A Name for the Fog
“Grief cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet.”
It was March 19th, a Friday. (Doesn't that already seem like a year ago?) That's when, while texting a friend one afternoon, I realized that many of us had gone from watching movies in crowded theaters to rationing our food in the span of a week. A privilege on both accounts, of course, but a brutal flip of reality in an unbearably short amount of time. I typed it, thumbs somewhat shaking, with a half-laugh—the kind you expel as your eyes well with tears. Suddenly, I saw the context more clearly.
Those few minutes spent standing in the shower, staring at the wall, before noticing that I hadn't moved? Hours passing in a day without much capacity to articulate exactly what had occurred in that time? Bursting into tears in the middle of an empty street? Countless nights of lost sleep?
This is grief. It's grief, Brandi.
Abrupt or deep loss feels like an ejection from your life. One day, the world looks one way and the next, you have been picked up and dropped off on an entirely different planet, and not of your own free will. There is no consent; you are not consulted. You are just living in a different world and you know, no matter how much your bones ache to believe return is possible, there is just no going back to how it was, or to who and how you were. To how we were. In this case, praise all that is holy for that—in some ways. Still, have any of us ever experienced this, so acutely, on a global scale, all at once?
This is an individual and collective grief.
It's the emotional toll that comes with the constant emails. The never-ending online meetings. The deluge of organizations you love and businesses you have invested in, all begging you for financial support, even when you have perhaps lost your own income. The housing and food insecurity, everywhere. The stories of sickness. The fear of sickness. The actual friends and family that are no longer here. God, it is a lot. It is so much.
This is grief.
Don't hear me wrong. I am not grieving the rapid destruction of a system that was only ever meant to care for some of us. I truly hope for that. I am praying for it. Dancing and shouting incantations to usher it in.
What I am grieving, though, is the loss of life tied to its demise. I grieve not sitting close to you in a movie theater. That we might eventually have to take our temperature in all public spaces. Having to wear gloves to touch my own belongings. Not hugging you without a second thought. All the backyard parties and poetry readings and residencies I probably will not host or attend this summer. Not seeing people in person. The lack of real contact. Falling asleep without fearing I will wake up with a cough.
At least for now.
And, listen. I'm saying all of this because—before we learn a new way of being, before we thrive and create and imagine new ways forward—it is essential to honor what has been temporarily, and maybe even permanently, lost. Not to dwell in the negative, or to play the "victim," or to get stuck here, cowering in the corner of your room (though all of those leanings are justified), but to acknowledge our very real, very deep, and very legitimate feelings.
Grief, if we let it be, is a holy place. Some sort of mystical experience where we may briefly open a kind of veil, revealing what matters and burning away the rest. But, we must allow it.
"There are two things we do when grief happens that take us away from ourselves: self-abandonment and life rejection...When self-abandonment happens, we're taught to quarantine off these parts of ourselves that are 'ad'—mad, sad, bad—in polite society, and when grief happens, those things are so ever-present that they can no longer be pushed away. We become mad, sad, bad, and so we literally push ourselves away."
Quarantine. Shelby Forsythia said this before most of us could define "shelter-in-place" without the aid of an internet search.
So friends, even if we must be quarantined from each other, please don't quarantine yourself, from yourself. If you find you need a good cry, let it come. Let your children see it. Take them onto your front stoop and invite them to scream along with you. Or do it alone. Reject politeness, which is not the same as rejecting kindness. Screw anyone who thinks it's overreacting. But—please—do not reject yourself.
Because this is grief.
Honor it.
Create a container for it, in whatever ways serve you.
Invite others to show up for "aftercare" if you plan ceremony around it.
Or, let the waves come as they may.
Check out, when you can't any longer.
Return to it, when you can.
And then, let us imagine what comes next.
