Grieve

Grieve

We have no grief rituals, and yet the loss is heavy around us. It is a fear, I think, that we will succumb, that we will fall into a pit of despair too deep to fathom, and that we will not come out. And this, too, is because we have forgotten how to cry together. We make grief a private affair, when our mourning is also collective. To feel the pain of loss is not different than to celebrate life. We are torn asunder by loss because we love. Had we not loved, it wouldn’t hurt us so. And in this way, grief and love are not different. To be touched, this is the thing. No one ever dies by crying, and the heart does not break by it. The heart breaks when it can’t cry, when it freezes over and the tears are locked in. Frozen in many of us is a veritable catalogue of loss.

Cultures that have grief rituals find a way to unloose the primal ache. KEENING, in Irish culture, is the act of wailing in grief for a person who has died. This wail— primal, unbounded, beneath the formation of words—is a lament torn from the breast. The ancient Greeks tore out their hair. In the Old Way, we allowed ourselves to be undone by grief. In our socialization these days, crying is often demeaned. We tell little boys to man up, to suck it up, to hold it in. We associate crying with weakness, with cowardice. But no. It is the opposite. When we do not grieve, we shut down.

Those who do not cry dissociate. To lock in grief is to become numb, and this explains much about where we are now in modern times, and who we have become. It is appropriate, these days, to grieve heavily the losses that mount around us, and to do so in community. Yet we can’t make ourselves cry. It is not something that we can do. Grief must be allowed. It cannot be mandated. To grieve, we don’t DO something. We get out of the way. We yield. We surrender. We let go. And perhaps it is this loss of control that frightens us most. We fear we will come to pieces and never be able to put ourselves back together again. We say to you, Let it happen. What is holding us together now is a tightness, a constriction. Let go into it, let it rip you open, let it melt your heart down and your heart will become tender again. Grief is a pathway to re-birth. Un-dam the river. Let the waters flow.