Grief is meant to be shared
On connecting personal and collective grief, and the interbeing of love, grief, and rage
“What is grief if not love persevering?”
-Vision, in WandaVision
Dear readers,
In honor of the third anniversary of my mother’s passing, January 16th, I wanted to share an essay of vignettes of grief that I have been collecting since that time. It felt like they wanted to see the light of day beyond the Google Doc where I’ve been collecting them. You can find the full essay here.
As I prepared to send the essay out, I discovered that what is alive for me now with respect to grief is different from what is shared in the essay. As I sit with the tenderness of the third anniversary of her death, there is so much to grieve in the world. As I sit with the words I wrote about how it felt to lose my mother a year into the pandemic, my heart pulls towards Gaza, towards the thousands of Palestinian children grieving the loss of their mothers, the Palestinian mothers grieving losing their children, entire families massacred with no one left to grieve but those of us bearing witness to the unfolding genocide.
Unfathomable, devastating, avoidable loss.
In the essay, I write about grieving amidst the challenging conditions of the early pandemic, and now I think about the horrendous conditions in which Gazans are grieving the loss of their families, friends, homes, under continuous bombardment, without even access to adequate food, water, and shelter, and with COVID and many other diseases raging. Or rather, as author, cultural worker, and plancestral medicine practitioner Layla K. Feghali said recently on For the Wild podcast,
“There has been incredible loss, but we really haven’t had the chance to grieve…You can’t really start healing a wound while it’s still gushing with blood. And right now, we’re still bleeding. We need the attention of the world to stop the bleeding.”
We owe our attention and efforts to stop the bleeding, which is to say, at a minimum, ceasefire now. Everywhere.
If you are a US citizen, it is urgent, necessary, and very easy to contact your representatives every single day to demand support for a ceasefire in Gaza. Two very easy ways to engage every day are 5calls.org and Resistbot (text RESIST to 50409). Please show up and use your voice in all the ways you are able.
In the essay about my own experience with grief, I touch upon the interbeing of love and grief and joy, and how they inter-are. In the time I have been writing this, even more bombs are being dropped, now on Yemen, from my government. I have been sick for a week, but beneath my exhaustion, what feels most alive is rage1. Rage that my elected officials are dropping more bombs because they prioritize international trade over human rights and life, they prioritize enabling genocide rather than ending it. Rage that war continues to be the response of those in power. Sacred rage for the protection of life. Love and grief and rage inter-are.
Michael Franti sings, “We cannot bomb the world into peace.” War will never bring peace. Ceasefire now. Other worlds are possible. May we work towards them and imagine them every day.
My little vignettes of grief feel so small in comparison to the massive collective pain, and yet I don’t believe our grief is meant to be compared. I believe our grief connects us, allows us to feel and empathize more. It is meant to be shared. And we desperately need a world with greater empathy, where we see and feel other people’s children as our own, and act accordingly, with all the love and care and protection in the world.
I believe learning to grieve well is a necessary capacity for the times of immense loss that we are living through, and I hope with all my heart that we take on the urgent task of building a world with far less suffering, far less avoidable and unnecessary loss, with the focus and dedication that is needed.
My mom’s main message in life and one of her enduring legacies is promoting peace through humor, and I cannot think of a better way to honor her memory than to call for peace, again and again and again.
With love and grief and rage,
Stephanie2
Read the full essay, Become a Vessel, here.
Lama Rod Owns wrote a fantastic book by this title, Love and Rage, and also has a new book out called The New Saints, both of which I highly recommend.
with extra special thanks and endless love to my longtime friend-love, collaborator, and thought partner Kimberlyn, who helped me reign this piece in and helped me see what I really needed to say today :)