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I Never Wanted to Be the Grief Girl LAUREN FLAKE I’ve been a writer since I was 9 years old. In fourth grace language arts class, I soaked up sentence diagramming and essay structure like it was manna from heaven. Words and language became my currency, and crafting fictional short stories and nonfiction family newsletters became my favorite escape. As a former high school English teacher, my mother encouraged my passion and fostered my talent throughout my childhood. She taught me to be selective and discerning, engaging but authoritative, and concise instead of flowery in my writing. She taught me to say what I meant in an honest and transparent way. She taught me to proofread and edit for content accuracy and language clarity.
She taught me to communicate. She taught me to write, and, in essence, she taught me to communicate.
Then, as I moved away from home, graduated from college, and got married, I watched my mother’s once beautiful verbal skills gradually deteriorate back to the level of childhood and then infancy, in the throes of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. She lost her ability to communicate by the time she became a grandmother, but in her true, selfless parenting form, she gave me something to talk about in her absence.
There's nothing quite as isolating as grief. While there’s nothing quite as isolating and unglamorous as grief, writing about the experience helped to bridge the gap from my soul to the disconnected outside world. Writing helped me begin to feel whole again.
LAUREN FLAKE
It helped me to feel understood when I lost the one person who had known and understood me best.
Top photo (pictured, left to right): Lauren Flake with her late mother, Dixie Stucky, in 2006
LOVE OF DIXIE MAGAZINE
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Lauren Flake was born in Austin and raised in Dripping Springs, Texas. She and her husband, Travis, live in Buda with their two daughters. Read more at LaurenFlake.com.
SUMMER 2019
