The first time I was faced with grief, I was 11 years old. I remember my dad getting a phone call while we were standing outside of a restaurant on a family vacation. It was pouring rain, and I remember the smell of the hot cobblestone sizzling under the dark wetness. “Your father is dead,” the other line said. I looked at my dad, and I saw his face drop. He hung up the phone, and told us that Grandpa had passed, and he was going to fly home the next morning.

I had no idea what to do with the feeling bubbling in my stomach. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t let my father see me sad. It was his dad, after all, who’d died. I needed to be strong for him—I needed to protect him—I needed to be good.

I wrote a poem about that day in school—one of many poems I would write in years to come as a way to cope with grief, though at the time I didn’t understand it.

It wouldn’t be until a decade later when my highschool sweetheart died and I started writing to process his sudden death, nor years later after going to eating disorder recovery and blogging to discover who I was without my ED, or in the last two years when I got divorced and wrote an entire book in the wake of losing my partner, best friend, identity as a wife, and future that I understood how deeply healing writing would be for my grieving process.