Grief rarely arrives as a single emotion. When someone dies suddenly, especially a child, the mind does not move neatly from sorrow to acceptance. Instead, it travels through a landscape of conflicting states: depression, denial, anger, guilt, and a restless search for meaning. Much of Smiler grew out of that journey.
Depression
Depression is often described as sadness, but the experience is something different. It is more accurately a narrowing of the world. Ordinary things lose their colour and urgency. Time changes shape. Days feel heavy and slow, yet weeks can pass almost unnoticed. The future, which once seemed open and expansive, begins to close in around the present.
For those experiencing profound grief, depression can feel isolating in ways that are difficult to explain. Life outside continues as normal while internally everything has shifted. The rhythms that once organised daily life no longer seem relevant. In that sense depression is not simply an emotional response to loss, but a change in the way the world itself is perceived.
Suicide
Within that darkness the mind inevitably encounters thoughts about escape. For some people this appears as the thought of suicide. Often it is not a plan or a decision, but a question that surfaces when pain feels unending. The very appearance of the thought can be unsettling.
Silence around this subject can make it harder to confront. Speaking or writing about it honestly allows the thought to be examined rather than hidden. Acknowledging its presence does not mean accepting it as an answer. Instead it allows the conversation to move from secrecy towards understanding.
Denial and Anger
Grief also produces its own forms of denial and anger. Denial is not always a refusal to accept what has happened. More often it appears as a quieter resistance to reality. The mind continues to expect the familiar voice, the familiar presence, as if the world might somehow correct itself.
Anger grows from the same place. It may have no clear direction. Sometimes it attaches itself to institutions, circumstances or strangers. At other times it turns inward. Anger is rarely rational, but it reflects the mind’s refusal to accept that something irreversible has occurred.
Guilt and a Deal with the Devil
Among the most persistent responses to loss is guilt. The mind begins to revisit the past with forensic intensity. Every moment is reconsidered. Conversations are replayed. Small decisions are examined as though they might hold the explanation for what has happened.
In that state it is easy to imagine alternative histories. If only one moment had unfolded differently, perhaps the entire outcome might have changed. This is where grief can begin to resemble a kind of bargaining with the past — a private and impossible deal with the devil in which one searches for a way to reverse time.
Of course, the past cannot be renegotiated. Yet the mind often insists on returning to these questions long after reason understands their futility.
Literary DNA and Self-Expressive Writing
For me, writing became one of the ways of living with these thoughts. Writing does not resolve grief, but it can give shape to experiences that otherwise feel chaotic. A sentence becomes a small act of order imposed on confusion.
Over time it became clear that writing about grief was not only about personal expression. It was also shaped by the writers whose work had influenced me. When reading books such as A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis or Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, it is obvious that each writer carries their own intellectual inheritance into the experience of loss.
We all possess a kind of literary DNA — a set of ideas, influences and habits of thought absorbed through reading and reflection. When grief arrives, those influences become part of the language through which we attempt to understand what has happened.
Self-expressive writing therefore becomes something more than a private act. It connects the writer to a much longer conversation in which others have attempted to face loss through language. Each account is individual, but each also echoes those that came before.
If Smiler contributes anything, it is simply another voice within that continuing conversation.
A Closing Reflection
The essays and reflections in Smiler emerged from that same process of writing through confusion rather than writing from certainty. The book does not attempt to offer conclusions about grief, because grief rarely provides them. Instead it records a series of attempts to understand how loss reshapes the mind, memory and the language through which we describe our lives. In that sense the act of writing became less about explanation and more about exploration — a way of walking carefully through the darker corners of experience and placing words where silence might otherwise remain.