Issue 21: Grief

Single Issues > 2011 > Issue 21: Grief > Last Note

Last Note

Ruminate Contributors on Grief…

These days, grief feels like a daily exercise. Good healthy grieving. Not that any major loss is marking my life right now; it just seems to me that simple changes deserve their grief time. A kind of witnessing. The summer ending, an office cleaned out for the next person, a book with no more pages left in it to read. Writing is, in part, grieving—didn’t Joan Didion speak about writers being born with a presentiment of loss (in “On Keeping a Notebook”)? And so we write it down, not to grasp it out of fear, but to know it fully in the present before we let it go. I often wonder if the bigger losses will feel more manageable if I give the small losses their due—no, not more manageable, but maybe more shot through with the kind of light you notice when you’re more awake. I hope that is the case.
                                                                        Jessie van Eerden Nonfiction Contributor

A writer friend of mine, whose life was suddenly revised by cancer, prompted me to think of this passage: As you can see, I am occupied with Death, so there’s no time left to answer you with a novel. When I first arrived in the world I thought there would be
more time; I was mistaken; so are we all.
                                                                        David Feela Poetry Contributor

Nothing can measure those long empty stretches, the self-elected isolation, the spasms of rage or sadness that leave me changed. My father’s death caught me on the cusp of adolescence. After the car accident, he lingered for days, finally leaving behind the sterile smell of hospital corridors. Depression, anxiety, nightmares. These are the tokens of grief and, in my case, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The past haunts, while the future remains unclear. It is only in the present that I find hints of life’s meaning, as well as its fragility.
                                                                        Mary Kathryn Wiley Poetry Contributor

In Paris, the dead alone dwell in the 20th Arrondissement divided between the Pere-Lachaise and Belleville cemeteries. The stone paths, mottled by the dim light filtering between the intertwined branches of ash and oak, climb Mont Louis. One afternoon, while climbing the steps to an upper terrace, something crunched beneath my feet—the path was paved in snails. They crawled in lines, one behind the other, and glided on their muscular feet, weighed down by the dark curl of their shells. I had interrupted several processions, but the snails kept on, inching around the shards of shell and flesh. I stepped off the path and watched. Soon, however, they were no longer avoiding the crushed snails; they were devouring them. Antennae squirmed over the carcasses, until all that was left were the shells and a glistening trail of mucus—a gleaming corridor between ravaged graves.
                                                                        Adrianne Smith Poetry Contributor

Sorrow is a cat  crouching in the undergrowth
often undetected   Her habits have worn a path
uniquely into each life . . .
                                                                        D.S. Martin Book Review Contributor

Many of our griefs are long and arduous, a continuous slog. They are particular to us and yet they are universal. And that is the truth about the world. Grief that feels too big to be born. It seems to me as a writer that the easiest way to capture grief is by writing small, focusing on the particular. We must also tell the other truth about the world, that the end of our grief has already been written. Annie Dillard writes, “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” And that is the flip side of our story: wonder and astonishment as individual and universal as grief. And somehow we must learn to live in between them both. There is a time to give voice to each.
                                                                        Maureen Doyle McQuerry Poetry Contributor

When I had to drive the length of the country—nearly 3000 miles westward, away from family and friends—I learned endurance. Physical endurance, sure, but a strange mental endurance that I’ve never known: one part focus, one part meditation on what was going away. And in that second part I learned a lesson in loss; or, if not loss, then disappearance, which is a friendly sister of loss. On the night we arrived, finally stopping and laying down and knowing that it was all done, I thought: It is already tomorrow on the east coast, just after midnight, and I know the people we left are doing whatever it is they’re doing. I know the people we love who are so far away will wake up tomorrow, as will we, in a new place, missing someone and going on in spite of it.
                                                                        Matthew Burns Poetry Contributor

When I first experienced crippling grief—over a sudden death—I finally understood that biblical gesture of tearing one’s hair and garments in sorrow. I wanted out of my clothes, my hair, my skin; any membrane that would dare touch a world where such pain and loss were possible, that would dare let in so much suffering.
                                                                        Kendra Langdon Juskus Poetry Contributor

I was talking to a friend recently about the grief involved with saying goodbye. I told her that I find it hard during these periods of sadness not to go a little crazy, like, eat pizza every day or smoke a million cigarettes, cut my hair with my eyes closed or laugh for too long, to that point where people look at you and say, “I think he’s cracked.” But then, miraculously, I do none of these things. I clip my fingernails. I go to church and talk to an elderly woman named Ruth about her silver bracelet. I sit on the arm of my sofa and bite into a jazz apple. I said to my grieving friend, if you find a jazz apple in your grocery store, I recommend you try it. It is from Australia, according to the sticker. Details like these provide me rungs to keep climbing.
                                                                        Tyler McCabe Nonfiction Contributor

Grief and love are so closely related that at times I find it hard to differentiate between them. Like love, grief is about the other— the need for that which is not contained within our selves. Like love, grief is impossible to articulate perfectly, which is why artists are always trying to do it, and always will. Lear’s “Howl, howl, howl, howl,” may be the closest anyone ever comes: grief originates from somewhere primal in us, somewhere animal. Like love, it whittles us to our barest state, then leaves us with only a question: What comes next? And that may be the most interesting part. The refrigerator and a one inch nugget of good cheese—becomes a feast.
                                                                        Dyana Herron Poetry Contributor

Every night I climb into bed and curl up in the glow of my iPad. Using the right combination of screen taps, I can transport myself to the Dadaab refuge camp, where despairing mothers queue up to receive temporary rations. Many have been raped on the way or forced to leave dying children on the side of the road in order to save the others. The pictures are hard to see, but I manage. I say a prayer, nibble on chocolate, and fluff my pillow for sleep. Oh God, decrease their suffering. Oh God, increase my grief.
                                                                        Tania Runyan Poetry Contributor

“As long as we are on earth,” wrote Thomas Merton, “the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a Body of broken bones.” I feel this love-rooted suffering at times, often while watching my toddler son doing the kinds of things toddlers do—holding his blanket to his face and sucking his finger when he is tired, for instance, or getting excited over picking up little rocks in our yard. In such moments I know that he is, in the core of his being, no different from children who suffer from the violence of abuse, of war, of hunger. And so, when my son is tired, I pick him up, kiss him, and lay him in his bed; with him, I admire and study the rocks he gathers. In his sleep and in his rock bucket there is, somehow, grace enough to reset this broken Body in which there is no separation, if we could but ever see it.
                                                                        Christopher Martin Poetry Contributor