an imposter, with all my writing about writing when I’m barely writing myself. I mean, my novel feels like an abandoned job site—and on top of everything else, my schedule is blowing up as I enter a stretch of teaching four classes October through December: one section of Writing for Public Health at the U of MN, one advanced CNF class at Stillwater Prison, and two sections of Writing in the Dark on Zoom.

So, friends, in today’s Lit Salon, I seek to answer my own question about how to write through heartache. I’m doing this—answering my own damn question—because it is too urgent to ignore, and, also, I have this belief that when we reveal ourselves to others, we make space for true human connection which in turn makes space for a better, more generative world. There is a line in my book, The Part That Burns, where the narrator, a younger me, says to the man she is falling in love with: “When you see me, I exist. When you see all of me, all of me exists.”

This Substack is like that—a place where we are allowed to see one another in our full humanity. Where we allowed to reveal what Ada Limon calls “the mess of us, the hurt, the empty” in her gorgeous poem “Instructions on Not Giving Up.”

I love Ada Limon’s work, and I am grateful for that poem right now—grateful for these instructions, about which I certainly need reminding. Because I want to know about not giving up. I want to know about how to write through the hurt.

How do we write through the hurt?

How do we write through the hurt?

Here is my best shot at answering my own question. I hope it helps any of you whose hearts are aching, too.

How to Write Through The Hurt

1. With painstaking care, cut the burs from your fluffy little dog’s face and legs. Tell her it’s okay, it’s okay, as you hold her and scissor out these painful prickly bits from her most beautiful gossamer fur. When her little face looks lopsided afterward, tell her she is so so beautiful.

2. Kiss your grown daughter on the top of her head. Smell her hair, the shampoo mixed with woodsmoke from the fire you had last night by the lake. Remember her from long ago, as a baby, and even before that, before she was your daughter, how precious she already was.

3. Send flowers to your friend whose husband who is celebrating perfect, clean scans one year after a terrifying surgery and treatment protocol. Cry when you hit send on that order.

4. Listen with your whole self as your son tells you about the most important things happening in his life right now. Believe him when he tells you what it all means to him.

5. My god, do you see that little oak tree? The white oak on the hillside? Do you notice how, here at mid October, the leaves literally redden and smolder between morning and afternoon? How the setting sun makes it look like a blaze?

6. Make homemade non-churn ice cream for your foster grandson. Let him help you whip the cream, let him help you swirl in the caramel. Let him lick the beaters, the spoon, the spatula. Laugh and laugh as he repeatedly exclaims, “I like it!” When the ice cream is ready, let him have all the sweetness he wants.

7. Remember that Hayden Carruth poem, “Testament,” about—among other things—dying, where he says, “Now I am almost entirely love.”

8. If you want to write about that beaver swimming back and forth in front of the dock, go ahead. I mean, it’s not a bear, or a moose. So, I really don’t know what you’re going to say about a beaver. What do beavers even do? They chomp wood. Build lodges. Swim. Slap their tails. Okay, whatever. Write about the beaver.

9. The truth is, you are thinking about your novel all the time. Just this afternoon when you walked into that coffeeshop on campus, you relived the scene where your protagonist is required to meet the school’s lawyer in a coffeeshop. Remember how you wrote it so the place was packed with purple hat customers, some kind of tour thing going on, no open tables? How the teacher and the lawyer were forced to sit side by side on the sagging plaid couch tucked under the macrame plant hanger, the lawyer’s knees jutting uncomfortably upward? It’s a pretty great scene.

10. You know what? Beavers are a lot more complicated than you said. Look at all those trees in the forest behind your cabin, the ones they’ve chewed down but couldn’t drag to their lodge. Beavers have limitations! Disappointments! Because why? Because they have hopes and dreams. Beavers fall in love, for fuck’s sake. True headline: “Injured Beavers See Each Other For First Time And Fall Instantly In Love.”

11. I don’t know what else to say to you. Just feel it all, feel every last damn thing. You’ll write when you write. You’ve always written. You can’t help but write. You’re almost entirely love now. You see that oak. You see that beaver. You see it all, tucked under the macrame plant hanger. Just take a breath and write it down.

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If you or someone you know is walking the long path back to yourself after a painful childhood, then my memoir, The Part That Burns, might help light your way.