Bittersweet Endings: Writing Grief into My Middle-Grade Fiction
Hello, all! Welcome back to the blog. I’m so glad you’re here.
I used to think that I wrote “happy endings.” But recently, as I’ve been reflecting on my writing and every book I’ve ever written, I’ve come to realize I actually write bittersweet endings. Writing for young readers always requires an element of hope in the ending, but if I’m honest with myself, I have never actually written a truly “happy ending.”
My books and their endings reflect a line that an ancestress of mine wrote toward the end of her life. Almyra King Holsclaw (1842-1931) wrote, “I can see my life like a pattern woven in with the lives of so many others. It seems, as I look at it from here, now that it is so nearly finished, that there is plenty of brightness to offset the dark, gloomy part of my weaving.”
Almyra’s reflection reminds me that there is always light piercing somewhere through the darkness– and if not, we remember that it’s always darkest before dawn. But without darkness, we would not know the power and beauty of the light. In life, we have both/and. And that nuance is so important to write into fiction for young readers.
Writing Grief into My Middle-Grade Fiction
When I was seven, I lost my beloved grandmother in a tragic car accident. I don’t remember the next several months after she passed away. To this day, the loss still affects me. I don’t know if I felt fully supported and seen in my grief as a child. I don’t think our whole family was fully supported and seen. And in this society, as grief is seen as inconvenient and even pathological, and the grieving are often shamed and shunned, I imagine I struggled far more than I’ll ever know– and that so many kids today do, too.
I wrote my novel-in-verse, Little Bird Woman, for this reason. Writing it helped me process my own grief from across my life. My hope is that it helps others feel seen in their own grief, too. The story takes place all in one day, that of the funeral of my character’s mother. It is Nature that supports her– and Nature has often been where I’ve found solace, too.
Nature always lets me be
just how I am.
She is my refuge.
She draws out my grief.
Only wilderness
can restore my peace.
Read Little Bird Woman
“We Love Anyway”
Grief says that something– or someone– still matters to us. I’ve read that grief is love with nowhere to go, but I don’t agree with that. I believe it’s more like this line from the show WandaVision, “What is grief if not love persevering?” This is how love lasts. We keep it alive. We keep meaningful moments and memories alive through grief, no matter how difficult it can be. And young readers need to see this in their fiction.
Last week I went to see the musical Next To Normal with my daughter at the University of Indianapolis. The musical tells a story of a family dealing with mental illness and grief. It is truly a powerful indictment against the systems that try to shove our grief aside. These lyrics struck me in their profundity: “The price of love is loss, but still we pay. We love anyway.”
That’s it: we love anyway– that is the tragic beauty of this life that I’m trying to infuse into my middle-grade fiction.
While writing my upcoming novel Heirloom Rose, I had to come to terms that the idealistic ending I’d wanted to write was not the ending the story needed.
Without giving too much away, I decided that this story– and these characters– needed a bittersweet ending instead. It was not easy to write, but writing this story was cathartic. I imagine this is part of why readers return to fiction– we process through our stories. We feel seen in stories.
So we need truth in our stories. And so truth is what I write– even when it’s hard.
And even if it’s hard, it’s filled and overflowing with love. And we can still be okay, as long as we move forward together. There is plenty of brightness to offset the dark, gloomy parts of our weavings– through our connections to one another. Through love persevering. In the final lines of Next To Normal, “there will be light.”
Tell me: Where have you felt seen in fiction?
Try this with kids: Look up the definition of “bittersweet” in a dictionary. What does it mean? Discuss ways in which the word may also be used to describe how something tastes. What kinds of food taste bittersweet? How can this help us understand what bittersweet might mean in the context of a story?
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I’ll be back on the blog again soon!
Katie
