When Bad Things Happen to Us or to Others--Dealing with Deep Emotion in Your Writing

I was in my forties when I experienced my first up-close-and-personal death.  Elderly relatives passed away when I was younger, but I was young, and although I missed them, often terribly, the deaths didn't have the same impact as when a close contemporary died.

Jan was not a close friend, but she was a person I admired.  She was intensely creative, a qu…