Recently, I became interested in the idea of grief as an inheritance. I am a second generation Irish American, whose father, because of the Great Depression, was left in an orphanage for a year at age six, whose grandfather, whom I never met was described to me, or at least as I can remember through the mysterious prism of childhood, as dying in an alley. He was an alcoholic, his charm reported to be boundless but whose thirst killed him alone and penniless. My father was a brilliant, funny, loving man whose personality was transformed when he drank to excess into a violent, angry, and cruel man. He suffered deep guilt but did not stop drinking and that was our family’s shadow. Further back one million of his ancestors starved in the Potato Famine, followed by immigration, and discrimination which he somewhat eradicated with a Harvard PhD, teaching at universities like Princeton, Rutgers, and Harvard and a multitude of literary achievements. Still, he grieved. I, as his daughter, grieved for that little boy and then later for the sudden loss of my best friend followed by the even deeper wound of losing my beloved sister.

After she died, I started to write novels. Until my sister’s death I was always writing but did not take myself seriously. Punctuated by thoughts of suicide and deep mourning, my first novel was about grief and loss, the second less so, the third completely. Like my father, I drank and transformed, but unlike my father, I stopped, worked a twelve-step program and yet the grief I carry in my body remains like one of the fading scars received from a childhood accident. I embrace this part of myself because it can’t be denied.

As we continue to deal with the stunning losses caused by the global pandemic, and the ongoing revelation of systemwide racism, I look back and forward at writing about grief. This video features a reading from my father’s exquisite first novel, Sisters and Brothers. Reading his book at age eleven I discovered a secret history, the anguish of my father’s childhood and the sadness of poverty and alcoholism. He had told me, the youngest, none of it but his past was a mystery until it wasn’t. He wrote about it. I write about mine. This is what we do. We do our best to move forward despite the lure of the dark truth that grief is as real as happiness and as inevitable as death.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

FOLLOW AND READ MORE: