Let the petals of grief enfold you and enfold you

A note on grieving

Hi, friends, I’m excited to bring you a post I’ve been working on soon, but it’s not ready yet. I’m sorry this one won’t be too upbeat but it’s important, I think. That said, if you’re not in a place to think about death and grief, please scroll on.

Two of my friends died a few weeks ago, and a few days later my body gave out. I didn’t know I needed to slow way down to allow myself to feel the complex layers that wanted to reveal themselves.

Grief feels like such a heavy emotion because it compounds. Each grief links up with the griefs that have gone before, each hand of grief clasping the others, whether directly or by several degrees of separation. When we say “grief,” in some sense we mean “all the griefs.”

With each new loss, others need to be seen and regrieved. Earlier this year another friend died, someone who’d known and watched over me and my family for my entire life. It flattened me. It surprised me how much it flattened me. I lay on the floor immobilized, sorting through the interlinked griefs of my life.

Last time I wrote to you, I was four months out from that loss and although I didn’t say it there, I was still very much processing it. I don’t think I have recovered. These losses leave me wondering even more, what do we do in the face of grief?

Of course it’s not possible to think my way through grief since it’s such a visceral sensation, but inevitably I find myself caught up in the whirl of my mind, which fills with the darkness of trauma and uncertainty. I wrestle with the edges where meaning blurs. Psychologically I search for control.

Control forestalls the work of coming to terms with reality, though. Sitting as the waves churn back and forth around and through me is an experience I have personally had enough of but that has not had enough of me. I resent how weak I feel in grief. I resent how slowly my body metabolizes it.

Perhaps it’s not so much about what I do with grief as it is about how I relate to her. What if if I saw her as a relational being, a valued member of my self speaking the unspeakable? She spins the world upside down to reveal what’s really going on. She is the truth teller.

Attempts at control don’t work because grief is alive. She has an identity. She hungers. Although she is of, from, with, and by the body, she has a will of her own, and she wills never to go away. She speaks when she will. She requires honor.

ohtruth

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When grief is with me, I can’t move and it takes some time for my mind to be able to articulate what I feel. I go numb and must slowly thaw. My body glued herself to the couch for several nights watching sad movies, letting them contemplate sorrow for me that I didn’t want to feel.

I watched Peter Parker grieve Uncle Ben’s death, Mary Lenox lose her parents and move to death-haunted Misselthwaite Manor, and noble Arthur of Camelot set aflame on a wooden pyre, while Guinevere and Lancelot and the knights of Camelot hold up their swords.

“If there ever is going to be healing, there has to be be remembering, and then grieving.”

Sinead O’Connor

It’s almost a surprise when I realize grief has left me topsy turvy still. I forget that grief is not a gloss on my human experience but the very pith of it. Grief is insistent. Ember. Familiar. Wise. Healing.

If I see grief as an emotion it’s too hard to bear. If I see her as my familiar, maybe I can carve out a place in my life that is large enough for us both to live in. I know I just wrote something real because my stomach burbled, as she does when I have found the truth.

Maybe I can release my grief from a place of shame and welcome her into my heart.

This year I have been spun upside down on my axis, and perhaps you have been, too. Let us meet with our prowling, yelping hurts and allow grief’s petals to enfold us and enfold us. We will bloom flowers of our own making, spun from the shadows of sorrow. I’m sending you so much love today for all you have lost, everything that was too precious to lose.

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Neural Shock-Stitch, published in Psaltery & Lyre, August 21, 2023

by Elizabeth Pinborough

Life is a visit with strangeness—
like the drive through at the Arby’s

in Bowling Green where they couldn’t 
take my mother’s order because 

their cash register was on fire—
like when three Union swimmers 

jumped into Lost River to test her 
depths, quicksilver undertow ferrying 

them invisibly away—like when I 
climbed into Mammoth Cave, 

marveling at yellowed stalactite teeth 
in the dripping mildewed jaw until 

a National Park employee cut all lights, 
erasing my body—emptying my eyes 

so I could not see my own hand 
held out, heart fibers lashing with 

lively panic—like the pack rat who marks 
days in Timpanogos Cave stealing pens 

from the grimy guestbook, his house 
emitting a most terrible stench—like 

soaring over LaVell Edwards Stadium 
at sunrise in a hot air balloon, my 

third-grade homage to Dorothy’s first 
failed return from Oz—like trying not 

to remember what happened when 
my brain sputtered in a calcium flood 

after skull met pillar—like I plan for grief 
to gobble February, and clear my calendar.