In July 2022, three months after my son Owen died, I took Megan Devine’s Writing Your Grief course with two dear friends.
I was looking for a way to say what I was feeling. I was also looking for people who wouldn’t need me to make it easier to hear.
I wrote about our home after he died. His things. My body. The places I wanted to take him. What people understood, what they didn’t, and the enormous distance between those two things.
Those pieces have become a small book: I Carry Him Now: Essays for Owen.
Keeping the person who wrote it
There is a temptation, when returning to old writing, to tidy everything up. Improve the sentences. Explain what you meant. Give the person on the page the benefit of everything you know now.
With these essays, I wanted to be careful.
They belong to my first summer without Owen. The person writing them did not know what would happen next. She was counting weeks, holding on to objects, and trying to understand how a home could contain so much preparation for someone who would never live there.
I don’t want to correct her with hindsight. I want her to be heard.
Making the book meant giving those pieces an order and room on the page. Nine pieces, a foreword, and a title. Something I can read and share with people I love, without sending them into a folder of documents named after writing prompts.
A folder has its uses. It is not quite the same as a book.
Some things can stay close
I wanted to include the project on this website. I also knew I didn’t want to put the whole manuscript here.
The writing is personal and raw. Making something I’m proud of doesn’t mean I need to make all of it available to everyone. I can tell you about the book and keep the essays themselves for myself and loved ones.
That feels like the right amount of sharing.
There is no neat arrival at the end of the collection. Owen is still my son. Rosie and Alec are his younger siblings. Our family includes someone they will know through photographs, stories, and the ways we make room for him.
This book is one of those ways.
