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grief is a means of testament in some way - a method of saying "I am still here, and you are still within me"

it only surfaces to speak when everything else is silent enough, rapidly growing from a whisper to an all-consuming churn not unlike that from a jet engine

my grief is the palest of whites for it has anchored me away from the sun, that I must be its steward away from its treatment





Sometimes my grief feels like shame, like being unproductive, weak, old, self-indulgent. Like the loss is my fault and the grieving is something I have to do only because I am faulty.

Sometimes regret mixes in with that--like I ought to have valued the person or savored the time with them more--but I generally talk myself out of that. 

 

The stomach is involved. Pressure like squeezing, involving the lungs, back, legs, tailbone. I often notice sympathetic pain in the tailbone, thinking of injury, pain, and death.

labor is how I process grief, or at-times avoid it, as I feel the loss(es) generating this grief create an emptiness, a space, which must be filled by my own growth 

the labor is often not something I like to do, or wish to do, and I feel that pushing through it for their sake or honor brings the light of what was lost to the place I am losing myself.

As a writer, I suppose I feel an impulse to record or document what I remember about their lives in some way. I do sometimes but I do not sorry too much about it. I try not to feel that as a duty. If they wanted to leave behind a record, they were all perfectly capable of doing so.

My mother's death was the most recent of a string of deaths and was harder than I imagined anything could be. It surprises me that, almost three years later, I am actually starting to feel it less intensely. In the thick of it, I did not think I would ever feel joy again or ever be creative again.




My mother was particularly critical of people doing that and so I would never want to do that to her (though the temptation is always there, isn't it? Like if you put a label on the person, you would be able to wrap them up and feel good about putting them away).

Others, still breathing, have died to make way for their new selves

- they do not want me around, I do not remember why. I remember enough to know I should be better, and trying to be better has become my act of faith in penance for what will never return; for who will never return.

I was addicted to creating my own grief and feeding off that of others for many years as I felt I could only identify with the world through its many pains. I then spent many more years self-medicating for I had eaten too much strife and became bloated on unnecessary, delusional suffering.

life took away the medications and my ability to remember this grief - a bloody, messy second chance. I have been given the cursed gift of forgetting and have found unexpected resilience through this without a loss of empathy.










I live now in service to the dead and pained as best I can. Burke is gone and I miss him








I've been grieving people who died, the family dynamic they had with each other and with me. I also grieve pets who have died, activities I used to do and am no longer able to, objects that have been lost or destroyed, and places that have changed. I've grieved friendships as well as friend groups that were extremely tight, then loosened, then fell apart.

collective loss is something I have an easier time responding to than personal loss, my instincts guide me to a straightforward action:

spend time and attention unto those who are suffering the most, or more than I

I who have abundance of opportunity and capacity should not simulate or sensationalize a response to collective loss if I am not the most affected, I feel. Rather, I should leverage my security to provide for others the compassion and acceptance I would wish for. 



this helps me satisfy my regular grief response of being compelled to labor and therein assists my personal recovery in response to a collective loss.

I have begun to explore similar approaches with instances of personal loss, having realized and articulated my inner community of selves that have recycled their way into the me of here and now. They are more affected than I am, and need me to show up in much the same way as I try to for the collective when it is reeling from loss.











grieving has taught me that absence is not a total destruction of space, but a partial destruction of what was there. the prima materia of everything all matter is vibrational waves which can never truly be destroyed, only changed.

all that ever was is still with us in different ways, physical representation is only one medium albeit a truly fragile one

absurdity provides an abundance of joy and resilience necessary to survival, allowing me to step outside myself through grief to see how absolutely wild it is that we exist at all, how little we understand the mechanisms of this existence, and how much power is to be had by admitting we do not always know nor do we need to - it is enough to feel, to trust, and to surrender our humanity for a moment and be one with everything around us when being human feels insufficient for witnessing the loss in all its mighty substance

an unending fascination with the brilliantly absurd existence we all share is what keeps me here

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The shape of grief is the shape of the being gone, its lack of shape / shadow / umbra that is left behind.

Grieving has been

contorting the body
and mind around
this shape
lack of shape
its shadow

moving the body
despite the missing
shape, living
despite its absence

a wall / encasement put up

It shows up in dreams
as memories and past lives,
desperation to relive
the memory of the shape,
texture and sounds.

I have let grief become a barrier to joy; I disallow joy as the world is crumbling, or let my world be a single thing that is now gone.

I found a quote about how grief is our final act of love as it is forever.


But I have been feeeling shame around grief because I always feel like I am grieving over lots of things.

Events of collective loss remind me that my own sorrow in reaction to mass loss, the dying planet, mass genocide should not become despair  

i have a rock that is michael; it is a black lava rock. the grief has holes, is a black rock, is heavier than it looks. sometimes i tie a thread around the middle of it so he knows i'm thinking of him. i used to keep the rock in a planter with the avocado tree. when i was on the honeymoon the tree died because it is sensitive and can't do without water for a few days. when i got home, i dug up the tree, and removed the michael rock. it was the first time the rock had been out of the avocado for a long time. i washed it, held it, and put it on the shelf above the sink next to a party glitter that reminds me of you and a ceramic pot with a face painted on one side and another face painted on the other. when you turn around the pot it can be smiling (bashful) or staring (incredulous). why those two faces? why just two? 



































i don't associate my grief with sadness anymore.






 

I love charcoal gray, but I hate grief because it won’t be over, already.

I use ashes in my ritual to work thro it, so I would say grief is gray.

grief has been very demonstrative — I mentioned my ritual above. I never used to get drunk and now I do.

i think i am in "survival mode" - the ecological grief that i have felt over the years has been enormous, and yet, i pass through places filled with living earthly beings as they are torn to bits by earth movers every day. i can't respond to everything or i would be overwhelmed. environmental activism points grief in a direction that is "doing something about it." but there isn't that certain acceptance, condensation of the grief in the same way that i have felt it with the loss of people. a "cutoffness" i feel
from my own sense
of grief, and my fear
that my lack
of "global level grief"
is monstrous.

i think i used to be able to be more raw; and yet- these years i have not had many die. i have been aware that it may happen soon.

Did you know that a placenta is an organ that a fetus grows in order to steal additional nourishment and energy from the mother it’s growing in? A whole organ devoted to depleting life force in order to grow something new—not necessarily better or worse—but new.  


Right below the heart I picture it as a small fire heating up the cauldron of the heart, and it is red orange. In the third eye region I picture it as a beam of light, and it’s yellow like an egg yolk.


Compressed carbon is how it feels to me. Not a diamond, but incredibly dense; packed down. Matte black.

Mine has pushed me closer to the veil, closer to some source of light beyond myself.


It was easier to act it out then explain. I was there though, because it was me. I was it.


I wondered if I’d just absorbed it into my body.


When my son grew up and left my home, I broke wide open. The gift of giving life is also the pain of having it outgrow you.


That’s where a new version of me began.

I found that I have a responsibility to it, as well as to those that I love. I found that energy continues, and that I am able to connect and commune with those I’ve lost all of the time.

I’ve felt my intuition strengthen. I’m sensitive to the shifts in energy, the mystical small nudges and whispers of the universe.

I talk with my baby, my best friend, my ancestors.

I’ve come to understand that there’s far more mystery than there are answers, and I’ve come to trust the ambiguity of having limited scope and vision when it comes to the big picture of the universe.




It changed everything. I exist mostly in a state of empathy and gratitude from a wholistic point of view.

I’ve made my world much smaller on the day to day, while also embracing adventure and calculated risks again.

I’ve found myself much more spiritual in a deeply agnostic manner. I’m more convinced that there is some strong connecting energy, probability, and consciousness but most likely in a way best explained by some quantum mechanism which I lack the conceptual framework to understand. The very nature of the mind, and the “theory of the mind,” continues to confound science and it fascinates me. No one can explain how the gray matter and electrical signals created identity and a rich interior life; a sense of self. I feel like all of these disparate concepts are somehow linked and somewhere in that I believe I’d find my dead friends.




Grief has changed me, insomuch as it’s given me ultimate permission to lean into the gentlest parts of myself.

They’re still here with me — not through delusion or denial about reality, but through a confluence of energy. I know I’m a more spiritual, less jaded human because I know grief.

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Please describe your grief(s). What is its shape? Quality? Color? Language? Where is it located in your body or outside of your body? How else does it want to communicate itself?

How do you show up to the process of grieving? What forms has grieving taken for you? What has helped you work with grief? What has surprised you?

How has your relationship to your grief &/or to grief as a concept shifted over time? How has it changed you? What has been released & what has returned? What has been the trajectory of your relationship to the dead or to what has been lost?

How do your individual experiences of grief inform your experiences of collective grief & vice versa? How do you respond to/process events of collective loss & how is this different from or similar to how you work with personal loss? What happens when these intertwine?

What has the process of grieving revealed to you about living? About joy and survival? How do you stay actively engaged with embodied experience and how does grief inform this process? What keeps you here?

<-We the Lake