Understanding grief as universal yet deeply personal

SALISBURY — When writer Tara Kelly’s ex-husband died, very quickly, from cancer, she began to understand what Tolstoy meant when he wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

In a similar vein, she realized that we all grieve — and that we all do it differently, and at our own pace. 

Robert Willis was a chef, architect, race car driver, beloved local figure in town. He was the owner of Cafe Giulia on Main Street in Lakeville and a regular member of the morning coffee hangout at The Roast — and then Sweet William’s — in Salisbury. 

He and Kelly had been married for more than two decades and had shared a home, a life, a fascinating history and two children in their early 20s. 

They divorced in 2012. In 2013, Kelly fulfilled a lifelong dream of getting a master’s degree in writing. She packed her bags for the first two-week session of the Bennington College MFA program and shortly before she got in her car to drive to Vermont, she learned from Willis that he had been diagnosed with liver cancer. 

She returned to Connecticut two weeks later, cared for him in the home (and the bedroom) they had shared, and he died on June 28. 

Kelly’s original plan had been to get an MFA in writing nonfiction essays, such as the columns she had been writing for The Lakeville Journal (where she was also a copy editor for many years). 

After Willis’ death, her advisor in the program (author Susan Cheever) guided her toward writing instead about the life she had spent with Willis — and the loss of that life. Not just his life, but also their life together.

Over the course of two years, she read around a hundred books (the Bennington program describes itself as “Read 100 books, write one”) while also writing a memoir about her remarkable and complicated marriage to a remarkable and complicated man. 

She graduated from the MFA program this year in June, and discovered while giving her final oral presentation, to an audience of more than 100 people, that when you talk about grief, you open the floodgates for other people to talk about their own experiences with it.

And she also discovered that all those experiences were the same — but different. This wasn’t a huge surprise to her, because she had spent so much time reading the work of authors who were also coming to terms with the loss of a loved one.

“For my last two terms at Bennington,” she said, “I read almost exclusively memoirs — and almost exclusively grief memoirs.

“And in some ways that gave me a lot of comfort.”

It also helped her see that, “We all grieve in different ways. Grief doesn’t have a timeline.”

She referred to Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. 

“You only have a year to grieve? Where does that year come from? Who decided that?”

She referred to the author Julian Barnes, writing about the death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh. “If there can be an accumulation of love over the years, then why not grief?”

At a talk on Sept. 14 — at the Scoville Memorial Library and cohosted by Noble Horizons — Kelly will share her thoughts on life, love, loss, grief through the prism of the many memoirs she has read in the past two years. It is a scholarly talk, to some degree, and will interest anyone interested in good books. 

But it’s also a talk, she said, “for anyone who is dealing with some sort of grief. The funny thing in our society is that as open as we are about so many things, we still don’t talk about grief. And bizarrely, there seems to be a feeling that if you are openly grieving the loss of someone you loved, you are being self-indulgent.

“So that right there is a reason why I’m giving this talk. It’s an opportunity to share what you’re going through.”

And a chance to learn how great writers have expressed their own, very individual grief in their own work. 

The talk is free and open to the public. It will be given at 4 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 14, in the Wardell Room of the Scoville Memorial Library.