Healing Words That Carried My Grief  

The envelope arrived on a Tuesday morning, its edges slightly frayed from transit. Outside my kitchen window, spring blossoms trembled in a breeze that carried neither comfort nor malice—just the indifferent movement of air through a world that had, nine years ago, stopped making sense. My daughter had been thirty-five years old.

Between my fingers, this particular card felt different from the others that had flooded in during those first impossible weeks. Most condolence cards followed predictable patterns: lilies on ivory stock, Psalms typeset in cursive, hollowed-out phrases about ‘better places.’ But this one… this one contained words that didn’t try to mend what couldn’t be fixed. Someone had sent me a photocopied letter written in 1942 by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French aviator who wrote The Little Prince while exiled in New York during the war.

At 3:17 AM later that week—one of those hours when grief becomes a physical presence in the room—I found myself hunched over my writing desk, tracing the pilot’s inky fingerprints on the photocopied page. He’d been struggling to complete Flight to Arras under crushing deadlines while yearning to rejoin his fighter squadron. Yet even amidst aerial combat and political turmoil, he wrote to his translator: ‘I believe the carpenter should plane his board as if it were essential to the earth’s rotation. This applies even more to writing.’

The radiator hissed. My tea went cold. And in that moment, through salt-blurred vision, I understood something fundamental about healing through writing: true craft isn’t about smoothing edges, but about honoring the raw grain of experience. Saint-Exupéry’s words became my unexpected life raft—not because they lessened the pain, but because they revealed how writing could become both memorial and metamorphosis.

What followed were months of dark-of-night writing sessions where I learned what every grieving artist eventually discovers: tears make terrible ink, but they’re the only medium that matters. The French aviator had confessed rewriting single phrases twenty-five times; I now understood why. Precision becomes sacred when you’re carving epitaphs in language. Each revision of my daughter’s story—each adjustment of metaphor, each recalibration of rhythm—felt like planing that proverbial board: not to erase the knots and whorls of memory, but to reveal their essential patterns.

Even now, writing this, the old wound pulses. But so does the truth Saint-Exupéry gifted me that spring: writing doesn’t heal by covering scars—it heals by transforming them into compass points. The card still sits above my desk, its edges now softened by handling, its message clearer with each passing year. Some losses can’t be fixed, only carried. And sometimes, the weight becomes the work itself.

The Carpenter’s Plane and the Pilot’s Pen

Nine years ago, when grief first carved its hollow space in my life, I found unexpected solace in a letter written by a French aviator seventy years prior. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1942 correspondence to his translator arrived to me as both compass and chisel – tools to reshape pain into precision. His words about carpenters planing boards with cosmic significance revealed what my mourning heart needed to understand: writing isn’t therapy, but alchemy.

The Weight of Wood and War

Saint-Exupéry composed his letter while exiled in New York, simultaneously crafting Flight to Arras and aching to rejoin France’s aerial battles. This tension between creative duty and combat urgency birthed his now-legendary writing philosophy. The original manuscript (preserved at the Morgan Library) shows ink-smudged repetitions where he honed sentences like a mechanic tuning an engine – each word bearing the weight of a life’s meaning compressed into wartime prose.

Modern writers face different pressures – the algorithm’s demand for virality rather than Vichy France’s censorship – yet the core struggle remains identical. Whether facing Nazi flak or Twitter’s backlash, we all confront how to:

1. Measure depth (emotional truth vs. engagement metrics)
2. Choose materials (precise vocabulary as lumber selection)
3. Work against time (publishing deadlines or mortality itself)

The 25-Pass Method

That stained draft page containing “rewrote twenty-five times” wasn’t hyperbole. Examining his Wind, Sand and Stars revisions reveals:

• Structural changes: Entire chapters rearranged like aircraft components
• Lexical shifts: “Danger” becoming “peril” then “precipice” across versions
• Rhythm refinement: Sentences shortened to match a pilot’s staccato breathing during turbulence

Contemporary neuroscience confirms what Saint-Exupéry intuited: this repetitive process literally rewires the brain. MRI scans show veteran writers develop:

• Thicker insular cortex (emotional granularity)
• Enhanced default mode network (memory integration)
• Strengthened arcuate fasciculus (word-meaning connections)

Your Personal Flight Manual

Try this adaptation of his technique:

1. First Draft: Write raw as engine exhaust (don’t edit)
2. Tenth Pass: Cut 30% like excess aircraft weight
3. Twentieth Pass: Add sensory details – the smell of oil, the vibration of wings
4. Final Pass: Read aloud at cockpit volume (whisper-shouting works)

My daughter’s memorial essay went through 27 versions. Draft 14 contained clichés about “angels”; draft 21 found precision in describing her childhood habit of tracing cloud shapes with mittened hands. That specificity – the woolen texture, the cold air – carried more truth than any abstraction.

Saint-Exupéry disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944, but his words keep flying. When your writing stalls, ask his essential question: Am I planing this sentence as if the world’s balance depends on its smoothness? The answer lifts every word beyond the page.

The Secret of Twenty-Five Rewrites

The Evolution of a Masterpiece

Saint-Exupery’s handwritten drafts of The Little Prince reveal what his letter described – the relentless pursuit of perfection through revision. The famous opening sequence, where the narrator describes his childhood drawing of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant, underwent seventeen documented transformations before reaching its final form. Early versions show:

• Version 3: Clumsy explanations about ‘adult blindness’
• Version 9: The introduction of the hat metaphor
• Version 14: Streamlined dialogue removing didactic tones
• Final Version: The crystalline simplicity we know today

This evolution mirrors what psychologists call ‘creative distillation’ – the process where raw experience becomes universal symbol. When rewriting about my daughter, I discovered this same pattern: early drafts overflowed with personal anguish (“The hospital machines beeped like broken metronomes”), while later versions found power in restraint (“Her last breath carried three decades of laughter”).

The Dual-Axis Revision Framework

For writers transforming pain into art, I developed this assessment tool:

A practical example from Flight to Arras manuscripts: Saint-Exupery’s description of night flying evolved from technical specifications (Rewrite 2) to philosophical meditation (Rewrite 19), finally achieving its lyrical perfection (Rewrite 25) about ‘stars becoming lighthouses of the infinite.’

Your Turn: The Rewriting Challenge

Try this exercise with your most personal writing:

1. First Draft: Write without stopping (set a 10-minute timer)
2. Fifth Draft: Remove all adjectives
3. Tenth Draft: Reconstruct using only metaphors
4. Fifteenth Draft: Cut word count by 40%
5. Final Draft: Read aloud until no words feel unnecessary

Which version surprised you most? Share your breakthrough moment in the comments – we learn as much from each other’s revisions as from masterpieces.

Behind every seemingly effortless sentence in literature lies what Hemingway called ‘the dignity of movement of an iceberg’ – the visible beauty supported by unseen labor. Those twenty-five rewrites aren’t obsessive; they’re how we honor both our craft and our ghosts.

When Words Become Lifeboats

In the fifth draft of my daughter’s memorial piece, I described her passing with clinical precision: “She died at 35 from complications.” The words sat on the page like sterile instruments in an operating room – accurate yet devoid of warmth. By the twenty-third rewrite, the same moment transformed: “Her light left at dawn, leaving our family’s constellation forever altered.”

The Engineering of Emotion

Saint-Exupery understood what every pilot knows – survival depends on structural integrity. His aircraft designs followed strict load-bearing calculations, just as his writing obeyed emotional physics. When crafting my daughter’s story, I applied similar principles:

1. Fuselage Framework (Narrative Structure):

• Draft 5: Chronological timeline
• Final: Spiral structure orbiting core memories

1. Oxygen Mask Protocol (Reader Engagement):

• Early versions drowned in personal grief
• Published piece balanced universal themes of parental love

1. Black Box Recorder (Authentic Preservation):

• Included verbatim text messages showing her humor
• Preserved the cadence of her laughter through rhythmic prose

The Weight-to-Lift Ratio

Aviation engineers measure efficiency by how much meaning can soar with minimal verbal weight. My breakthrough came when comparing these versions:

This precision didn’t diminish emotion – it gave grief wings. Like Saint-Exupery’s trimmed prose in Flight to Arras, every eliminated syllable increased altitude.

Navigation Beacons

Certain phrases became fixed stars in my rewriting galaxy:

• “The way she pronounced ‘tomorrow’ with three syllables when excited” (sensory anchor)
• “Her hospital bracelet kept time with the monitors” (symbolic chronometer)
• “We didn’t lose her – we simply must love her differently now” (perspective shift)

These crystallized moments serve the same purpose as an aircraft’s emergency locator transmitter – ensuring what matters most continues sending signals.

The Unfinished Manifest

Creative writing professor Roy Peter Clark suggests treating important pieces as “permanent drafts.” My daughter’s story now has:

• A sealed envelope with handwritten additions
• Digital files dated annually with new reflections
• Marginalia from readers who never met her

Like Saint-Exupery’s recovered wreckage that still inspires, these fragments form an ongoing memorial beyond marble or bronze. The writing continues bearing witness, continues carrying love forward – one carefully planed word at a time.

The Words That Remain

The card sits on my desk still, its edges softened by nine years of handling. The ink hasn’t faded, just as the memory hasn’t dimmed. What made these particular words so extraordinary wasn’t their eloquence—it was their truth. They didn’t soften the blow of loss; they honored its weight. Like Saint-Exupery’s twenty-five rewrites, these sentences had been distilled to their essence.

“Her laughter was compass points—when you heard it, you knew which way was home.”

This final version emerged after twenty-four attempts to capture what couldn’t be contained. Early drafts overflowed with adjectives; version seven drowned in metaphor. By the fifteenth rewrite, I understood what the French aviator meant about planing wood—each pass strips away excess to reveal the grain beneath.

Creative writing becomes sacred when it transforms private anguish into universal language. My daughter’s story in its final form helps strangers recognize their own losses. A reader in Oslo emailed last winter: “Your ‘compass points’ line made me dig up my sister’s voicemails.” That’s when writing stops being solitary craftsmanship and becomes communal healing.

Saint-Exupery disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944, yet his words keep flying. My daughter left no physical children, but her essence lives in these paragraphs that others now carry. The card’s message—originally meant for me alone—has become a shared monument, its words recarved by every reader who finds their own story in its lines.

Flight Log:
Final approach completed
Coordinates: 41.8781° N, 87.6298° W
Date: May 17, 2024

Your turn now—what pain have you rewritten until it became a gift?