Guest Post: Grace Bubulka Describes How Telling Her Mother's Story Helped Her Grief Process
Published
By Grace Bubulka
“Congratulations, your book is . . .”
The remainder of the email blurred, its words smearing together. The publisher was congratulating me, or rather trying to congratulate me, on the release of my latest novel, Ida’s Secrets, a 442-page historical tome about my mother’s life, her tragedies and triumphs. This seven-year writing venture had felt complete. I’d been satisfied that I’d successfully captured her story to the best of my ability by cobbling together her own words, supplementing them with facts provided by family and friends, and finally blending in my intimate memories and flashbacks.
But a gut punch doubled me over in my chair. I exhaled hard and refocused on the letters crawling across the screen. I attempted to shake away the feeling in my stomach. It persisted. Within seconds, a sensation of energy rose through my chest and finally settled at the base of my throat.
What was happening? I checked my pulse. As an RN of fifty-one years, I decided that was the sensible thing to do . My heart rate was a little fast, but regular. Lightheadedness closed in. After a few deep breaths, I moved away from my desk, sat on the recliner with my dog Muszka, and started asking myself some questions as if I were one of my patients.
Was I upset about something? Yes.
Was I sad? A little.
Was I heartbroken? Maybe. . . . But why?
The news of my book’s publication had created a vaguely familiar emotional reaction resting deep in the recesses of my psyche. I did not understand. I’d fully expected to be elated when this good news finally arrived. The pressure in my throat reminded me of something. Something that felt just out of reach. Tears stung my eyes.
Was I grief-stricken? Yes.
This mimicked the exact set of sensations I’d experienced three years ago when I read of my friend Mamie’s unexpected death on Villanova University’s alumni obituary page. A shocking gut punch. The strangled choke. An unconscious stream of hot tears. My long-anticipated novel, hot off the press, presented a perplexing personal mystery, and the accompanying sensations mimicked my reaction to Mamie’s death.
It took time. Hours. Slowly, in three distinct segments, I started to understand.
My initial gut reaction echoed famed psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s definition of the earliest stage of grief. The shock was embodied in an “entity” that had been part of my life for years. The practice of writing this complex story, and the learning to write it well, had been a close, everyday, centering partner. Now that the book was finished, that partner was gone. It had left me.
Yes, this was true. But the explanation felt incomplete, so I held Muszka tighter and rocked, still pondering the quandary.
Then, what emerged in my thinking about Ida’s Secrets were more Kubler-Ross stages of grief: denial, guilt, and bargaining. Maybe my novel wasn’t actually finished. Perhaps I should’ve checked on it one more time before releasing it into the world. I realized it wasn’t only the technical writing practice that I missed. The writing itself—the words—had become my surrogate therapist, my personified confidant with whom I shared my mother’s deepest secrets. And my own secrets.
Muszka and I locked eyes at this possible, somewhat imperfect, further explanation for my reaction to the congratulatory email. We struggled out of the recliner, still exploring my surprising grief together, searching for a satisfactory root cause. Suddenly, I stopped mid-pace; it finally all made perfect sense. Yes, I grieved the writing practice and the daily therapy sessions, but there was more . . .
As suddenly as the initial gut punch had leveled me, I was propelled back in time, to 2008, and thrust across three thousand miles to Saint Peter and Paul’s Cemetery in Philadelphia. A sobbing relative was pestering me to kneel with her in the mud of my parents' freshly closed grave. Numb with jet lag, confusion, exhaustion, and sorrow, I refused. Passers-by noted my stiff presence. I registered their disapproval at my lack of respect, my behavior in contrast to the other bereft mourners who demonstrated a theatrical level of piety.
Now, in 2025, seventeen years after my mother’s death, I exhaled as peace now found a place in my heart and rested there. Publishing the book had been a big step toward saying goodbye to my mother, but I also needed to do so in my body—in my head and in my heart. Once I understood, I was finally able to do that.
The next morning, FedEx delivered a hefty box containing twelve, shiny, brown/gold author copies of Ida’s Secrets. Book by book, I tenderly placed them on my bookshelf, smiling at my mother’s profile on each cover.
I know she smiled back at me.
Grace Bubulka is a retired pediatric trauma nurse and a violin teacher who lives on the Central Coast of California with her dog, Muszka. In addition to Ida’s Secrets, she has published two other books: Beyond This Reality: A Personal Account of the Near Death Experience, a spiritual memoir, and Heartstrings, a middle grade novel.