Notes from Poetry and the Cycle of Grief

Things that stuck with me...

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Somatic healer and grief facilitator Josea Tamira Crossley recently let me slide a short module on The Cycle of Grief and Poetry into her class roster. I love this material, it’s one of those wells we can all drink from endlessly. My topic felt especially welcome in the space she creates. I want to share some of the highpoints so we might all carry a seed of this work within. There is so much fertile ground here.

Which is weird to say because writing and grief don’t often go together. When you’re in grief, and I mean big grief - the kind that swallows you whole - you really can’t write. You are surviving … we hope. If you’re lucky, like me, you’re being held by those living souls who love you. I was buried in a pile of kids and animals for the first few weeks after my wife’s passing. I know we’re not all so lucky.

Grief has a way of untethering everything we thought was reliable, every story we thought we could tell. It defies rational thought without any effort at all. Words do not join us when we are buried in its folds.

So why bother writing? Some of us will write compulsively because thats just who we are. Others of us will worry at the edge of writing, thumbing the keyboard, scratching with a pencil from time to time. For many of us written words will feel foreign, like strange bugs crawling over us while we hide from the world.

Though it’s counterintuitive, writing can be a lifeline.

“Amidst this storm of unprocessed, often painful memories, my own stories and poetry became islands I could drift to. I found a kind of footing on those shores that didn’t allow me to hide from the memories, but gave me the comfort of my own presence, my own heart as the difficult stuff washed over me. Like the cairnes you find hiking through large expanses, they gave me not only a sense of orientation, but a map to allow me to navigate in and out of those states.”

Writing - raw, honest writing - can give us a foothold in a place where there are no footholds. We remember the source of our own being, making it tangible at a time when everything dissolves. That small oasis may even convey to us the presence of spirit, witnessing us. Writing can be a companion in the dark.

Maybe this is just new for us. Let’s be honest, we’re not great at the grief thing. We don’t want to spend our days crying ugly, failing spectacularly at achieving the best version of ourselves (whatever the hell that means.) For many people grief feels like an unsightly boil on the ever evolving selfie they’re perfecting. If we write about it, won’t it just draw more attention to it?

Our culture, and all of us in it, are poorer for the lack of active grieving in our lives. As one Irish elder commented “we grew up unafraid of the sound of grief, not so today.” We make a smaller banquet of life by avoiding the tougher food. Those elders know it, they feel it in us. They know we don’t laugh as deeply because we cannot grieve as well.

As writers, what can we find in those waters? We talked about how metaphor is central to all forms of human expression. Writing, dreaming, dance, ritual, science, any form of human communication is bound up with metaphor. When words fail us, metaphor is readily available. It is the endless fount, if we are able to sit and wait patiently for it to share what it knows.

We worked with the ways metaphor can arise from being embodied. When we walk, when we breath, when we engage our body mindfully we open the door to images and stories that might guide us deeper into our experience of grief in a way that keeps it flowing.

As Josea said, “grief has to move through the body.”

Body is key to knowing when grief is ready to speak, ready to move. Even in the deepest sorrow, if we are still rooted in our bodies, we will be reminded to move. We must walk, eat, or shower. Unless we’ve trigger a deep depression or overwhelming trauma, our bodies want motion to move our process. What needs to be written will arise naturally.

Our grief will come and go and come again. As the class title states, grief is a cyclical experience. So many of us who have suffered a deep loss talk about anniversaries, the return of grief when a birthday, wedding anniversary or death-day comes back upon us. Days or even weeks in advance we can begin to feel uncomfortable, irritable, tending to isolation. This rhythm gives us opportunities to bring our writing to bear when we are invited back in to be with grief.

The key is not to describe, but embody. In preparation for teaching I read poetry on grief from a variety of cultures and periods. In most instances the authors were better at talking about grief than from a place of grief. I can relate. It’s easier to survey grief with an objective eye than it is to sit in grief and tell your story. But if we bring our bodies to the process of writing, if we trust the metaphors that come, grief can unfold easily.

#18 Carry Her, from 31 Poems About Grief (a work in progress)

I would like to carry her
down this hallway
my sometimes tender
often edgy bird
to lay her on the bed waiting for her.

It may be a bed for living or dying,
I don’t know which it is now,
but she shouldn’t have to walk there,
feeling the cold floor,
alone.

Let her rest against me,
hear my heart beating,
let me kiss her,
and gently pull the covers up over her shoulder
as she looks for sleep,
from this battle
put upon her
with cruelty.

This is not easy, but we all need this. If we can show up for our work with grief, present in our bodies, trusting our voices, grief can move and contribute to a grief-wise culture.

I’ll be continuing to work in this space, completing my 31 Poems About Grief and finding ways to teach more. It would be wonderful to have more time to sit in the space of grief with writers like you. After all, we’re all storytellers.

Stay tuned.