Last month, I coerced a room to talk about death, again. I find it is always much easier to get people to face it through a small, benevolent betrayal. This way, people come hopeful and nervous and curious in their unknowing. Death is a hard pre-sell.
When I told them the night’s theme was grief, the room heavied, noticeably. I thought that perhaps I wouldn’t get them back this time.
They came back.
I spoke, as you’ll read, all about how hard it is to talk about grief even though its a universal experience. I swore I’d lead by example and share my own experiences with it to open up space for others. I then, initially, skipped out on doing so because I was too afraid. As it goes. Further, in the time leading up to this week, I was feeling so much rage and confusion and hope and loss that I didn’t want to even consider it any longer. But here we are.
In the wake of the U.S. election, I believe it is so important to not bypass grief, or any feelings for that matter, for the sake of pushing forward. Processing rarely comes later in ways that are productive; rarely in time to prevent any resulting harm. Subverting grief through anger is a half-step. Intellectualizing circumstances to a point of not grieving is a half-step. We have to move through it in its entirety. We have to do so for ourselves and for each other.
So here are further thoughts on grief and prompts to help liquify you from last month’s session.
Be well.
***
Facing grief:
Why is talking about grief and loss so uncomfortable? Why do we treat something so universal as something private and unique?
Who are you in the face of loss? What do you turn to or away from?
What are your or your culture’s rituals + stories around loss? How do they carry you through the grieving process?
When do you recognize the need to grieve? Where else could a grieving process be helpful to you/us?
Extra:
How could we use language in a way that centers the realities of loss? How would we communicate with ourselves and each other?
***
We are a people petrified and paralyzed in the face of death.
So much of our lives and systems are founded on the avoidance of loss of life and power.
The reality is that all of life is a cycle of loss. We face loss on a daily, sometimes momentary basis.
Death of loved ones, of strangers, of relationships, of dreams, of beliefs, of time.
The further we run from death, the less resilient and less able we are to process life. We are stuck, frozen, coping, reacting. We turn away from each other, from ourselves. We build structures that sacrifice the many in the name of preserving the few.
In some ways, we are wired this way. Survival is our most basic function as a species.
But as a species with the ability to think critically and process time, the avoidance of acknowledging death is counterintuitive to our personal and collective survival. It is an inevitable part of all life; physically dying, personally and systemically going through a death process to be transformed, etc. When we hide from death - and in many cases, even turn toward immortality, the attempted actualizing of an ever-lasting life – we deny reality. We are blind to the imagination and creation of worlds that could be. We fail to honor the lessons and lives that have come before us.
Death and loss have the power to stop us in our tracks entirely. Confronting death directly, and moving through a grieving process, helps unstick us. Active grieving liquifies us; aligns us again with the flow of life; creates space to uplift the lives and ways of being that were.
Grief is a universal feeling that we have sequestered to dark corners of ourselves; in doing so, like with anything we hold in out of fear or shame, we perpetuate the idea that it is something to be feared, and we bend our lives to the will of that fear.
On an individual level, the privatization of grief keeps up isolated, holding the weight of something that is entirely impossible to hold on our own; further traumatizing us as we are unable to encode the loss, or prospective loss, as a single-moment event. We relive and relive and relive; our narrative mind exhausts itself to find The Story that will make the pain of loss, or the anticipation of it, disappear.
We make decisions that harm ourselves – prolonged isolation, destructive coping and avoidance behaviors, paralysis, minimizing our feelings
We make choices that harm others – seeing others as threat, belief in the scarcity of resources, behaving in ways that substantiate stories of a hierarchy of beings.
I wonder how our lives, our systems, would change if it were no longer positioned in avoidance of death but rather a moving towards life in the time that we have. If life was not a reaction to death, but a continuation of the journey, like as we observe in nature through every season.
If we truthfully acknowledged how little time we have with one another, would we ask instead what we could learn from each other; what we could explore together in the space we are given. Would it presence us? Make us more intentional? Would it bury us?
What would a world look like if we accepted and understood how precious life is apart from the need to circumnavigate death? What could we build together if we refused to skip the grieving process; where loss was an integrated aspect of our day-to-day lives? What would we remember if we could face the pain of what was lost?
Folktales and oral storytelling have long been places that explore death and grief head on, and, in doing so, offer a salve for it. A refuge from the spiral of suffering; a place to feel seen and held in a way most primal. Many cultures have death rituals that normalize loss to remind us of each other; of life that continues; of life that was.
What is helping my grief process right now is acknowledging, naming, and sharing the things I am grieving; beliefs about myself and my role as a daughter, belief in my ability to control the uncontrollable, the newfound understanding of the grief of others. I think in turning toward these things, and allowing others to hold them with me, I am able to be fully present. I am able to show up to my life in ways that mitigate reactionary harm, i’m able to face the reality that a new way of being is required of me & it gives me the chance to be intentional with how i handle that becoming.
Language provides a space to memorialize, to celebrate, to process, to alchemize, to create life.
How can we be intentional about language in ways that honor and uphold each other’s grieving processes?
Prompt:
Close your eyes. Take ten minutes to sit with the reality of the loss that scares you the most. Write a poem, song, story, essay, letter, etc. about what you asked it, what it feels like in your body, what it looks like. Write about who you are once the time is up; did it have any advice to give?
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Language is our sacred, shared experience. To mute our grief is to bite our tongue, only giving strength to a wounded silence. The inner turmoil deserves to breathe. To understand that humanity's story is the healing we all need.
To gentrify the neighborhood, to still all joy, all hurt, all emotions until there only exists a silent mind will leave the rich deaf, dumb, and blind, and angry at no one for not knowing why.
To lead the blind is writin in scriptures, I'm told. Our shared story is old, rich in shared lessons and mentions of hope. I try to keep my ears and heart close to those echoes. Today they sound like a whisper. But lean in: their ancient song is wise and bold.