There are things I cannot explain, things that don’t feel learnt but ancestrally given, perhaps. My seeking to better understand grief, to intimately know the shape of mine, to validate the grief streams of others - it’s a seeking that feels bigger than me.
It fascinates me, perhaps because I fear it. Because I have been broken by it, many times, and somehow repaired, though with cracks and scars as souvenirs. Know that this won’t be the first time I write here about grief. I’ll give these thoughts a home of their own; griefnotes.
There are a lot of words of mine unwritten, about both the map (in making) of my own lived grief and broader reflections on the ‘feathered thing’. It’s a curious juxtaposition - to be someone who holds space for grief in circles and to be in a new chapter of grief becoming. Earlier this month I withdrew from holding a grieftending session that I’d been invited to lead. The reply I got to my carefully written message of honesty and vulnerability was ‘thank you for sharing’. Four words. They stung. And here I am writing this.
Jana Roemer wrote this week;
‘we live in a such a grief illiterate society that people don’t know what to say’
You can read her full post here, a capturing of the tender phase of grief.
We’re also ill equipped to honour and tend to our own grief. The UK crematorium service feels symbolic of forgotten rituals and hurried expectations of mourning. And then there’s the missing lexicon we have to speak to the multitude of grief experiences that don’t involve death. None of us are strangers to the things that we - and others - don’t readily label as grief. The things that broke, that slipped through our hands, things lost or stolen, the experiences we assumed we’d have… that never happened.
If you’ve found me through my work on infertility and reproductive trauma, I know you’ll know, that I know.
I think it was Elizabeth Day who coined ‘disenfranchised grief’ as a means of recognising the more externally subtle/unseen losses of long term trying to bring a baby home. We are deprived in so many ways of our grief mattering, counting, happening. I’m not sure it’s an acknowledgment we even allow ourselves in the breadth that it begs for?
I want, no, I need a shelf in this library to lay down thoughts on grief and the long and short shadows it casts. I write this in September 2023 standing at the top of a canyon of grief. I can’t see the bottom. I don’t feel ready to descend into it, so here I stand, in shock and in sadness. There is beauty here too, and so much richness that I know will reveal itself in time.
So, griefnotes is born. A series of reflections and things I have found that speak about grief in a way I can relate to. A space to share your own descents and ascents. A space to be wistful in, quiet in, to purge sadness through the written word and sense make a fraction of the impossible.