Tag: grief

Spell for Grief or Letting Go

For those of us grieving today’s election results, re-living trauma, feeling terrified, heavy-heartedly unsurprised while still in shock and disbelief, feeling at once invaded yet also abandoned, feeling ravaged yet unseen.

adrienne maree brown gifted us this spell for grief, for letting go ― both of which we might need, but also to nurture the strength to keep up the fight where it matters.

“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.”

Spell for Grief or Letting Go – adrienne maree brown

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.

Sending love and strength.

should we have stayed home?

How did we get here again?

In the days trailing Christmas, Lisbon steadfastly follows all the rules. I’m at once grateful and desolate about the relative safety I’m indulging in, of a country whose people were so devastated early on that they are now strict in attempts to ward off the inevitable. Is that what it takes? The consequences of a past so deep that we can’t ignore the future? It hasn’t seemed to work yet, I think grimly about home, about love, about bids for forgiveness. At least they are trying, I accept, as I walk twenty thousand steps per day to reward myself with pastéis de nata. On one of my sojourns I wander into a bookstore across from a museum, tucked away in a northern suburb where tourists are less likely to go. The newest issue of Granta lures me from its perch. Should we have stayed home? issue 157 inquires, alluding to the familar lines of Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem. I am reverent, called-out, shameful over my first vacation in a long time.

Two years ago we wrote about this, earnestly thinking that after 2 weeks we’d have finished the canned beans we stocked up on. Two months ago we wrote about this, thinking we’d fold our cloth masks and put them away for the future. I saw some people string up cloth masks above their rooftops in triumph at believing they wouldn’t need them anymore; I saw others burn theirs. It’s different the second time around and even moreso the third, they’ll tell you about lockdown, and sex, and falling in love. That’s diminishing it, I know, but we’re all doing our best (we claim).

B sends me TikToks that I don’t watch until I do: bingeing his torrential messages in secret while attempting to sleep, but in public declaring that I’m “too old” to be a millennial and that I don’t watch TikToks. I kid myself when wondering why I suffer from insomnia, but at this point I gladly accept the burden of sleeplessness over other looming ailments. I rewatch The Walking Dead a third time, and this time it seems so close to the truth that I have to turn away to things like Sandra Bullock romantic comedies.

I return home again (what is home?), and I can still taste the cinnamon on my tongue. On every street corner, discarded fir and pine trees tumble into one another next to the metal bins. In the rare event that it’s not raining, Vondelpark is packed; gloved hands full of glühwein and dogs’ leashes. A surge of pessimistic foresight led me to purchase dumbbells at a suburban Target before I moved, and I use them every day. My friends invite themselves over to my place for dinner; they feel trapped, they feel alone. I make food for them on weekends. We sing songs from Moulin Rouge to pass the time. My neighbors across the street decidedly close their drapes to avoid watching me throw solo dance parties to Enrique Iglesias music videos from the 90s. But really I want someone to invite me on a roadtrip in their converted van, so that we can hide from the Greek alphabet and cook dinners over butane stoves in national parks while watching the stars. That’s a privileged-ass thing to be able to want, just like craving B’s curated TikToks under the safety of my Marimekko bedspread to the sound of the Dutch rain. On my daily walks I listen to podcast stories about death and collective grief. I think about my personal grief every day, but don’t write about it.

On cold nights I bike past the Amstel, noting the yellow holiday lights strung on tree branches blinking silently on the river and echoing our hope. Past due, left on for a little too long, yet still glowing like embers next to the bobbing moonlight.

glass jars

i walked to the coffee shop that makes matcha teas the way i like them (yes so bougie). and while waiting, i looked carefully at all the too-fancy glass jars of jam on the shelves. rose petal preserves, traditional quince preserves, organic fir honey, bergamot preserves (which is a type of citrus).

i reminisced about when people would still spend time in the kitchen to make things based on grandmothers’ handwritten recipes, and not just drink or eat ready-made things out of a plastic container. i remember the way my grandmother would cook meals in her tiny apartment in Tainan. it was always dim, they never turned the lights on (to conserve on energy bill). my grandfather always sitting at the small table kind of grumpily, surrounded by his calligraphy paintbrushes. his face was always stuck in a strict, mean expression. i was absolutely terrified of him.

when he was dying, i sat by his bedside at the hospital and stared at his white hair and sunken cheeks. the strong mouth i was terrified of because it was always saying too-mean things in Mandarin, it lay silent. when he did gain consciousness, he would tell me about my childhood self, not knowing i was the same person. not recognizing the adult version of the girl he talked about. he would ask me to fetch his paintbrushes so that he could practice his calligraphy, though he was too weak to even hold them.

i was overwhelmed at how it felt. i wondered how to treat this sudden lack of terror towards him. we tell ourselves that keeping the uncomfortable parts of someone’s presence would be worth it, just let us keep them. please, just let us keep them here by our sides on earth for the rest of this lifetime. “these are the things i would trade for him to stay,” we shout into the void.

at the altar where my elders’ photos hang, i felt the universe moving, adjusting to the loss of a soul. the fishbone that had been caught in his throat led to the discovery of other cancers that had invaded his body.

such tiny, invisible things that alter us.
such huge things that change us, that can in no way be contained or understood.
the mystery that hangs in the stillness between worlds, between us and loved ones lost.

i wondered what we could do, put their souls in glass jars, keep them safe, preserve them? mix them with rose petals and bergamot, pour in all the sweetness stocked up in ourselves that we saved up thinking there would be a better time in the future to say the necessary, come up with a new name for the concoction. give the soul-preserves a forever shelf life, and keep them present within every food we eat and at every meal we share.