Grief in Installments
on the importance of ritualized mess
I am experiencing a profound moment of grief and loss in my life.
As I process, I realize that there aren’t a lot of places I can go to be with the immediate textures of this grief: big big fear (O you Good, Dark Teacher), shame, ache, love, tenderness, nostalgia, sorrow, confusion, relief, clarity, peace, even excitement and elation.
Humans are social creatures, so I feel an impulse to draw others close during this time. However, as soon as I let someone else into my process, its nuanced layers begin to feel more distant and narrative-based. My loved ones— with nothing but the purest intentions— tend to introduce pragmatic considerations like interpersonal dynamics, perceptions, judgments, and worries. I therefore find it difficult to invite people in for intimacy and consolation. I want to allow ample space for their authentic reactions, while also seeking for myself what I feel is a necessary present-tense experience: the decanting of various emotional ingredients and holding them up to the light, without placing them in a future context.
The luminous Nai Kéren-Or once shared with me: “Any feeling fully felt is pure bliss.” ANY feeling fully felt is pure bliss. I want to feel the farthest reaches of this thorny, unfastened grief. If I can swim in waves of discomfort unmoored from story, I leave room for the unexpected. I leave room for discovery. I leave room for a transformed perspective. These “grief pockets” are attended by a startling potency and clarity: you might be surprised by who shows up and who retreats. You might be surprised by what you produce when you’re cracked all the way open.
I share my personal experience not to throw myself a pity party (although all of you are invited; please bring snacks), but because globally we are deep in a process of collective grief… and we’re not handling it well.
Grief is complicated. Grief is disarming. Grief needs room to flail around a bit. Grief cannot fully unfurl her wings beneath an anxiety to please or a fear of offending others. We cannot self-censor if we endeavor to locate our deep bass notes and let loose our fractured howl. However, we also want to be sensitive to the experiences of others— which is why publicly unleashing our grief during its teething phase is often more harmful than helpful.
If we are hurting, and the terror and trauma of this time feels trapped within us, we can turn to the people we trust (or do this on our own) and take it one big wave at a time. Ideally, when we are in a resourced place, we can expand to hold all the contours of grief: that is a different kind of teacher. But when we feel unsafe, threatened, or overwhelmed, we need to tend to the cornered animals within ourselves and approach them gingerly.
Some grief practices might include:
- Blasting cathartic music and moving your body to it
- Screaming into a pillow
- Setting a 3-minute timer and speaking without stopping about one facet of grief
- Journaling
- Meditating
- Breathwork
- Venturing out into a wild place and yelling
- Asking to be held by a loved one
For a global crisis as fraught as this one, you may need to repeat these rituals many times, for many distinct sorrows. For instance, ask a loved one if they’re able to sit with you in a grief process for the people of Palestine. This can be a separate, purposeful, and equally potent process from the one you hold for the people of Israel. You may need a grief process for how these events impact your own embodied history: racial, cultural, or religious. You may need a grief process for feelings of confusion, or fear, or impotence, or a sense of rage that it feels like there is no grown-up in the room.
But don’t be afraid to take these discrete sorrows head on, ritualistically. Your brain is likely to collapse and simplify anyways, so you may as well meet that reductive thinking consciously. Then, having felt it all and discovered what lies at the depths for you (for rarely does anyone access those depths and not emerge having learned something), you can integrate. In this way, you can make of your grief a mosaic or tapestry, with due attention given to the disparate parts, and a sense of restoration and artfulness applied to the all-encompassing whole.
You, dear one, are a human being who aches for other human beings. That feeling-it-all— that immensity— is a thing of Beauty as well as a burden. Tend to your own raw hide and anoint it with all the grace and gentleness it deserves. The space we create within ourselves is a practiced, purposeful microcosm of the external world we traverse: a wild, vast, complicated, and glorious terrain; one that expands to hold all the interlocking stories that it must.
If you enjoy my writing, go wild and click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. Big love to my Grief Girl Gang: BD, BK, X, Julie, Ani, Andi, Kir, Natalie, Mal, and my incredible mama.
I hope that the grief you examine and experience in your inner and outer lives is as balanced and nuanced as your essay!