Tina Hedin never considered herself a writer.

She knew she had creative instinct, but beat herself up for lacking the drive to do much with it. At 60 years old, she was constantly pestered with life’s unanswered questions: Was I successful? What other paths could I have taken? How could I have accomplished more?

Now, though, the self-doubt hasn’t come knocking in months. She’s a published essayist in the New York Times, and she has more doting emails from readers in her inbox than she has time to open. She travels the country, posting her reflections on her blog, “Letters from Turkey Town,” as she goes. There is no question: She is a writer.

What changed? Her worst nightmare came true.

Hedin and her husband Eric were longtime Keene residents with their daughter Kiki – or “Keek,” as they often refer to her. In January 2023, Kiki went into a medically-induced coma in Boston after a severe allergic reaction to dairy. Five days later, she died.

In the following year, the couple traded life in New Hampshire for life on the road. For eight months, they wandered the country in their RV. Now, they’re back – for the fourth consecutive summer, they’ll be living in a three-trailer setup on a friend’s farm near Alstead.

Before Kiki died, Tina had been working with her therapist to quiet her existential anxiety. She fretted about the past and the future alike. “I felt like I hadn’t done enough,” she said.

After Kiki died, that problem went away.

“All the choices I had made, everything I had done, was perfect,” she said. “It was a good life. I say it ‘was,’ because my old life of being the person I was was over.”

There was no more reason to question whether she could have done better – that was the life that brought her Kiki, and she wouldn’t trade anything for that.

Grief had granted her what she was looking for. For the first time, she was completely present.

“A major change for me has been being able to take pleasure in the small things in life,” she said. “For me, today is enough.”

‘Things I wanted to say’

When the couple returned home from the hospital, the last thing on Hedin’s mind was writing. She was just trying to survive.

When someone dies, they leave loose ends to tie up – banking, employment, insurance. Because Kiki was so young, there was less to do to unweave her from the fabric of ongoing life, but the tasks still overwhelmed her parents. Completely in shock, they battled through their to-do list, finding themselves exhausted by each and every item.

“Somehow, it would take us all day,” Hedin said.

Everything felt difficult. Neither of them returned to work. Eating was almost impossible. For five months, they had to re-learn how to live.

Hedin turned to the internet, compelled to see how other people approached this devastating new life. She read articles, books, and any personal testimonies that might offer her some pathway to being okay.

“I went into research mode,” she said. “But right away, it became too much.”

As she built up more of an understanding of what grief was supposed to look like, she found herself wanting to excel at it. She had a therapist, and whenever she met with her, she hoped to hear, ‘You’re doing really well.’

She never did.

Amid her grief research, she read an article by writer Colin Campbell. He had lost both of his kids in a car accident on the way to Joshua Tree, where the family had created some of their most defining memories. Before their death, Campbell was set to buy a family house there. Afterwards, he immediately canceled the sale – it would be too painful. To even reach the house, he would need to drive through the exact place on the road where his children’s lives had ended.

But three days later, he changed his mind. He wanted to go back to Joshua Tree. As he wrote in his article, to face the agony of going back is to get closer to his happiest moments with his kids. If he could endure the grief, he could access the joy as well.

It resonated with Hedin, deeply.

“Some of it was so raw that I was like, ‘Oh wow, can you even say that?’” she said. “But I felt such a connection to it. These were things I wanted to say, too.”

Writing through the sadness

For a long time, Hedin’s favorite author was Raymond Carver. His work was simple, with an emotional punch, and she liked that. But she had trouble replicating it. What would she write about?

“I didn’t have the maturity to do the kind of writing I wanted to do,” she said.

The first thing that Hedin wrote and actually liked was for a college intro-to-writing class. It was the second assignment, and she focused on a specific memory: her and her parents visiting her older brother, a professional guitarist, after he’d moved away.

Both of her older brothers had moved out of the house when she was still a preteen. They had been her idols. “It’s affected me my whole life,” she said. “They were my first loss.”

The first time she wrote after Kiki’s death was just a jumbled list of details about those five days in Boston. After all, that was how she remembered it – the way the hotel room looked, the underwear she was wearing the day Kiki died – fragments of memory with nothing but the fog of horror and gradual acceptance in between.

She looked at the list.

“I kept going back to it,” she said, “Until I realized, ‘Oh, it’s actually a poem.’”

She was proud of it.

And for the first time, she felt a weird conflict she would keep coming back to: She liked a poem she had written about her daughter’s death.

“I made this thing, and it gave me a sense of creative satisfaction,” she said. “Which is a good feeling, and it’s weird to have a good feeling writing about the day that Keek died.”

“But,” she added, “It was kind of transformational.”

The writing kept coming. When Hedin cleaned out the refrigerator, she found a non-dairy creamer she had bought for Kiki when she came home for her last Christmas. It had gone sour. She poured it into the sink, watching the expired evidence of her daughter’s life swirl down the drain. She would never buy that creamer again.

So, she wrote a few pages.

Writing had proven itself to be an appealing alternative to blocking out the memories or simply dissolving into tears.

“I don’t even like to say that it helped, because nothing helps,” she said.

“But during that time, Eric and I talked a lot about the difference between sadness and suffering. Because you can’t do anything about the sadness, but you can do something about the suffering.”

Grief is not the enemy

When Kiki was 3, Eric was starting to hate his job. He was a social worker in South Florida, and burnout was getting to him.

The family rented an RV for a weekend trip to get out of town. They loved it so much that when they got back, Hedin and Eric bought a used trailer to fix up and take across the country. From ages 3 to 7, Kiki enjoyed a life of campsites, free-roaming, and quality time with her parents.

“Those years really defined us as a family,” Hedin said. “We got really comfortable with the traveling life and not having a real home, so we always wanted to return to that.”

Hedin and Eric were already planning on living life on the road again before Kiki died. Now, their pilgrimage took on a new meaning.

They left in October. In their trailer, they wandered through the U.S., spending weeks at various campgrounds and state parks. It reminded them of their travels two decades before, and not only because of the nomadic lifestyle; they brought Kiki’s ashes along and sprinkled a little bit at each of the places they’d visited with her.

“It’s really connected us to our past, to our life with her,” Hedin said.

That connection can sting.

Hedin had pushed herself like this before, on a smaller scale. Going to the hairdresser where Kiki used to work; visiting a museum like they used to do together – “It hurts like a physical pain,” she said.

She thought, “Why am I putting myself through this?” Beneath that question was a stronger, underlying tenant: She would not let the grief scare her away from reminders of her daughter’s life. They were all she had left.

“It hurts, but there also is an equal amount of gratitude that I got to have her,” she said.

Like Campbell returning to Joshua Tree, Hedin was reliving the journey on which her family had flourished. She was directly confronting what she’d lost. But that was a good thing.

“The grief is bonded with me, it’s inside of me, but it’s not the enemy,” she said.

“It’s not a malevolent force. It’s a beautiful thing, because the depth of my grief is equivalent to the strength of my love.”

Healing isn’t a process of killing the grief; it’s a process of learning to function with it.

‘I’m alive’

The idea to start a newsletter began as a way to keep in touch with people.

“I thought of it more like, ‘This way I won’t have to talk to anyone on the phone,’” Hedin said.

She decided to commit to publishing one every two weeks, to keep herself accountable. Her platform of choice was Substack – she could post her work, and subscribers would receive it in their inbox. The first week was for drafting, the second was for editing.

Her editing style was less about flowery writing than it was about honesty. “I’d ask myself, ‘Am I saying this because it sounds good?’” she said. “‘Like, is this really the most true way I can say it?’”

Every other Sunday, she sent it out.

The title of her page, “Letters from Turkey Town,” is a reference to a paper town she encountered on the road. To Hedin, the ambiguity of the name mirrors the nature of the content. It can be whatever she wants it to be.

Writing continued to free her. “I’ve been able to say things in writing that I could never say to people,” she said.

And the process brought her a rare sense of peace.

“The creative flow state is a rest for the grieving mind,” she said. “And, it’s – there’s something about creating something that is a declaration of, ‘I’m alive. I’m alive, and there is still something to feel good about.’”

Modern Love

Hedin and Eric were parked at a winery in La Cruces, New Mexico, watching the sunset over the mountains, when she got the email.

An essay she had written would be published in the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column.

“If I’m at the dentist and something horrible is happening, and I need to think of something really happy,” she said, “I’ll think about that moment. I’ll relive it over and over again.”

She got to work with a NYT editor. Her name was printed in the paper.

“I dreamed of that for years,” she said. “For me, the Times was just the ultimate accomplishment.”

She used her page-space to recount her last day with Kiki. Her writing is saturated with detail, and her storytelling is spliced with present-day reflections on grief – and the strange virtues that sometimes sprout from it.

“Eric and I are so careful with each other now,” the essay reads. “We feel the other’s fragility, how we’re on the brink of shattering. We can’t fall apart at the same time though, or there will be nothing to hold us up. So we take turns.

“All those years of wishing he would notice more, ask me about myself, and now that’s what we do, tend to each other. Our days are made up of small kindnesses; he brings me coffee in bed, asks me about my dreams, puts a new bell on my bike. Sometimes we’ll be playing Scrabble and he’ll notice my expression, ask if I’m sad and what I’m thinking before I even realize I’m thinking about her.”

The reaction was immediate.

Emails flooded in from grieving parents, touched by her honesty like she had been by Campbell’s. Her Substack subscriber count skyrocketed. Around the world, people were saying Kiki’s name.

‘She was everywhere’

When the New York Times published her essay, that conflicted feeling returned. “This dream-come-true event would not be happening if Keek hadn’t died,” she wrote in her newsletter.

But she didn’t feel guilty.

Writing was good for her. “It gives me a quality of life that I can’t imagine having otherwise,” she said. “It gives me something to look forward to.”

And it was good for Kiki, too. It wasn’t her death that inspired Hedin to write: it was her life.

“For a long time, I was really focused on the idea that her life had been cut short,” Hedin said. “And I still certainly, all the time, grieve the life she expected and the things she didn’t get to do.”

“But now, I look at it as: There’s a difference between thinking of a life cut short and thinking of a full life, that was also a short life. She lived her whole life.”

Writing couldn’t extend her life, but it could capture and preserve snippets of it. The night that the New York Times essay was published, Hedin felt Kiki buzzing all around her.

“Knowing that people all over the world were reading her story and saying her name,” she said, “I felt like she was everywhere.”

Coming back to New Hampshire, Hedin felt the fresh ache of returning somewhere she’d been with Kiki. The family had stayed at this farm before.

The first week back was hard. “I felt like the sadness had descended, like I’m never going to feel anything but that,” she said.

But by now, she knows that the lows are just part of it.

“I had a realization, the first week she was gone,” she said.

“It just came to me that, ‘Oh, this is forever.’ Not her being dead forever, but this loss – this grief – it’s always going to be there. And that was scary, but also important. Now, I’m not striving to get over it.’”

Sofie Buckminster can be reached at sbuckminster@cmonitor.com.