June: Grief & Gratitude
The heart is a frontline,
and the fight is to feel
in a world of distraction.
—Adrienne Maree Brown
Here I am, writing about grief again. As you may recall, this writing project was born of grief and was partly the focus of its introduction.
Grief was not my intended topic of the month. I had originally intended to write about soulfulness. But as life unfolded throughout the month of May, I began to see that June’s topic must be grief. Soulfulness could wait until later in the summer.
As it goes, sometimes we know when a loss will arrive at our doorstep. And sometimes we do not.
Death visited our family twice in May.
On May Day, the first day of the month, a family member who had struggled mightily with alcohol for many years passed from complications due to liver failure. His death was not necessarily a surprise, as his health had been failing for several years. But while his passing wasn’t a shock, it was still an untimely death. When I visited him for what I knew would be the last time a few weeks before he died, his body had been through so much that he looked old enough to be my father. He was just three years older than me.
Sometimes when people we love die from causes such as suicide or addiction, this can add complexity to our grieving process due to the social stigma surrounding the cause of death. In 1989, grief expert Kenneth Doka coined the term disenfranchised grief, which refers to a loss that's not openly acknowledged, socially mourned, or publicly supported. Judgment from others, or even our fear of the judgment of others, plays a large role in disenfranchised grief. We feel disenfranchised grief whenever we feel that we shouldn’t be so sad, or we’re embarrassed to talk about the loss, or when there simply isn’t a societal norm or structure for it.
There’s something endearing I want to share with you about my family member. For the most part, he was pretty rough around the edges and stoic; although, he had a kind, protective, and generous side I saw a few times over the 22 years I knew him. But there was something only a few people knew about him: he loved lilacs.
I found out about his love of lilacs after his death, when I was told that these flowers were placed on his body moments after he died. I was not present for it, but I imagined him lying there like a king with flowers on his chest, surrounded by those who knew and loved him best. The Lilac King, lying in repose.
Synchronistically, just a few weeks before he died, I happened to plant five new lilac starts along my back fence line. By the time he passed, many of them were thriving, rooting in, and producing new growth. But one bush, for reasons I still have not figured out, became the favorite play thing of our local squirrels. Many times, I would find it uprooted, knocked over, and with broken branches. At first, I was mystified about why this plant kept falling over while the others seemed stable. And then I observed the squirrels having their way with it.
I had just replanted it for the umpteenth time, making sure it was deep enough in the ground, giving it fresh water, and staking it in, when, from my kitchen window, I watched as a squirrel climbed halfway up the fence and then launched off, parkour-style, once again knocking over this beleaguered bush.
As I knelt on the earth to replant it, carefully setting up a tomato cage around its branches in the hopes of protecting it, a metaphor came to mind: without being too reductive (addiction is a complex biopsychosocial process), it occurred to me that this plant, which happened to be my family member’s favorite kind, represented him. The squirrels are addiction.
If we wouldn’t blame the lilac in this case, but instead, do everything in our power to protect it from harm, it occurred to me that perhaps we can show the same non-judgmental care and love to those who struggle with addiction: protect them, support them, help them grow, and mitigate destructive forces to the best of our ability. We can believe in their internal strength, will to live, and desire to lead a meaningful life, which will emerge naturally when they have the support and protection they need. And, of course, we can work to mitigate our own internal tendencies to blame or look down on them for having these struggles.
I’m happy to say that, to date, I’ve been able to keep the meddling squirrels off the lilac bush. Perhaps now it will have a fighting chance at life.
The second loss our family experienced happened later in the month, on the day before my son’s 9th birthday. He had been caring for a crayfish at school for many weeks and finally was able to bring her home. It was a Thursday, and we carefully walked home after school with her in a plastic tub, water sloshing, as we prevented her from crawling out.
With much excitement, we picked out a new aquarium and lid, filter, pebbles, food, water-treatment drops, and a few extremely overpriced items for her to climb on and hide in. I did a bit of research on how to care for crayfish. We set up her tank and placed her inside, and she seemed to love her new environment, which I imagined was quite an upgrade from the plastic bin she’d been living in in my son’s third grade classroom.
We decided to name her Cloud, for the way that she would climb on top of the structures in her tank and then float down. Perhaps we were all projecting our human traits onto her, but she appeared to be happy, good-natured, and highly social. When we would approach the tank, which sat on a bookshelf in my son’s room, she would come up to the glass and stay there until we walked away.
I was interested in this behavior and thought maybe she was just responding to the reflections, perhaps trying to escape, or even showing aggression. I am probably being naive, but I think she genuinely liked us. As we know, crayfish are complex creatures with intricate nervous systems, capable of playing, bonding, and feeling pain.
I developed a habit of spending a lot of time at the aquarium window. When I would turn on the light and enter the room, Cloud would come out from her hiding place. I would gently place my finger on the glass, and she would position herself directly on the other side. When I would release my finger and stand up to leave, she would stamp her feet insistently, becoming still again when I put my finger back on the glass. We would stay this way for 10 or 15 minutes at a time. Finally, I would remove my hand from the tank wall and smile as Cloud protested. “Sorry, Cloud,” I would say. “I’ve got laundry to put away.”
We brought her home on a Thursday, and by Saturday morning, her tank had turned a bit hazy. Not to worry, Google said. That’s a normal process of the tank ecosystem getting established.
By Saturday evening, Cloud still seemed happy, floating around her tank, devouring the carrots and pellets we fed her. On Sunday morning, I came into the room and touched the glass. I could see her toward the back of the tank, but she didn’t come out to greet me. Many types of crayfish are nocturnal, so I thought she might be sleeping. We were still getting to know her habits, after all, as it had only been a few days since she came to live with us. I didn’t want to disturb her, so I left and came back around 11 am to feed her.
But she was no longer alive.
How? Why? What happened? She was so young! So healthy! So happy! Crayfish are supposed to live for two to three years!
Immediately, I noticed an instinct to blame myself. What did I do wrong? Was it the water? The food? The substrate?
There’s no way to know for certain, but her likely cause of death was something called new tank syndrome, a phenomenon I found out about all too late. I then noticed my self-blame turning the finger in the opposite direction and looking to blame others. Why didn’t anyone at the pet store tell us about new tank syndrome?
But, as psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist Francis Weller says in The Wild Edge of Sorrow: blame does nothing for us because it requires nothing of us. Instead of blame, we can turn to a different process: grief.
This little creature had been in our lives for less than 72 hours, but her impact had been profound, and my grief matched it. She was more than a crayfish. She was novelty, joy, connection, and the necessary but risky heart-opening that comes with bringing a pet into your home.
When I told my son that she had died, after his initial tears, he began talking about our dog, who died last November. In Cloud’s death, she also then became a conduit for other losses. As for myself, in the days following her death, when I would cry for her, I could feel inside that it was a grief for my other losses as well, a grief for all the world.
Cloud’s death can also be viewed through the lens of disenfranchised grief. Crying over a crayfish? Someone might think, rolling their eyes. You’re too sensitive.
I’ll admit that feeling so deeply toward a creature you can order and eat at market price at your local seafood restaurant had its moments of absurdity to me, as well. But, I believe everything with consciousness has a soul, a unique personality. And, as I mentioned, she was also a symbol for new life, new beginnings, an embarking back into the realm of pet ownership.
Both of these deaths touched on another dimension of grief that I’d like to mention here known as the Six Gates of Grief, a concept described by Weller. I think of these gates as types of grief, or like rites of passage we move through when we experience loss:
Everything we love we will lose (loss of people, places, and relationships);
The parts of us that have not known love (grief from outcast parts of ourselves);
The sorrows of the world (grief over mistreatment of the natural world and injustice);
What we expected and did not receive (loss of village, purpose, and connection);
Ancestral grief (the losses and sorrows of our lineages, our ancestors' grief over disconnection from us); and
The harms we've done (grief over the harms we've caused, either directly or through complicity in systems of supremacy)
As novices, we did our best to set up Cloud’s tank and care for her, but something went wrong. Her untimely death ushered me through Gates 1, 3, and 6, in which I came face-to-face with a reminder that everything we love we will lose. And I was forced to reckon with the profound sense of responsibility I felt for this innocent being’s demise and for creating a painful loss for my child.
My family member’s death opened up several of these gates, as well, as I grieved for the parts of him that perhaps felt unloved or unlovable, and for the unintended harm he had caused to himself and others throughout a life marked with addiction.
As many people I respect have said (including Francis Weller and Adrienne Maree Brown, among others): healing happens in community. While some of our grief process is done internally and is necessarily a private and solo process, grief is also best seen as something we can do with others, not in isolation. From the smallest life forms to the largest, from our private losses to our public ones, and from the losses of what we expected and never received, we can dance and sing our grief songs with others. We can hold others while they grieve, too, remembering that we do not have to carry our losses alone.
Thank you for holding tenderly these two losses I have shared with you here. As I come to a close with this writing, I can feel that my heart now holds just a little less heaviness.
I’ll leave you with this Spell for Grief or Letting Go written by Adrienne Maree Brown. It appears in her book Emergent Strategy:
Adequate tears twisting up directly from the heart and rung out across the vocal chords until only a gasp remains;
At least an hour a day spent staring at the truth in numb silence;
A teacup of whiskey held with both hands, held still under the whispers of permission from friends who can see right through “ok” and “fine;”
An absence of theory;
Flight, as necessary;
Poetry, your own and others, on precipice, abandonment, nature and death;
Courage to say what has happened, however strangling the words are . . . and space to not say a word;
A brief dance with sugar, to honor the legacies of coping that got you this far;
Sentences spoken with total pragmatism that provide clear guidance of some direction to move in, full of the tender care and balance of choice and not having to choose;
Screaming why, and/or expressing fury at the stupid unfair fucking game of it all (this may include hours and hours, even lifetimes, of lost faith);
Laughter, undeniable and unpretended;
A walk in the world, all that gravity, with breath and heartbeat in your ears;
Fire, for all that can be written;
Moonlight—the more full the more nourishing;
Stories, ideally of coincidence and heartache and the sweetest tiny moments;
Time, more time and then more time . . . enough time to remember every moment you had with that one now taken from you, and to forget to think of it every moment;
And just a glimpse of tomorrow, either in the face of an innocent or the realization of a dream.
This is a nonlinear spell. Cast it inside your heart, cast it between yourself and any devil. Cast it into the parts of you still living.
Remember you are water. Of course you leave salt trails. Of course you are crying.
Flow.
P.S. If there happens to be a multitude of griefs upon you, individual and collective, or fast and slow, or small and large, add equal parts of these considerations:
—that the broken heart can cover more territory.
—that perhaps love can only be as large as grief demands.
—that grief is the growing up of the heart that bursts boundaries like an old skin or a finished life.
—that grief is gratitude.
—that water seeks scale, that even your tears seek the recognition of community.
—that the heart is a front line and the fight is to feel in a world of distraction.
—that death might be the only freedom.
—that your grief is a worthwhile use of your time.
—that your body will feel only as much as it is able to.
—that the ones you grieve may be grieving you.
—that the sacred comes from the limitations.
—that you are excellent at loving.
