Issue 21: Grief

Single Issues > 2011 > Issue 21: Grief > Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note: Grief

Grief. Suffering. Let’s face it—they’re not very reader-friendly topics in today’s market. The staff and I actually wondered if hosting an issue on this theme might be too heavy, if the topic might discourage folks from reading the magazine.

I was thinking about this as I walked my son to his first day of kindergarten. He bawled and bawled, begging me to not leave him. My heart broke for him, and I realized, this too is a kind of grief. He, grieving his loss of the familiar and comfortable. “Let’s just go home and come back tomorrow,” he says to me. And me, grieving the passage of time—my baby with his big dinosaur backpack and the large crocodile tears falling down his cheek. And yet, when I picked him up from his first day, he came barreling out of the classroom telling me “It was great, Mom—we had three recesses!”

As my son reminds me, yes, we’re resilient. But that doesn’t excuse an oblivious eye or attempts to avoid the heavy, and it doesn’t mean that the three recesses cancel out the tears of the morning. We all experience moments, seasons, and even years of heart wrenching, but if we’re honest, we’d rarely choose to sit with grief, or even sadder, we’d rarely choose to sit with those grieving.

But in the hands of artists, a difficult topic can be given handles, places to hold on to. And while we’re holding, the artist can point our vision to something we might not have seen before or place our fingers on something we thought too difficult to touch. This is true of the talented contributors gathered here, who had a lot to say about grief. Grief that exists in divorce, death, goodbyes, lost babies, lost love, disease, or just feeling lost—reminding us all of the pain of this world but also of the beauty that can exist in the ashes.

So here it is. Issue 21. Heart-wrenching, lovely, and full of cries . . . even howls, I suppose. (I love what Dyana Herron points out in the adjacent “Notes From You”—that King Lear’s “Howl, howl, howl, howl” may be the most honest articulation of grief.) And the cries are not alone. These pages are moving examples of weeping with those who weep. To me, this solidarity and community is hopeful. Perhaps when we practice weeping with those who weep we are then even more equipped to rejoice with those who rejoice.

And we do rejoice with Adrianne Smith, winner of the 2011 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, and with all the finalists poets. Naomi Shihab Nye was the finalist judge this year, and it was an honor to have her reading and selecting the winners. She wrote this about Adrianne’s winning poem, “In Bridgewater, my room”: “A deft, moving, potent poem. Understated, it carries its threads gracefully—room, song, train, someone departing—the grace of this poem’s music, and haunted beauty of its content, made this one really stand out.” We couldn’t agree more, and we were even further inspired to create this issue on grief because of Adrianne’s poem, a poem that reminds us that some day we will all be carried home.

Yes. We could stand to have our hearts moved, even wrenched a little more often. Not because we’re trying to find drama or seek tragedy, but because we want to be softened to the suffering (and the joys) of this world. And because we so desire what Matthew Burns describes as “a soft hand on [our] cheek / and soothing, bloodless words / we [are] all straining to hear.”

We are grateful for the handles,

Brianna Van Dyke

Editor-in-Chief