September 2018
Dear Beloved,
I have been compiling a list of mundane, everyday griefs.
the end of a relationship
the loss of a soul
the killing of a spider (accidental or intentional)
a miscarriage
the thinning of seedlings so others may grow
a species breathes its last
wildfires rage on
we leave
or they leave
the spotting of menstruation when one is trying to get pregnant
the absence of menstruation when one isn’t ready for what that means
the memory of a place we used to call home
a house becomes condos...and someone else’s home
uprootings
goodbyes
a childhood plate shatters
I don’t mean to compare sadnesses but I call all of these things griefs in an attempt to connect.
To say: I recognize grief because I know loss.
To ask: How can I help.
Even though I know that part of grief is sitting with the helplessness that accompanies it. Humbled to the forces of the universe, loss is a constant reminder that we don’t control everything. Grief is a reminder that life is a dance between what we can do and what happens, what merely is.
There is a part of me who wants to stretch out a hand to friends experiencing grief...but I can’t quite bridge the distance. After all, no one is as awkward at sending a condolence card to a friend who has lost a parent than one who has previously lost a parent. The news of it reaches you like a vacuum, or maybe in a vacuum — no more breath in this body, no more air in this room. You’re supposed to know what to say, so you end up saying nothing.
Instead, I find myself collecting poems that I never send. (No one wants to see “thought of you and your grief” in their inbox.) Here are some of the lines that swirl in my mind, like a stainless steel worry ball rolling in one’s palm, round and round and round.
the way grief
breaks over you when you’ve already given all you’ve got
and hands you tools you don’t know how to use. [1]
while outside the planet spun
unperturbed. [2]
At least an hour a day spent staring at the truth in numb silence;
...
that the ones you grieve may be grieving you.
...
Even your tears seek the recognition of community [3]
(I’ll append the full poems to the end of this letter.)
To know that someone else sees you in your grief can be powerful.
Dear Beloved, it is very possible that I am only collecting these poems for myself.
(Maybe I wouldn’t mind it so much if I saw one of them in my inbox alongside the words “thought of you.”)
—
Wednesday is fifteen years since my mom passed.
It is possible that I will experience the fog of grief on Wednesday. It is possible that I will not.
It is more likely that it will be a random Tuesday, months from now — a childhood plate shattering, or watching the way a mom and her daughter huddle over seedlings, or hearing about the trip of a friend to their grandfather’s home — that the weight of loss will roll in.
And if I’m lucky, it will roll back out like an ocean wave,
shifting the shoreline, uncovering seashells.
—
How do we make visible these invisible things, these mundane everyday griefs we all experience?
—
I imagine a village of yore. A cluster of huts nearby a river, a gather of beings around a fire, everyone knowing everything. The sadness a communal weave resting on the shoulders of the villagers: witnesses all to the cycle of life and death, witnesses all to the one who is in mourning.
Everyday, mundane griefs can be talked over, can be shared.
Everyday, mundane griefs can be celebrated as part and parcel with the harvest of the land.
Loss is held, and loss is released. More than anything, loss is allowed to flow because it is known as natural, it is welcomed with open arms.
You don’t have to tell me that loss is evidence of love, or that grief is gratitude for beauty.
We all know these things because that is what nature earth teaches us.
It is only that we have forgotten these truths, that we delude ourselves into believing that anything is ours, that anything is forever, that we suffer.
—
In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing [4]
in vietnamese there's a phrase we say when expressing condolences: "chia buồn". it literally translates to "dividing sadness"/sharing your sadness to convey that u dont need to carry ur burdens alone and that others are thinking of you and idk i just think it's really tender [5]
It's the same in English. 'Con' meaning together with, 'dolere' meaning to grieve.
I want to say: I recognize grief because I know loss.
I want to ask: How can I help.
It’s okay that it’s not okay.
Love,
Christina
Previous Letter :: Next Letter
[1]
Dark Thirty by Barbara Ras (excerpt)
All year, death, after death, after death.
Then today look how majestically clouds float in the sky,
God putting on a show of tenderness, nothing like thoughts
that rise and drift in my mind, like flakes shaken
in a snow globe, and my brain laboring in its own night,
never feeling the punky starlight of dark thirty, the time
a friend said for us to meet and had to explain it was half an hour
after the first dark, when daylilies fold up and headlines
lead the way home, but maybe too early
to find the moon turning half its body away,
holding it hidden like the black side of a mirror, unseen
until it breaks, unexpectedly, the way grief
breaks over you when you've already given all you've got
and hands you tools you don't know how to use.
[2]
How to search for aliens by Christine Klocek-Lim
At midnight we'd light candles
in the tabernacle and begin
our yearly vigil for the dead.
Mostly I remember the kneeling,
how the vaulted ceiling pressed
the congregation silent until grief
weighted the air. Sometimes I slept
as the incense censer chimed smoke
into strange eddies; often I dreamed
of falling into a vast darkness only to wake
in the pew with tears stepping down my face
as though death had come and gone in the space
of an hour. Even then I knew the spirit shunned
this drama, the artificial quiet shrouding the voice
of god in ritual while outside the planet spun
unperturbed. Four point five billion years
since genesis and the sky still hovers
like a veil between us and space,
wanting to be lifted before the unintelligible
babble dismantles the tower we have
half-built. At Arecibo, signals fall
from the dark like angels dropping messages;
there are miracles in the data waiting for discovery,
contact unrealized despite centuries of squinting
into the heavens. When our vigil ended we would walk
home in the cold, my mother mourning the past
while I tracked the stars that winked between
the street lights, listening for serendipity
in between footsteps. She held my hand so tightly,
perhaps she knew that prayer was too simple:
not enough prime numbers hidden in the signal,
no small man standing on our solar system,
peering out into the universe.
[3]
Spell for Grief or Letting Go by Adrienne Maree Brown from the book Emergent Strategies
Adequate tears twisting up directly from the heart
and rung out across the vocal chords until only a gasp remains;
At least an hour a day spent staring at the truth in numb silence;
A teacup of whiskey held with both hands,
held still under the whispers of permission from friends who can see right through “ok and “fine”;
An absence of theory;
Flight, as necessary;
Poetry, your own and others, on precipice, abandonment, nature, and death;
Courage to say what has happened, however strangling the words are...and space to not say a word;
A brief dance with sugar, to honor the legacies of coping that got you this far;
Sentences spoken with total pragmatism that provide clear guidance of some direction to move in, full of the tender care and balance of choice and not having to choose;
Screaming why, and/or expressing fury at the stupid unfair fucking game of it all (this may include hours and hours, even lifetimes, of lost faith);
Laughter, undeniable and unpretended;
A walk in the world, all that gravity, with breath and heartbeat in your ears;
Fire, for all that can be written;
Moonlight—the more full the more nourishing;
Stories, ideally of coincidence and heartache and the sweetest tiny moments;
Time, more time and then more time...enough time to remember every moment you had with that one now taken from you, and to forget to think of it every moment;
And just a glimpse of tomorrow, either in the face of an innocent or the realization of a dream.
This is a nonlinear spell. Cast it inside your heart, cast it between yourself and any devil. Cast it into the parts of you still living. Remember you are water. Of course you leave salt trails. Of course you are crying.
Flow.
P.S. If there happens to be a multitude of griefs upon you, individual and collective, or fast and slow, or small and large, add equal parts of these considerations:
that the broken heart can cover more territory.
that perhaps love can only be as large as grief demands.
that grief is the growing up of the heart that bursts boundaries like an old skin or a finished life.
that grief is gratitude.
that water seeks scale, that even your tears seek the recognition of community.
that the heart is a front line and the fight is to feel in a world of distraction.
that death might be the only freedom.
that your grief is a worthwhile use of your time.
that your body will feel only as much as it is able to.
that the ones you grieve may be grieving you.
that the sacred comes from the limitations.
that you are excellent at loving.
[4]
from High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never by Barbara Kingsolver (h/t @notabilia)
In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.
It’s not such a wide gulf to cross, then, from survival to poetry. We hold fast to the old passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another—that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.
in vietnamese there's a phrase we say when expressing condolences: "chia buồn". it literally translates to "dividing sadness"/sharing your sadness to convey that u dont need to carry ur burdens alone and that others are thinking of you and idk i just think it's really tender