Sooner or later, every writer I coach brings me the one they have been afraid to write. The divorce. The diagnosis. The year the business went under. The child they lost, or nearly lost. They know there is a book in it, because it is the biggest thing that ever happened to them, and they are right. They also cannot make it work on the page, and they do not understand why, because every word of it is true.
That is exactly why.
What happened to you is a set of facts. A story is a shape. The facts of a hard year do not come with a shape, they come in the order they came, and most of the time the order is the least interesting thing about them. Write it down straight and you get a report. It is honest and it is yours, and the reader, who was not there, feels like they are being handed somebody else's photographs.
The work of fiction is to take what you know from having lived it, the feeling, the weight, the exact thing it does to a person, and hang it on a shape a stranger can walk through.
Keep the weight, change the facts
Here is the first move, and it is the hardest one, because it feels like a betrayal. Change the facts. Change who it happened to. Change where. Change the object at the center of it. If your father's illness is the true story, write a brother. If it was a house, write a boat. Move it to a town you have never lived in.
What you keep is the thing underneath. What it is like to sit in a waiting room at two in the morning holding a paper cup of coffee you do not want. What it is like to be the one who has to make the phone calls. The specific way anger and tenderness get tangled up when you are caring for somebody who did not always care for you. That knowledge is the gold. The facts were only the place you found it.
When you change the facts, two things happen. You get the distance you need to see the shape of it, and the reader gets a story that is nobody's, which means it can be theirs.
Give it to somebody who wants something
Grief on its own does not move. A character in grief who wants something does. In Writer's Block, Stu Remington has lost his family and cannot finish a sentence, and for a while that is all he is. The story starts when he wants something, when an old typewriter turns up that can give him back what he lost, and he has to decide what he is willing to do to get it. The want turns the grief into a road.
So ask the question of your hardest material. Given this loss, what does my character want now, and what will they do about it that they should not. The answer is your plot. The loss is only the weather it happens in.
Let a stranger say the true thing
You will find that the most honest line you have about your own life sounds false when your narrator says it about themselves. Give it to somebody else. Let the neighbor say it, or the nurse, or the old man at the end of the counter. Readers trust an observation from the side of the room more than a confession from the middle of it, and you will find you can write the truth more plainly when it is coming out of a mouth that is not yours.
Wait until you can bear to be wrong about it
One more thing, and then I will let you go. Some of it is too soon. If the wound is still open, the book will be a bandage, and a bandage is not a story. There is no shame in writing something else for a year, or five. The material will keep. It will be there when you can look at it and change the facts without feeling that you have betrayed the people in them, and that is the day it becomes yours to use.
If you have one of these in the drawer, try this. Rewrite the first scene with a different person at the center, in a different town, with a different thing lost. Keep only the feeling. See if the page comes alive. I think it will, and I think you will be surprised by how much of the truth survived the move.