"From Grief to Gratitude" by Lorraine Martin Bennett

 – What now?

Heartaches move to a quieter part of the mind ever so slowly.

Lorraine Martin Bennett is a print, web, and broadcast journalist who grew up in Murphy, North Carolina. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, she began her career on the Atlanta Journal, writing features and covering news. She became the first woman to head a domestic bureau at the Los Angeles Times. She joined a fledgling CNN, completing her career at CNN International. She still practices her craft by copy editing and occasionally writing stories for the Clay County Progress weekly. Her first novel, a psychological thriller titled Cat on a Black Moon, is due to be published later this year.

Author’s Talk

When I lost my husband and soulmate after 54 years of marriage, I literally wrote my way out of grief.

Lorraine Martin Bennett

In the beginning I didn’t know how to move on. He had been ill for quite some time, and I also helped care for my aging mother.  I lost them both in the span of two months, and I wondered what life could possibly hold for me now.

Trying to put feelings into words was impossible, but when I sat at my computer keyboard words eventually started to cover the page.

It was rough– tears, uncertainty, doubt, a feeling of flailing about, of being unmoored from a life I knew and loved, frustrated and adrift, as if I had lost purpose.

Unexpectedly galley proofs-- for a book I had begun years ago and finished when my husband’s illness began to grip his life -- arrived in email. I had almost forgotten about it. Now it is in production. Good friends pressured me into joining a choir and I found I could begin to sing again.

A friend asked me to submit an essay for an upcoming publication. I took a weekend class in poetry writing.  These small steps became gargantuan leaps in my healing process. They prodded me to write and I found I needed to.

Life goes on, even when we don’t care whether it does.

I went for my annual physical. My physician, a wonderful man who had so tenderly treated my husband and helped ease his passing, called me “tough” and “a survivor.”

I don’t feel that way. But I do feel I have the strength now, and the courage, to move on -- one poem, one essay, one story at a time. — Lorraine Martin Bennett