Reading (and Not Reading) about Grief

I’ve heard of several deaths recently, more than usual (is there a usual amount of death?) among friends or relatives of my friends and relatives. People far enough from me that I don’t know much more than their names or identifiers (like her uncle or her son), but close enough for me to feel sympathetic waves of sadness from their sudden absence and the wrongness in their passing. Because most if not all of these deaths have not been peaceful, expected or the culmination of a well-lived life.   

When my dear mother died, at age 69 and after nearly 10 years of dancing back and forth with cancer, I was gut-shakingly sad. One of the best gifts I received at that time was hearing from someone who described grieving the loss of her own mother as “primal.” It was a feeling I could fall into yet somehow not drown in. Profoundly painful, but not horrifying. I even had moments of wonder, experiencing her death as the natural and mysterious flip side of her birth.  

But these deaths from violence or trauma, accident or mistake? There's less sense to be made, and wonder is elusive.  

*

After my mother died, I wanted to find instructions for grieving, maybe a guidebook to the foreign land of motherlessness. My therapist said: No. Don’t read anything for the first few months. Just let yourself feel whatever you feel. That was not the guidance I wanted, but it was good, helpful advice. I don’t remember much from those first few months, but there was certainly a good amount of crying or staring absently into the middle distance. When my wife kindly took me on a day trip to our favorite beach in Maine, the openness of the sky and the rhythmic power of the waves were wordless, nourishing recipients of my pain.  

I come from beach people on my mother’s side. She grew up on Long Island, with daily summertime trips to float in the swell at Jones Beach after her father came home from work. When he died unexpectedly in his 50s, she took her mother for a walk on the empty winter beach. I still have a fragment of a seashell she collected that day. That’s what we do, how we process things that are big and overwhelming, especially when there’s nothing to be done.  

Whether it’s the ocean, a mountain, or simply the sky we all share, I hope that those who are grieving can feel they have something, somewhere, larger than themselves to witness and receive their wordless pain.  

At the beach in Connecticut on the fifth anniversary of my mom's passing 

*

When I did eventually read some books about grief, two were particularly helpful. Healing Grief, Finding Peace: Daily Strategies for Grieving and Growing by grief counselor Louis E. LaGrand is warm, kind, simple, practical.  

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by psychologist Francis Weller is more spiritual, communal, and mystical. I’ve been re-reading parts of it again lately, as it speaks to the common human experience of a continual flow between love and loss, desire and desolation, in all areas of life.  

And I think this recent Discover article, The Stages of Grief Are Unique to Everyone, but They Can Help us Cope, is a good place to start for a shorter introduction to some of these concepts. 

Here’s a poem I wrote about one of my journeys. 

Stages

A purple tulip bud 
clenched and dark 
slowly unfurls   
a central white star. 
Grief reveals 
in its own time 
if a fist can become   
an open palm.  

 

Wandering Through the Dark

I’m excited that the spring equinox is getting closer, although the time change has been tough for me to adjust to this week. Green leaves of daffodils, crocuses, and tulips are showing themselves in my garden, hinting at bright colors to come. It’s easy for me to write about flowers and beauty, but before that begins again, I want to take time to acknowledge the dark we’ve come through here in the Northern Hemisphere.  

This year's solstice wheel

Every year the seasons do their circle dance, and some parts are more welcome than others. I have learned, though, that even dark winter days have their own beauty and gifts. This is mainly thanks to a meditative practice led by Carolyn Cushing called Descent and Return of the Light, where we use Tarot cards and candles to explore and learn from the long nights surrounding the winter solstice. I did this e-retreat for the third time this year, and one of the helpful phrases that came to me was that I can “keep the darkness in my heart.” The December holidays can feel like mandated, simplistic happiness that grates on me if I’m not able to also hold space for sadness and complexity.  

Card image of The Moon from The Wild Unknown by Kim Krans

For a meditation prompt about who or what can be a guide through the dark, I pulled the moon card, which signifies directionless! I was frustrated by the idea at first, but as I thought about it, I came to a more mystical sense of trusting that I can wander without being “lost.” (Like in the famous Tolkien quote.) Soon after that, I was walking by the ocean on a dark night with no moon, noticing rich layers of darkness with the deep water, the new moon, and the midnight winter cold. Here’s a poem I wrote from that experience. 

New Journal, New Form: Check out the cadralor!

I’m happy to say, dear Reader, that after a five-year hiatus, I have resumed revising and sending out poems! The first fruit of those labors is my poem We Begin at the End in the latest issue of a new journal called Gleam. This journal is completely dedicated to a new form they’re calling the cadralor. It’s an interesting and expansive form, focused on images and intuitive structure instead of meter or anything you can count, other than the required five stanzas. Last night I had the pleasure of hearing many of the poets in the issue read their work, as well as reading mine to them. 

A poetry reading on Zoom is an odd yet oddly beautiful experience. The one I attended last night included people from at least three U.S. time zones and someone from the U.K. There were no audible sighs from the audience after particularly affecting lines, like we would have heard if we were all in a room together — but instead, people quoted those lines in the chat, or made other comments about what spoke to them in each poet’s work. 

I owe thanks for the discovery of this new journal and poetic form to the poet Kris Ringman, whose gorgeous poem, When I am dead, will you make runes with my body? was in Gleam’s inaugural issue. You can also see and/or listen to her reading it on YouTube. 

In early drafts, my poem was an ekphrastic work based on the 10 cards in the Gaian Tarot. Poet and tarot reader Carolyn Cushing had shared that 10s in the tarot can symbolize what comes after a culmination, the end that slides into a beginning again. For a while, I revised and reworked it as a four-stanza poem, but to make it into a cadralor, I added another stanza based on a 10 from a different deck. This is the third stanza that comes in the middle, where the poem transitions from an act of learning and mourning to a growing sense of obligation and connection. Taking on the challenge of writing a cadralor, which pushed me to add a fifth stanza, was key to this poem finally coming together.

Inspiration in the form of Tarot art

Morning Sounds

Roofers ride their ship of shingles

through the ocean of day.

Rock music and radio ads cut their way

at the prow, as a chorus of hammers

shimmers in their wake.

Old tiles crash off the sides.

A reversing truck alights with an exhale

of brakes. The sun is a tyrant.

The breeze, when it rises

is a sip of fresh water.

---

I wrote this poem-sketch last summer, while sitting in my yard and listening to roofers work on a house nearby. Aware of how comfortable I was in that moment compared to them, I thought about how loud music like what they were playing can be helpful when you’re doing something that, no matter what, just has to get done. Seeing them walk along the roofline reminded me for some reason of the boat-shaped play structure my childhood friend’s grandfather built for us a long time ago. I wasn’t close enough to take a picture, so here’s a stock image of a boat’s wake instead. 

---

Five Roses

Five roses in a jar

On the kitchen table

Layers of petals

Skirts and frills

Make shadows

Like folds of flesh

Four of them are

Antique white

Like an old 

Wedding dress

Tinged with

The gray-pink

Of silver polish

The fifth is paler

More ivory than blush

The color

Of old paper &

Pear-shaped

Instead of round

What is written

In the cells

Of these blooms

Whose blood

Is on their thorns

The eye is drawn

To difference

It calls everything

Into question

---

Since we're spending so much time at home these days due to Covid, I've been putting extra effort into making it a nice place, including buying flowers for the kitchen table every week. And it's important to remember the people who grew, picked, and packaged them. 

---

Eggshell Poem

Each egg is a gift

Pushed out with pain

And squawking

I dress them up

With salt and cheese

Savor each soft bite

The shells are red, tan

Coral, cream

Even blue

Together, they pass

The life they might have had

To me

A little detour

On their way

To something new 

---

I get these chicken eggs at Big E's supermarket in Easthampton, MA. They're from Cold Spring Ranch in Southampton, MA and a sticker on the carton calls them "happy hillbilly eggs." They're delicious and, as you can see, beautiful. The different colors remind me that each one came from an individual. 

---

Starting the Sealey Challenge

Reading poetry is something I love and have done for decades, but sometimes it still intimidates me, either because I’m in awe of the poet’s skill or I’m frightened by the depths of emotions the words take me to. 

That’s why I loved discovering #theSealeychallenge last year and why I’m doing it again this year. Reading a poetry book a day for a month (or 100 pages a day, or however close I could come to that) was so freeing! At first I approached it like a task to do well, but I soon realized the only way I could do it was to let go of how I normally read (slowly, carefully, thoughtfully) and just go for it. Let the words flow over my eyeballs, my brain, my heart. Devour the words like popcorn, instead of eating them gingerly like petites fours.

I discovered some poets whose work amazed and excited me. I slogged through some who just didn’t do it for me. But the best gift I got from the experience was gorging on words, trusting that they were changing me even as I let them go, like racing down a highway with the windows open, poems written all over the land.

My bookshelf, ready to go!