A Pocket of Stones, A Constant Hum

On the persistent presence of grief

Grief is an emotion nearly as unacceptable as rage.
Generally, in Western culture. Specifically, in my youngest years.

“Cast all your cares upon the Lord,” chided the church.
“Don’t be sad, be glad,” clanged the radio.
“Smile for us, sweetheart,” crooned the men.

I was sad, early and often. I was angry, too. But I learned to push these feelings down. To fold them into softer shapes. To compress them into stones and hide them somewhere inside myself, dark and deep.

Eventually I’d forget my hiding place. The memory of offense or injury or fear or loss would scar, would fade. But my body remembered. Carried the weight of those stones for years.

In my twenties the rage resurfaced, renewed and accompanied by an omnipresent nublado of sadness. It was understandable, the melancholy. The twenties are typically a great and shapeless disaster, no matter who you are. You stagger about your world, prefrontal cortex still raw, drunk on your own independence, crashing from heartbreak to heartbreak, contentious and confused and desperate for some kind of meaning.

I layered all the usual twenty-something angst with a hefty helping of heresy. I was tearing apart the religion of my youth in the messiest sort of way, and the deconstruction of that devotion created fissures that cleaved me to the marrow. I was leaking all over the place. In all the mist of the chaos, that long-buried grief finally rose to the surface to rime my skin with salt.

Eventually, I got therapy. I turned 30. Gravity reasserted itself and all the pieces of me resettled and rearranged themselves. Still, there were days in my thirties when I’d lock myself in the bathroom, fall to the floor and weep as if every warp and weft of hope had unraveled all at once. Marido would sit outside on the linoleum floor, his back against the door, and ask, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I’d wail.

“What can I do?” he’d beg.

“I don’t know,” was my refrain.

This June I spent three Mondays in a row examining my grief in a room full of books and women. There were ten of us in

Fariha Róisín

’s Grief Writing workshop in Lisbon, gathered around a table laden with ice water and fresh cherries to exhume our grief, particular and collective. The goal was not so much to exorcise our pain as to honor it.

“In a world rife with genocide, war and environmental debilitation,” Fariha wrote in the description of her workshop, “this class provides infrastructure and relief as a way to process all our deep-seated anxieties and pain, permitting us to confront all that we are with a steadfastness and agility that so rarely accompanies the symphonies of grief.”

A writer and poet well-acquainted with grief, Fariha led us on a journey of discussion and revelation that helped us acknowledge not only what our grief is (denial, anger, bargaining…) but what it could be (rediscovery, dreaming, action…)

“Grief is a portal,” Fariha said. “If grief is present, it’s important. Where will you let it take you?”

Do not resist the call of a drum, we read from Caleb Azuma Nelson’s Open Water, Do not hold your body stiff, but flow like easy water. Be here, please…

When I sat in Fariha’s workshop, the poet Andrea Gibson was still alive. They breathed their last on July 14th and as I write this now I can’t stop thinking about their poem about death, the one their wife Megan shared with the world just two days ago, the one that says:

“When death first came to visit, I refused
to let her enter my home. She sat outside
in the garden picking buttercups, painting
her face the color of the sun.

I stood at the window for hours
watching her, thinking, Why is she still here?
It’s not like she has nowhere to go. I’d try to sleep,

but as soon as I closed my eyes

I would hear her outside talking
daisies into blooming at night.
I suspect she knew, I too am the type
to open my petals for the moon.

On my eighth night awake, I did it.
I don’t know how, but I did it––I walked out
to the garden and invited her in. I poured her
a cup of lavender tea. I made up her bed

and turned down the lights. I wished her good
dreams, though I knew her good dream
was to one day take my life.
I used to believe I knew my purpose,

thought for sure I understood my calling.
But my calling, I now know, has always been
this: to parent my own departure.
To never punish the child for being who she is.

To keep a roof over the head of the truth.
To raise what will end me, with love.”

The poem doesn’t end there. You should read the whole thing, later. What struck me, what I can’t escape in this and everything Andrea ever wrote, is the love, the love, the love.

In their Love Letter from the Afterlife, Andrea wrote: One day you will know why I read the poetry of your grief to those waiting to be born, and they are all the more excited.

“Grief and love always appear together,” Fariha told us, and pointed us to the page where bell hooks wrote: “Our collective fear of death is a dis-ease of the heart. Love is the only cure.”

I am every day awash in grief. A symphony of it… I grieve my mother. I grieve my father, my sister, the place that used to be my home. I grieve the green grass of Golden Gate Park and the fog-soaked shores of Ocean Beach. I grieve my friends, scattered like sparrows across the globe. I grieve the days I once had and the girl I once was. I grieve the lies I believed and the time I spent like it meant nothing to me. I grieve loves squandered and loves withheld. I grieve my pride and my ignorance, my complicity and my cowardice. I grieve Palestine. I grieve the walls we defend and the systems we build, all bent on domination. I grieve the destruction we leave in our wake. I grieve the trees felled, the air thinned, the soil salted, the bees drowned in the dog water bowl. I grieve this entire beautiful, stupid world. I hear its melody. I grieve it all. I love it all.

Andrea Gibson again, that warrior of love, said it was their primary daily practice to define the challenges in their life by what would open their heart instead of close it. (They also had a fucking brilliant observation about turtles vs. octopuses {octopi?} that will lay you out.)

I don’t hide my grief away in some forgotten frightened corner anymore. I carry the stones in my pocket (I make sure I have enough pockets), I smooth them with the swirl of my thumb. I carry them with me to the swimming pool, the hiking trail, the school drop-off line, the grocery store. I take them on airplanes and motorcycles. Ferries and trains.

From time to time, I can let one go. I stand at the edge of a great, still water and sling the stone to skim the surface, say a prayer for every spreading ripple. I stay until it sinks beyond sensation, then walk away with lightened steps.

Grief is a corset, I wrote in a poem the week after my first class with Fariha.
a constrictor
a disused driveway
a number that never rings.
An echo. A roar. A banshee. A melody.
A phantom limb. A withered twin.
A window
a void
a portal
a testament.

It is not normal, I think, to admit to such grief. Not loudly, not in a public room. We are conditioned to whisper our sorrows quietly, in shame-faced confession, the door closed and a whir of white noise. All those stones stuck tight in our throats.

Sometimes it amazes me, bell hooks wrote, to know intuitively that the grieving are all around us yet we do not see any overt signs about grief that lingers. Like a stain on our clothes, it marks us as flawed, imperfect. To cling to grief, to desire its expression, is to be out of sync with modern life…

But to love is to be open, Andrea Gibson taught us.
Grief is a portal, Fariha Róisín said.
Love knows no shame, wrote bell hooks. To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love.

I don’t always understand my grief. But understanding is not, I think, necessary to find meaning in it.

The question is not: “How do I rid myself of this burden?” Is not: “How do I protect myself from this pain?”

It is: “How do I honor the truth of this grief?”
It is: “How do I surrender myself to the softness of this sadness?”
It is: “How might I carry this grief but leave room for joy?”
It is: “How might I open my heart even wider?”
It is: “What/who/how else can I love?”

Tomorrow it will be exactly one year since my friend Sarah’s husband died. Suddenly, without warning. He was there and then he was gone. When I think of JC, I think of all the ways he loved Sarah. I think of how, every single time I’d video chat with her, he’d suddenly appear in the background with a steaming cup of tea and set it down gently by her elbow. He knew that talking with me made her happy, and he wanted her to have even more comfort and warmth for the duration. So, in his nubbly British way, he’d bring her a spot of tea. For years he did this, every single time I called her.

When I think of JC, I think of Sarah sitting on the couch in their living room, tears rolling off her cheeks and spattering onto her jeans unheeded while she told me something she’d just remembered, a story about JC. And in the middle of her sorrow, a cavern so cold she feared she’d never be warm again, she’d start laughing—tears still rolling. Because JC always made her laugh. Even now, he makes her laugh. And because grief is all bound up in love. And that’s exactly how it should be.

Edit to add: I forget that when I write something that appears especially vulnerable, people think I’m not ok. I am ok. I’m better than ok. I wouldn’t write about heavy things if I were not able to handle them. Scorpio/Enneagram 4 over here: I’m well acquainted with the dark. I do not find it frightening. I am not in need of head pats and hugs, however well-intentioned. :)

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