7

“My Pen Shall Heal, Not Hurt”: Writing as Therapy in Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythes Are Quoted

MELANIE J. FISHBANE

Literary scholars have long shown interest in how an author’s personal loss, specifically a death, fuels his or her creative work. Harold K. Bush Jr, for instance, explores how the death of Mark Twain’s daughter, Susy, characterizes the author’s later work; Keverne Smith considers how the death of William Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, changes the way in which the playwright discusses and describes death and grieving in his plays; and Christian Riegel focuses on how the death of Margaret Laurence’s mother when Laurence was young informs her fiction, arguing that Laurence’s writing about grief and the grieving process is an attempt to bring back what has been lost.1

Writing has always been a form of meditation for me. At thirteen, I started a journal, and at various stages of my life, I have turned to writing non-fiction and poetry, and recently to finding my voice in young adult fiction, to seek understanding and heal wounds. Creative writing instructors and theorists have much to say on this. Anne Paris suggests that immersion in a creative endeavour can be good for one’s psychological health.2 Sheppard B. Kominars argues with his “Write for Life” workshops that the act of journal writing can heal the body, mind, and spirit. Richard Stamelman takes this one step further, stating, “Writing is an act of survivorship; it is what the survivor does in order to keep on going, to understand what has happened in his or her own life, and to give form, shape, and sound to the pain of losing.”3 Susan Zimmermann provides daily exercises to help people transform their grief and loss through writing and argues that the “act of writing brings a structure and order to the chaos of grief.”4 One of Natalie Goldberg’s writing exercises challenges writers to think deeply about why they write and to see how writing permeates their lives. “Writing is not therapy,” she states, “though it may have a therapeutic effect.” She continues: “Writing is deeper than therapy. You write through your pain, and even your suffering must be written out and let go of.”5

For these personal and professional reasons, Montgomery’s writing out of and through her grief has intrigued me. As an outlet that allowed her to retreat into her ideal world when the real one “bruised [her] spirit,” writing brought Montgomery great pleasure and often relief. Whether it was in her journal or fiction, from an early age she used writing as a productive way to cope with what she had learned were inappropriate emotions. Writing provided a means to channel her darker moods and doubts about self and society. In a letter to G.B. MacMillan dated 3 December 1905, Montgomery tells him, “When I get very desperate I retreat into my realms of cloudland and hold delightful imaginary dialogues with the shadowy, congenial shapes I meet there. It is not so satisfying as the reality of such might be but it is far better than to let one’s soul slip down to sodden levels for lack of the stimulation which comes from the flash and meeting of other intellects.”6 As Goldberg says, writing “is an opportunity to take the emotions we have felt many times and give them light, color and a story.”7 Through her creation and recreation of characters such as Anne, Rilla, and Walter, in Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythes Are Quoted, written two decades apart, Montgomery tapped into what writer Anne Lamott counsels in her craft book Bird by Bird: “You must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things.”8 Perhaps recalling Emily Dickinson’s “Dare you see a soul at the white heat,” Robert Olin Butler echoes Goldberg’s and Lamott’s challenge to write from the emotional “white hot center”: “You have to go down into that deepest, darkest, most rolling, white-hot place . . . whatever scared the hell out of you down there – and there’s plenty – you have to go in there; down into the deepest part of it, and you can’t flinch, you can’t walk away.”9 Montgomery intuitively understood how emotions and craft worked in tandem to inform one’s art; she writes in her journal on 8 April 1898, recalling the occasion of her grandfather Macneill’s death, which prompts memories of her mother’s funeral, “I am going to write it out fully and completely, even if every word cuts me to the heart. I have always found that the writing out of a pain makes it at least bearable.”10 This idea later finds its way into Emily of New Moon, when Emily pours her pain over her father’s death into letters to him: “When she had covered the backs of four letter-bills she could see to write no more. But she had emptied out her soul and it was once more free from evil passions.”11

This relationship between pain and writing aligns with my interest in how a writer’s personal history affects his or her craft. Did Montgomery’s periods of depression affect her creative impulse? What does her creative process reveal about her psychological health? How did writing help her balance her hypersensitive, moody, and brooding nature with the discipline, self-control, and dignity her grandparents had expected of her and that were required of her as a Presbyterian minister’s wife and mother of two boys after she moved to Ontario?

Riegel’s research on Margaret Laurence is suggestive for the study of Montgomery. Riegel examines how “death and mourning [are] pervasive in Laurence’s writing, [and how] her personal life was deeply informed by her first-hand experience of death.” Laurence’s posthumously published memoir often discusses the profound effect her mother’s death had on her life and her writing. Riegel argues that, as part of working through the grieving process, mourners engage in attempts to bring back what has been lost, and for Laurence that meant writing fiction that explored autobiographical material. Riegel says that this is “work that needs doing, as in the psychological, social, and cultural processes of mourning themselves; and work that results from mourning, as in the creatively articulated texts that result from grief.”12 By giving her characters Morag and Hagar the opportunity to grieve, Laurence could also revisit her own complicated feelings about her mother’s death and loss. Similarly, William Thompson and Caroline Jones in this volume examine this theme with reference to Montgomery. Thompson (chapter 6) shows a direct link between Anne’s grief over the death of Joyce in Anne’s House of Dreams and Montgomery’s own mourning over the death of her stillborn son, which marks a shift in Anne’s character that can be seen throughout the rest of the Anne series; Jones (chapter 5) presents a compelling argument on how Montgomery processed her complex feelings around motherhood through Anne, Valancy, Pat, and Jane.

As seen throughout this collection, the publication of Montgomery’s Selected Journals and now of her Complete Journals has allowed Montgomery studies to make connections between her life writing and fiction. Within this significant area of Montgomery research, my interest focuses on how personal losses inform her fiction to create grief narratives in which storytelling is tied to the attempt to make meaning out of profound sadness. While personal storytelling is an accepted method in grief counselling, my interest is not clinical but driven rather by my need as a writer to understand and illuminate another’s writing out of psychological and emotional desolation. My interest rests also on the link between emotion and craft, on the techniques that transpose the personal experience into the creative work. The compulsion to create through suffering is particularly relevant when applied to the tumultuous years leading up to and through Montgomery’s writing Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythes Are Quoted. This chapter thus explores how Montgomery uses her characters to question public and private forms of grieving and how the act of writing and reading or hearing words is part of her characters’ mourning process.

Rilla of Ingleside centres on Anne and Gilbert Blythe’s youngest teenage daughter, Rilla, during the First World War. Scholarly work on this novel focuses on the tragedies that characterized Montgomery’s life before, during, and after this war as well as her obsession with the war and the interpretation of her views of women’s roles during wartime. Montgomery’s loss of her stillborn son, Hugh, on 13 August 1914, the impact of the war on her psyche, and the death of her best friend and cousin, Frede, of the Spanish influenza on 25 January 1919, set the stage for this wartime novel. A few months after Frede’s death, on 24 August 1919, Montgomery writes in her journal, “This afternoon I was alone and bitterly lonely. I took a wild spasm of longing for Frede. It seemed to me that I could not go on living without her – and that it was no use to try.”13 Rilla was born out of this rubble of emotional turmoil, as Montgomery started writing it six weeks after Frede’s death and would later dedicate it to her “true friend.” As Mary Beth Cavert discusses in chapter 2, Rilla is the fictional response to these losses and to the deaths of three young soldiers from Leaskdale to whom Montgomery dedicated Rainbow Valley.

Scholars of women’s history have given much attention to the importance of journal and memoir writing in the evolution of women’s literature. In many cases, these personal writings gave women the means to articulate suppressed female perspectives. In Grief in Wartime: Private Pain, Public Discourse, Carol Acton suggests that during wartime, the diary emerged as a way for writers to control their experience through language and create a narrative in which they participated with the “self as a central character.”14 Acton examines the different private narratives of grief and the discourses that controlled the public expressions of that grief. While product advertisements from the period often glamourized weeping and mourning women, the diary allowed women to explore honest expressions of grief in private. As the development of a female literary tradition shows, journal and memoir writing constitutes a significant part of women’s literature. During wartime, the diary provided a literary form for women in which they could voice their war experiences in a safe place – that is, outside of the mainstream public discourse with its strictures on acceptable emotional responses.

In Rilla of Ingleside, Montgomery varies her narrative methods to reflect different expressions of grief and mourning during the period. A third-person omnipresent narrator acts as the public voice, whereas Rilla’s journal, which slowly develops and becomes the dominant point of view in a number of chapters, functions as a way to show private expressions or observations of grief as well as to give voice to those whose perspectives have been historically silenced.15 As the diarist, Rilla is the observer, the record keeper, of grief. When Jem goes off to war, she writes, “I shall never forget Susan’s face when Jem came home in his khaki. It worked and twisted as if she were going to cry, but all she said was, ‘You look almost like a man in that, Jem.’” Susan’s public teasing covers what Rilla (privately) detects as the family housekeeper’s worry. Rilla also recounts Anne’s emotional reaction when Susan mentions in passing that the mayflowers are blooming in Rainbow Valley: “Her face changed and she gave a queer little choked cry. Most of the time mother is so spunky and gay you would never guess what she feels inside; but now and then some little thing is too much for her and we see under the surface. ‘Mayflowers!’ she said. ‘Jem brought me mayflowers last year!’ and she got up and went out of the room.”16 While propriety demands that Anne should hide her feelings in public, Rilla’s diary entry reveals her own and others’ true emotional states.

Indeed, Montgomery shows the kinds of pressure women were under as twice in the novel the already vilified Irene Howard accuses Rilla of not behaving appropriately. In both circumstances, Rilla chooses to keep her emotions to herself and show a distant “businesslike” attitude to the world and continue her work with the Junior Red Cross. The first occurs when Walter leaves for the front and Irene tells Olive, “You would never suppose . . . that Walter had left for the front only this morning. But some people really have no depth of feeling. I often wish I could take things as lightly as Rilla Blythe.” The second occurs after Walter dies, when Irene claims that “every one is talking about” Rilla’s calm demeanour and refusal to wear mourning garb, which she does out of respect for her mother’s wishes.17 Despite being an emotionally shallow gossip, Irene represents the larger society’s attitudes towards the public’s idea of appropriate grieving. Yet through Rilla’s journal, we are aware that she and her family feel a profound loss over her brother’s going to war and his subsequent death.

Rilla also observes and records the inner life of those beyond her immediate family. Gertrude Oliver returns to work immediately after hearing that her fiancé, Robert Grant, is missing and possibly dead, but Rilla’s private narrative reveals Gertrude’s anguish: “I heard Gertrude walking up and down her room most of the night . . . And once I heard her give a dreadful sudden little cry as if she had been stabbed.” And later, when Rilla tells Gertrude that her fiancé is still alive, the diary bears witness to Gertrude’s collapse: “She said, ‘Rob – is – living,’ as if the words were torn out of her, and flung herself on her bed and cried and cried and cried . . . All the tears that she hadn’t shed all that week came then. She cried most of last night.”18 Here we see what was publicly expected of Gertrude in contrast to what Rilla’s journal reveals about her friend’s private grief. Through Rilla’s journaling, Montgomery gives Anne, Susan, and Gertrude a space to reveal their true grief, while highlighting the public pressure to mourn in private.

When Walter dies, however, Montgomery chooses the third-person perspective, giving her readers a compassionate distance from Rilla’s pain. In response to the news that Walter has been killed in action at Courcelette, Rilla “crumpled up in a pitiful little heap of merciful unconsciousness” in her father’s arms. “Nor did she waken to her pain for many hours.” The profound emptiness that follows the loss of a loved one is keenly observed, as Anne lies “ill from grief and shock,” and Rilla realizes that she must “go on with existence, since existence had still to be reckoned with.” Yet, later when Rilla is in bed, she cries “the bitter rebellious tears of youth until at last tears were all wept out and the little patient ache that was to be in her heart until she died” takes a permanent hold.19 This perspective indicates how devastating Walter’s death is for Rilla; she cannot even write about it. She is hollow. Instead, she goes through her daily life as expected and then weeps until she is left with a dull emptiness. Through shifting perspectives and changes in narrative form, Montgomery provides insight into public and private notions of grief and pushes her characters to their emotional core.

Words also have the power to bring solace to a grieving heart. When Rilla receives the letter Walter wrote the evening before he died, she reads it in the same spot in Rainbow Valley where she sat with him at the beginning of the novel. The power of his words lifts her spirits: “Walter, of the glorious gift and the splendid ideals, still lived, with just the same gift and just the same ideals. That could not be destroyed – these could suffer no eclipse. The personality that had expressed itself in that last letter, written on the eve of Courcelette, could not be snuffed out by a German bullet. It must carry on, though the earthly link with things of earth were broken.” Here, in the light, Rilla can find the strength to move beyond her grief for a moment and find solace. Similarly, after being worried that Kenneth might be drowned at sea, she receives his first love letter from the front and finds a moment of peace in his way of “expressing things in a few poignant, significant words which seemed to suggest far more than they uttered, and never grew stale or flat or foolish with ever so many scores of reading.”20 While the act of writing allows her to work through her emotions and show the conflicting ideologies between private and public forms of grieving, the act of reading can also be a balm for pain.

Montgomery further explores these themes in her final novel, The Blythes Are Quoted, in which writing and reading are an important part of the Blythe family’s healing. As Benjamin Lefebvre outlines, it is impossible to know when Montgomery started writing this novel because the three typescripts that survive in the Guelph archives are undated.21 Still, we can ascertain that Montgomery was writing The Blythes approximately twenty years after Rilla of Ingleside and after a number of years of personal struggle.

Both Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythes Are Quoted were written after or during times of war, but because The Blythes is so new to Montgomery scholarship, there is still much we do not know. Montgomery’s journal stops in 1939 with only two more entries before her death in 1942. And while we have some clues in her correspondences with G.B. MacMillan and Ephraim Weber, much is clouded in Montgomery’s emotional fog. Her last journal entry on the 23 March 1942 is of a woman deep in despair: “My mind is gone – everything in the world I lived for has gone – the world has gone mad. I shall be driven to end my life. Oh God, forgive me. Nobody dreams what my awful position is.”22 The final journal entries, her letters, and the note left by her bedside the day she died provide a complex story of the author’s overall declining physical and mental health.23

As with Montgomery’s time leading up to writing Rilla of Ingleside, a series of personal tragedies from 1937 onwards inspired the themes in The Blythes Are Quoted. The Second World War was looming, and the loss of life – both present and past – weighed heavily on her. The death on 18 January 1937 of a beloved cat, Lucky, who seemed to give her more companionship than the people in her life, deeply affected her. Her vigil by his deathbed speaks to her devotion to him, and even years later, she continued to miss him. Soon after Lucky’s death, she found and recorded the “ten-year letters” that she and Frede had written in 1907 and 1917 and spoke of dreaming of Frede. Chester’s graduation reminded her of not only how much Frede had loved him but also how much she continued to miss her friend: “the pain of her loss has grown bearable but it has never ceased – and never will.”24 As Kate Sutherland’s discussion in chapter 12 on the Canadian Authors Association indicates, Montgomery was also suffering with the loss of her literary reputation. With Ewan’s declining mental health and Chester’s betrayals, her world was crumbling. In 23 February 1938 and 23 July 1939, she reports to MacMillan that she had severe sciatica pain and insomnia and had fallen, hurting her arm so badly that her ability to write was compromised, meaning that she did not have this emotional outlet on which she had depended so heavily throughout her life.25

It is difficult to know exactly the extent to which ill health affected Montgomery’s creative process, but her journal entries clearly indicate that her usual strategies to channel adversity into creativity were failing her. In an entry dated 28 August 1937, she complains, “I have felt a little better today and was able to do a little spade work on my book. But I had no heart for it. All my old pleasure in my work is gone – I can’t lose myself in it.”26 Writers experience creative cycles and often have “blocks,” during which they are unable to find joy in their work and lose faith that they will ever find that spark again. That The Blythes Are Quoted did come to fruition shows that Montgomery found the creative will she needed to continue to write and that through craft she was still exploring the emotions of grief and loss.

The Blythes Are Quoted becomes a companion novel to Rilla of Ingleside because both have similar subjects, which echo many of the situations Montgomery was dealing with later in life. However, the idealism and hope that characterize the final pages of Rilla have disappeared. While words and writing are the elements that the Blythes use to work through their grief, there is little reprieve, reflecting Montgomery’s despair at a world heading back to war, which may very well require the participation of her now-adult sons.

The Blythes Are Quoted features Anne and Gilbert and their family at Ingleside and is divided into sections of poetry, dialogue (or vignettes), and short stories. Part 1 is set before the First World War, and Part 2 begins after this war, concluding after the start of the Second World War. While there are changes in perspective within the short stories, Montgomery’s experimentation with different styles has been of greatest interest to scholars. As Lefebvre notes, while Anne and Gilbert speak often in staged dialogue, they are rarely in the stories and instead are made “the objects of gossip.”27 Thus the poetry and prose illuminate how various family members behave in the privacy of their own home. Elizabeth Epperly explores why Montgomery grouped these pieces and why there is no easy closure for the Blythes.28 These are compelling questions, particularly when we consider how Montgomery was trying to reframe her best-known characters into a post–World War I world – a world from which she felt alienated. After Frede’s death, Montgomery writes how she is now living in two worlds, one before the war and one after: “I have lived one life in those seemingly far-off years before the war. Now there is another to be lived, in a totally new world where I think I shall never feel quite at home.” When she starts writing Rilla of Ingleside, Montgomery specifically connects this idea to Anne, who “belongs to the green, untroubled pastures and still waters of the world before the war.”29

The fragments of prose, poetry, and story are one way that Montgomery addressed this divide because then she had to stay within these broken spaces only for a short time. While many of these pieces were appropriated from previous works, especially the short stories, by reframing the poetry and dialogues within this context, Montgomery tells a different story, one that reflects the Blythes in a new light. In “Fancy’s Fool,” for example, Allardyce’s perception of the Blythes, while a reflection of his own character and his annoyance that Anne has not responded to his flirtations, suggests how others see them. When Allardyce believes that his fiancée, Esme, will do whatever she is told, the narrator indicates that, even if Gilbert told him differently, Allardyce would not believe him because he “did not know Dr. Blythe or would not have had much opinion of his views if he had.”30 The Blythes may not be the main story, but Allardyce’s petulance underlines his dismissal not only of Gilbert and the prominence in which the community holds him as a doctor and counsellor but also of the family’s esteemed position generally.

Within each poem and dialogue, similar threads connect Rilla of Ingleside to The Blythes Are Quoted, such as Walter’s poem “The Piper,” which differentiates the call to arms in the First World War from that in the Second World War, showcasing how Montgomery’s perspective has changed since the earlier novel, and with the expectation that her readers would know of Walter’s fate. Montgomery, as narrator, indicates that readers have often asked her for the poem that Walter wrote in Rilla and explains that at that time “the poem had no real existence” but has been “written recently.” Only with the threat of the Second World War looming does she find the “white hot center” she needed to write it. The narrator even says that the poem feels “more appropriate now than then.”31

Like Rilla, who writes in her diary as a way to handle emotionally what is happening in the outside world, in The Blythes Are Quoted, Anne and Walter write poetry to channel their grief and anger, poetry that the family now turns to as a way to heal their suffering. As Susan muses, “As far as I can understand it, writing poetry is just putting into rhyme what everyone feels,” thus giving Montgomery an opportunity through character to describe how important the act of writing is to the writer’s emotional well-being. While there is a haunting tone in Anne’s poetry in the first half of the novel, that tone turns morbid after Walter’s death. In response to Anne’s reciting her gothic poem “The Bride Dreams,” Susan thinks that Anne never wrote so darkly before Walter’s death. After Gilbert suggests that Anne’s writing in “The Wind” is so strong because she is healing, Anne replies, “But the scar will always be there, Gilbert,” confirming that, even though she is writing, the pain still lingers and the scar is a permanent reminder of the family’s loss. When Anne finishes writing one of Walter’s poems, “The Parting Soul,” which he started before he “went away,” the poem becomes her tribute to her son and brings mother and son together through words.32 Anne is moved by her grief to write verse that might be darker than what she had written before because it speaks to her suffering, which may be eased but never completely vanquished.

Walter’s natural inclination to use words to understand his world echoes that of his mother and younger sister. The poem “The Aftermath” was written on the battlefield, perhaps on the same night he wrote his letter to Rilla, and the tone is one of regret, combined with the boldness and bloodthirstiness of battle, the effectiveness of propaganda, and the belief that what the soldiers were doing meant something. It is the only poem that Anne reads that was written while Walter was at war. As opposed to Walter’s “I Want,” written before the war, which describes the virtues of country life, the darkness in “The Aftermath” addresses Walter’s personal shift.33 The soldier wishes to forget the person he killed, wishes to forget the blood of the battlefield, even wishes to forget his own cowardly nature, but he cannot, reminding the Blythes that Walter was once perceived as a coward and even thought of himself as one for not fighting.34 Walter’s poetry shapes the narrative and emotional arc of The Blythes Are Quoted and raises difficult questions concerning patriotism and self-sacrifice.

For the Blythes, hearing and reading poetry allow them to work through their grief and reconnect with the dead. While Walter destroyed most of his poems before leaving, he bequeathed a few to his mother. Now in the evenings, Anne reads Walter’s and her own poetry partly to keep “his memory keenly alive in the hearts of his brothers and sisters and partly to please Susan, who now treasured every scrap of Walter’s scribblings,” signifying that words – whether written, read, or recited – carry the energy of the person who penned them and have the power to heal, even if simply during the experience of connection they provide. When Jem leans over and whispers to his wife that he wonders if reading Walter’s poems is good for Anne, Faith says, “Yes, it is. It helps an old ache. Do you think if you hadn’t come back from that German prison I wouldn’t have cherished and reread every letter you ever wrote me?”35 Her answer shows how important Jem’s words were for her while he was missing and how, although not an absolute cure, words do help Anne.

As the poetry becomes multi-layered in meaning between the life before Walter’s death and the grief that follows, the dialogue accompanying each poem contributes to the melancholy and sombre tone. In Part 1, Anne’s poem “Sea Song” may be discussing the lure of the sea and was originally inspired by Captain Jim’s Lifebook, but there is also the idea of a very different kind of call – the call to war. The lines “Sing to me / Of the terror and lure of the sea, / Of the beautiful creatures it clasped to death . . . / Wondrous-eyed children, women fair” speak of this dangerous lure. As the conversation following the poem “Grief” indicates, the meaning of the poem shifts after Walter’s death. The poem personalizes “Grief” as a faithful companion who accompanies the narrator wherever s/he goes, replacing “Joy,” also capitalized as if it were a person, possibly again reminding readers of Anne’s loss of baby Joyce:

Music lost its tender grace

When I looked on her grim face,

Flowers no more were sweet for me,

Sunshine lost its witchery,

Laughter hid itself in fear

Of that Presence dour and drear,

Little dreams in pale dismay

Made all haste to steal away.

In the poem’s last line, although Grief leaves, there is still an ache, which works in tandem with the dialogue that follows. Anne discounts the last line, saying that she had written the poem when Matthew died but has since learned that “some griefs are more faithful,” to which Una Meredith responds, “Ah, indeed yes.”36

In this final work, Montgomery explores how writing and reading poetry can be a form of therapy. If, as Kominars argues, the act of journal writing is a form of therapy, it seems that Montgomery certainly understood the power that it had in her own life. Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythes Are Quoted were written after a number of years of intense emotional, physical, and psychological circumstances that shook Montgomery’s foundation, forcing her to change her worldview. Written twenty years apart, these novels show a writer who knew that the only way to her story’s truth was by writing through her own experience, however painful it might be. Anne’s story ends not with a blissful dream but with more questions. Epperly writes, “Montgomery the artist triumphs in shaping this final book: there is no easy closure for Anne’s story, and we care how and why this is so.”37 What is it about some losses – such as the death of Frede – that they can never be totally forgotten and the pain completely relieved? Why do writing and reading fail Montgomery in the end? These are questions that writers throughout this volume come back to and address from various angles.

Although healing is about coming to terms with loss, there is always something more to discover. Part of the joy of writing from the perspective of Dickinson’s “soul at white heat” is the journey to Butler’s “white-hot center” and the discovery of “the flash” (to use Emily Byrd Starr’s term) found there. Montgomery’s grief narratives are the creative manifestations of a writer who was compelled to channel her emotions into her fiction – even if that meant, as in The Blythes Are Quoted, a revisiting and revising of older texts, laden with memories. Both these novels speak to lost ideals, lost hope, and a family coping with loss, experiences of which Montgomery had intimate knowledge. Although she intuitively channelled her anxiety and pain through her characters, finding the heart of her fictional stories, this became more difficult towards the end of her life, which her later fiction reflects. Through writing fiction, Montgomery found a way back to her heart and to her own story, whatever form that story might take.