Caregiving runs on emergency. When it ends, the emergency goes, and for a lot of writers the words go with it.
A young author posted in a large self-publishing group this week about something hundreds of writers recognized instantly. Her debut YA dark fantasy had spent a day in the top ten of two Amazon categories. She’d gotten good early reviews. Then her grandmother died.
She’d been her grandmother’s caregiver for eleven months to the day.
She’d coordinated specialists, nurses and social workers. She’d logged symptoms and medications, and covered for her grandmother as dementia and heart and kidney failure got worse.
Now all of that was over, and she felt like it was all still happening. She’d written the dedication for book two of her series to her grandmother. She was trying to move her brain through cement. Her wedding was less than a month away, the wedding they’d hoped her grandmother would live to see. She had goals for her writing career before the end of the year, and she couldn’t make herself do anything.
Almost a hundred writers answered. Nearly every one of them had been through it.
I have too, in my own way.
Why can’t you write after caregiving ends?
Because your body and mind have been running in emergency mode, and the emergency just ended.
One writer in that thread explained it about as well as I’ve heard it put. For months, a caregiver runs on stress. Every phone call could be bad news. Every day has a list of things that can’t wait. That pressure is exhausting, but it also keeps you moving. When the person you were caring for dies, the pressure disappears overnight, and so does the thing that was driving you. What’s left is exhaustion that was there all along and grief that had to wait its turn.
Another writer described turning around to do a caregiving task and remembering it wasn’t necessary anymore. Another said the whole routine of her life had been built around one person’s needs, and suddenly it was gone, along with the purpose that went with it. Several said they felt relief and freedom too, and then felt guilty about the relief. All of that is normal.
Creative work needs a mind with some room in it. Grief takes the room.
What I did while my wife was sick
I wasn’t writing books when my wife Claudia was sick. That came later.
What I had then were websites. Several of them, with probably five or six thousand hand-coded HTML pages that I kept up to date. While Claudia was sick, that’s where my energy went. It was my vent. It was how I stayed sane, and it was how I communicated with people when I couldn’t do much else. It worked very well.
Looking back, I think it worked because it was the right size. Updating a page doesn’t ask for your best creative work. It asks you to show up and do something useful with your hands and your head for an hour.
It gave me a place to put my mind that wasn’t a hospital room, and it kept me connected to people at a time when I could easily have shut everyone out. Some of what I wrote then was about her. I wrote about Claudia’s chronic pain while she was still alive, and about the worst month of my life, when she nearly died.
Claudia died in January 2005. For most of the next eight years I traveled and photographed belly dancers and renaissance festivals. The books came after that. I’ve written about how that loss shaped the work that followed in Loss Is a Heavy Thing.
When my wife was sick, I didn’t write books. I kept up thousands of web pages. It was my vent, and it kept me sane. – Richard LoweShare on X
How long does it take to start writing again after a loss?
Longer than you want, and nobody can tell you exactly how long.
The writers in that thread gave answers from a few months to two years. One woman cared for her grandmother, her mother and her father, all of whom lived with her and died within four years. She lost every bit of creativity when the caregiving ended, and it took nearly two years to come back.
Another cared for her father until he died in December and felt back in her game around June. A third said she kept writing straight through her mother’s death, told herself she was fine, and three months later it hit her so hard she couldn’t write for months.
That last one is worth paying attention to. Grief you push past comes back and collects. Several writers said the same thing in different words: take the time now, or it takes the time later.
And it comes in waves. You’ll think you’re through it, and then something small will knock you flat again.
Should you push through grief to meet your writing goals?
Usually not. Shrink the goals instead of forcing them.
One writer asked the author a question I’d ask too: what happens if you don’t reach those goals by the end of the year? In most cases, nothing. The goals move to next year. Writing goals are made up, and you’re allowed to change them for any reason at any time. Her grandmother is gone and her wedding is less than a month away. That’s her focus now.
If you need to keep some momentum, make the goals very small. One writer in the thread does two 25-minute sprints a day when that’s all she has, and she still finishes books, just slower.
Another suggested writing something completely different for a while: short stories, poetry, a different genre, anything that doesn’t ask you to climb back into a dark fantasy world while your own world is upside down. One woman who runs a nursing home weaves the names and memories of residents she’s lost into her stories. Another kept adding to a slideshow of her mother’s life for nearly a year after her mother died.
That’s the same thing my websites did for me. Find the work that’s the right size for the person you are right now.
Is it normal to feel relief when caregiving ends?
Yes, and the guilt that comes with it is normal too.
One writer in that thread said it outright: feeling relief and a sense of freedom after caregiving ends is normal and understandable. Others described guilt in every direction. Guilt for being tired. Guilt for wanting your own life back. Guilt for not writing. Guilt for writing. One man who was caregiving for his parents summed it up in five words: guilt in all directions.
Caregiving is a job nobody trains you for, done for someone you love, with no end date anybody will tell you. You give up sleep, work, friends and your own plans. When it ends, part of you is grieving the person and part of you is grieving the life you set aside, and part of you just wants to rest. Those feelings don’t cancel each other out. They all sit in the same room.
Don’t let anyone, including yourself, tell you which ones you’re allowed to have. You did the work. You get to feel whatever comes after it.
Does grief change your writing?
Yes, and not always for the worse.
Several writers said the same thing. You won’t be the same person you were before, and what you write afterward will carry that. One said the work she’s doing now, after all that processing, is the best she’s ever done, at least according to her editor. Another wrote an entire novel inspired by her grandmother, and it became her most successful book.
I didn’t plan to become more creative after Claudia died. It happened anyway, over years. The photography came first, then the books. Some of what I write now I couldn’t have written before.
None of that means grief is a gift, or that you should feel grateful for it. It means the writing will still be there when you come back, and so will you, changed.
What should you do right now?
The author who asked had already figured it out by the end of the thread. She was turning her attention to her wedding. She’d organized her writing supplies and planners, and decided that would have to be good enough for now. She posted a photo of a wooden flower bouquet she’d hand-painted for the wedding, in shades of purple with black roses and gold eucalyptus. She did a good job, and she said so.
She got it right. Rest. Do something with your hands. Let the people around you take care of you for a while. Keep one small outlet, something low-stakes that lets you feel useful. If the grief isn’t lifting, or it’s getting worse, talk to someone who’s trained to help.
I’ve written about the warning signs in what writing burnout really looks like, and if you want to write about the caregiving years themselves someday, writing a caregiver memoir covers that. The psychology of writing hub has more on writing and mental health. The words will come back. They came back for me, and for almost everyone in that thread.
