A complicated grief

This Creative Writing Thesis is a collection of forty poems entitled A Complicated Grief, a medical term for debilitating grief that continues to intensify beyond a year, with a nod to Miriam Toews’ novel A Complicated Kindness. The trigger for the project was the death of the author’s father which took place on October 15th, 2022. David Kennedy’s Elegy explains that while grief is part of one’s private life, the feelings of grief are universal, and the elegiac tradition has long provided people with a way to help make sense of their mourning. This thesis was written on the belief that feelings have become too private, leaving a world of people who do not know how to feel with or for each other, making it difficult for humans to truly connect. This thesis says there is strength in vulnerability – cry in public. It is divided into four sections, “Have You Seen My Dad?” containing poems about the author’s father, “Grief Is” exploring the grief process in general, “Sore Spot” revealing how grief takes place in big and small ways every day, and “How to Be Happy,” including healing poems. This structure takes the reader on the journey of a personal experience with grief, starting with loss and ending with hope. Though most poems are written in free verse, a variety of other forms including the sonnet, the ode, the haiku, concrete verse, and other poetic experiments are used to explore the broad spectrum of experiences of grief.