I started writing about my grief way before I realized I was grieving.

My 5-year-old daughter had just been diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease, and I wrote an essay about how the news was affecting my family.

I didn’t know then that we can grieve for people who are still alive. I didn’t know about ambiguous grief or anticipatory grief or all the other flavors of grief that don’t have Hallmark cards associated with them. All I knew was that something life-changing was happening and that I needed to write about it in real time.

More than a decade later, I understand not only that I was experiencing profound grief in the face of the life-changing news of my daughter’s illness, but also that writing was a powerful way of integrating that grief.

Why?

When our........

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