Writing about the pain of loss.

People often maintain that it is therapeutic to write or speak about the devastation felt upon the death of someone very close to you. Just as they say better not to suppress your grief, rather you should let it all out, allow yourself to cry, rant and rave, whatever gives you relief; bottling it up only delays the healing process. But the truth of it is the healing process is slow whatever you do and, where you truly love, can never be wholly complete; years may soften the loss but never entirely eradicate it.  Images, memories, a remembered tune catching us unaware can wipe away, as though they had never been, the in-between years. Each of us copes differently with our separate grief, shocked, saddened and bewildered by the feelings evoked. Seamus Heaney describes such loss in his poetry as being caught broadside, nearly blown away by the suddenness and force of it. Emile Zola speaks of the artist in 'His Masterpiece' who at once turns stricken from his dead child's bedside to begin capturing the image on canvas. In this way we are desperately striving to diffuse the pain, to put order on something that in our hearts we are all too aware is beyond our control.