After the death of her younger brother, Mary struggled to find words to express the unbearable weight of her grief, even privately to herself. Rather than fill hours with long-form writing which proved mentally and emotionally exhausting, she explored haiku as a way to portion out conflicted feelings into manageable bites to deal with a little at a time. The structure and brevity of haiku poems provide her a tiny measure of control and composure over what feels like a bottomless pit of sadness.