Love, loss and claiming the life that is yours
A guest post on the power of writing through grief and finding a new purpose
This week I invited my friend Uma Girish to share her journey in writing her book Losing Amma, Finding Home: A Memoir About Love, Loss and Life’s Detours.
This is the book blurb: When Uma arrives in a Chicago suburb in the spring of 2008 to start life with her husband, 15-year-old daughter and her dreams, she has no clue of the cosmic wheels in motion. Ten days later, her 68-year-old mother who lives in India is diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer. Sadly, Uma’s beloved Amma passes away just eight months after her initial diagnosis. Losing her mother plunges Uma into the deepest despair, but more importantly, awakens a sudden clarity and knowing that ‘there has to be more to life than this.’
Uma writes…
Being between writing projects feels like inhabiting the liminal space. That’s exactly where I found myself as I lathered shampoo into my hair one Saturday morning. My novel was written. The next project hadn’t announced itself.
As I rinsed out the shampoo, I heard a voice: Write about your Amma’s death. A visceral knowing flooded my body. This is how I know what I know. It’s the feeling of certainty, a direction and a message that lands in my body.
An hour later I walked into Barnes & Noble where our writers group met every Saturday. A fellow writer was handing out empty journals to everyone because that’s who she was. A generous soul who often brought us surprise gifts.
That felt like a clear second sign of the day.
Here we go, I thought to myself. Now I have no choice but to write about the most painful thing I’ve lived through. My Amma died in January 2009; I received my summons from the universe to write the story in 2011.
That I had a cohort of writers reading my work and offering feedback was hugely comforting. Every book I’ve written has been written in a group—and I highly recommend it. It’s great for accountability, keeps you moving the pen on the page, and when parts of the writing make you fall apart (which they will if you’re writing memoir), these beautiful people will hold you, hand you tissues, and buy you a Starbucks coffee.
I write long-hand. It’s my preferred method. I write faster than I type and the intimate act of hand moving across a blank page, left to right, and words flowing from my pen, is a lovely ritual that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
I like to begin every book with an inciting incident, a story that grabs the reader, triggers emotion and curiosity, and invites them into my personal world. Being an intuitive writer, outlines, to me, feel like literary suffocation. Writing one-liners of stories that feel important to include in the book is as far as my outlining process goes.
I prefer to let my imagination roam, and scenes and stories to land on the page as they choose. In this case, I knew the general story arc: how Amma’s death shattered me; why the shattering made me question everything about my life; how the rearranging of the mosaic created a whole new version of me. A version that felt deeply committed to living a life of service and meaning.
Memoir writing is not for the faint of heart. It forces you to travel back in time to some dark places and find the version of you that lived through that pain. Some chapters were brutal to write. I’d find myself sobbing and have to walk away from my writing desk. But I returned to the writing. Every. Single. Time.
Why did I put myself through the pain of revisiting my past? Something in me knew that I was simply an agent of action in service to the spirit of the book. The story was given to me to live so that I could use my gift of storytelling and share it with whomever it was meant for.
There was a bigger purpose to my book than I could envision. And I certainly don’t mean making the bestseller lists, raking a fortune in book sales, or bagging prime spots on B&N bookshelves.
My book is soul medicine for the grieving who seek to make meaning from their loss, and it was mine to write and offer that medicine.
If I’d allowed my emotions and procrastination to tempt me to walk away from this writing project, I’d give in to selfishness. So, in some profound way, giving up on the book never felt like an option. My Why kept me going, writing, showing up.
About a year later, the book felt finished. I was pretty pleased with the shape it was in, but I was getting ready to travel to southern India to visit my sister, so I decided to give myself a break from the manuscript.
One morning, during vacation. Having read the last few pages of a Hay House book, I set it down, closed my eyes, and started to meditate. When I opened my eyes twenty minutes later, my gaze immediately fell on the back cover of the book. In that moment, it felt as if the address of Hay House’s India office lit up in neon and a knowing flooded my body.
Pick up the phone and call Hay House.
Who picks up the phone and randomly calls a mega publishing house??! Are you crazy, my mind screamed. But the part of me that knew steered my body toward the phone and dialed the number. The conversation went something like this:
“Hay House, good morning.”
“Umm…my name is Uma. Umm…may I please speak to someone in Editorial?”
Gulp, gulp!
“Hold on Ma’am. I’ll connect you.”
A male voice. “Editorial. This is R speaking.”
Some nervous throat-clearing. “Hi. My name is Uma. I live in Chicago, but I’m visiting my sister in Chennai. I have a finished manuscript, a memoir about my mother’s death and my transformation. I’m calling to see if…”
He cut me off. “We have a review meeting coming up in two weeks. Why don’t you send me the first 3 chapters?”
I nearly dropped the phone. When I hung up, I was giddy.
Dear reader, what you should know at this point in my story is that being published by Hay House was my cherished dream, one that I didn’t even believe was possible for me. But here was the opening, the crack in the door.
I opened my laptop and hit SEND. Three chapters of my loss memoir were zooming through cyberspace toward a Hay House editor’s inbox!
Soon I was swallowed up by my vacation: family gatherings, good Indian food, and late-night chats with my sis. Two weeks later, after my return to Chicago I received an email from said editor who now wanted to read the entire manuscript.
I was, at this point, a quivering mass of human jelly.
About six weeks later, an email from the Managing Editor popped into my inbox. “R forwarded your manuscript to me. I’ve started reading it and will get back to you by mid-June.”
Excitement overload.
But her email also stopped me in my tracks. Something in me whispered, You’ll get back to me on the 18th of June.”
June 18 was my deceased mother’s birthday. From the moment this email arrived in my inbox I kept the hotline to heaven really busy.
Amma, you know I’ve dreamed forever about being published by Hay House. That dream is so close. I need your help. From where you are, you can make this happen. This is OUR story so please help me share it with the world.
On the morning of June 18, 2013 I opened my laptop and watched the emails drizzle into my inbox. There was an email from the Managing Editor of Hay House. “I’ve read through the entire manuscript and would love to publish it!”
I dropped to my knees, sobbing. Love, gratitude, relief.
Amma had one last surprise celebration for me. If you look on Amazon, the publication date of Losing Amma, Finding Home: A Memoir About Love, Loss, And Life’s Detours is June 18, 2014.
Isn’t this just a lovely story of following your instinct and not letting your fears get in the way? There is something deeper behind it too though. Uma shares on her website that her mother’s cancer was “the culmination of a lifetime of people pleasing, taking care of others, giving her power away, and letting her voice be silenced. She would wring her hands in sheer desperation, but she didn't know how to say No. She shrank herself so that others could feel more comfortable. She had trouble asserting herself. The word Boundary didn't even exist in her vocabulary. She was a beautiful human and a caring soul who sacrificed and abandoned herself -- until we all lost her.”
And in this is a lesson for us all, I think. There is a life that is waiting to be lived through us. If we constantly deny it, it will shrivel and so will we. If you are struggling to find or allow that life, Uma is one of the beautiful souls that can help you reconnect to it.
I hope that in some way Gathering our bones helps you to reconnect to yourself too, by bringing you people, ideas and insights that ignite the inner fire and encourage you to explore the territory of yourself.
Do go and explore Uma’s writing here and on her website. There are riches to be mined.
Tomorrow I will release my first post for paid subscribers on my writing journey as I embark on my next book. I’ll see you there!
It was such a pleasure to write this essay, Tina. Thank you for inviting me to share ❤️