grief is a sneaky bastard

Ah, grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don’t know you’ve been living
under my porch.

 

fragment from Talking to Grief, Denise Levertov

– A sprawling piece, longer than usual, that arose from thinking about my relationship to grief. –  

 

I stumbled around the house one morning in August wondering why on earth I couldn’t see anything that was close to me. Straining to read my phone unless I stretched it out at arms length, I started to panic. What the fuck had I done to myself?

It took at least another hour before I realised that I had, in fact, put in not one, but two pairs of contact lenses. One on top of the other. I’d basically forgotten to take out the previous night’s pair and then just crammed in another set in the morning, not thinking to ask myself why I had risen from bed with perfect vision when I usually can’t make out the details of the objects on the chest of drawers a mere, what, three metres away from me.

The next day I went into work and found myself straining at a spreadsheet with next year’s timetable in it. Not because I couldn’t see it – thankfully I’d put the right number of contact lenses in that day – but because I couldn’t for the life of me fathom what all the numbers were doing. I was trying to figure out how many hours of contact time I had with students and I couldn’t. fucking. do it.

I cried. Head in hands. An urgent feeling that I needed to get the fuck out of there swelled through me. I sent my boss an email saying I didn’t ‘feel well’ and escaped out of the building.

Grief is a sneaky bastard.1

I should have recognised that it was coming but yet again – even though I know this time of year fucks with me – I was royally tripped up by its arrival.

Forgive me, because if you’ve hung out here long enough, you’ve probably already heard the one about how my brother, Alistair, killed himself the day before my birthday in August when we were on holiday. And you probably already know about how this queasy mix of grief and joy is a bit too much for my system to handle.

It’s been grief season here again, my friend. Every summer I feel I go a little bit deranged… and it turns out this year was, in some ways, no different.

Since Al died2 I feel like I’ve been in an ongoing experiment with myself and my family in how to navigate this time of year; how to mourn, whilst also feeling the sweetnesses life has to offer when it’s one’s birthday. We’re taught in mainstream grief education that some anniversaries might feel hard: the day they died, their birthday, Christmases, et cetera, but I’ve never read anything that has said you might struggle for a whole month or, in my case, the majority of the summer.

Some years we go away on holiday for a bit, hoping that a chnage of scene will provide me with some peace. Other years we’ve stayed put, but made an effort for my birthday day. Lots of beloveds over. Delicious food. There’s been okay years and very bad years and still not much rhyme or reason to what provokes a very bad one.

Last year was a Bad Year, so this time round we decided we try something new. My partner took our daughter away for the week, giving me a week here to just do normal shit: go to work, hang out with friends, but with an extra delicious dose of peace and quiet. And if the grief came, I could mourn in the house on my own. Undisturbed. They’d be back just in time for my birthday.

As they were packing up to go, I was stoked to have this time to myself. Plus, the usual creeping dread that I experience around this season hadn’t hit me. Maybe I wouldn’t be in mourning-mode this year? Maybe I was just going to have an excellent week alone in the house to myself? What bliss.

It’s been nine years of this. And there is a big part of me that, after all that time, wants my grief to make sense; to be well behaved and contained; to arrive only when invited and to not make too much noise when I give it a place at the table. (I’m not quite at Denise Levertov’s levels of grief-welcoming just yet.) Until the contact lenses and the spreadsheet incident I really thought I had bypassed the worst parts of how grief shows up for me.

It took me years to accept that my grief wasn’t just a feeling I had. It was a cacophony of challenging thoughts and erratic behaviours, forgetfulness, indecision and brain fog all sandwiched together with an awful physical heaviness, as well as feelings of depair, regret, anger and loneliness. Oh, and sorrow. So much bloody sorrow.

When he first died I trailed around like that consistently for the first two years or so. Raising a wild toddler who never slept and trying to put on a brave face at work, these years were utter torture. The exhaustion was constant, but worsened during my period (and again during the dark moon 3) and the harder feelings spiked during my luteal phase. Some months I really thought I would never recover.

And of course, now, as I write that I realise things have improved. Vastly.

Of course they have. I’ve had many years of practice accepting it all. But I haven’t yet managed to get to grips with this particular time of year and I suppose I feel that, as someone who is so cycle-literate, I would have been at least able to see it coming this time.

People often assume that because I’m a funeral celebrant, that I have some expertise in grief and bereavement. Certainly, I’ve been up close and personal with a lot of folks at the jagged edge of loss. I’ve sat with folks who are trying to hold it togetehr after a child or a lover or a mother dies. I’ve been there for brutal, sudden endings and ones where death’s arrival brings a bittersweet relief that all the suffering is finally over. I’ve had the privilege of witnessing how it unravels people in those first weeks and months enough that – I hope – I have a fairly good intuition about what to say and not to say to the recently bereaved. I guess I’m unphased by grief’s madnesses and the fierce ways it rattles through our beings – at least when it’s someone else’s grief and not my own.

But I am no expert, really, on the shapes of grief and mourning beyond the funeral. Nine years in and I’m still just plodding along in this strange landscape and stumbling at those milepost anniversaries like everyone else.

Sometimes I feel like I’m not meant to admit this.

And sometimes I feel embarrassed that nearly a decade in I still don’t have a map for how to navigate this time of year. When will I stop being a morose wreck every summer?

When I look back on those first few years of brutal sorrow and those early summers without him, I realise now that I wanted three things: 1) for people to say my grief was welcome; 2) that is was worthwhile to grieve and 3) to be reminded that I could grieve as much as I wanted to; that there was no time limit for my mourning.

Although my beloveds were – and still are – very, very good to me when it comes to Al, all their loving support was still set against the backdrop of a culture that fails to support those three premises. We might not be told directly that our grief is a nuisance, but woven through our daily interactions are many messages that grief is a big inconvenience and something to get over with as quickly as possible. Beyond the funeral, we have a cultural desert when it comes to traditions for how to support our grievers to navigate their loss. The lack of cultural reverence for grief and the UK’s penchant for a dose of stiff upper lip, mean we’re also incredibly squeamish about it.

We like people to grieve privately; to put on a jolly, brave face in social and work interactions and we praise those who get back to work quickly as a ‘distraction’ from grieving. I certainly went back to work too soon, believing that it would be helpful in this way. I also endured many interactions over the first few months and years where I watched people wince when I tried, haltingly, to talk about my pain. They’d then sling me one of the awful bereavement platitudes that still do the rounds. ‘He wouldn’t want you to feel like this,’ or ‘He wasn’t meant for this world,’ and so on. (I never imagined that people actually said this shit until it happened to me. I think we’re so stumped for what to say, we defer to these ridiculous quips out of desperation.)

One of my least favourite ideas about grief and one that seems to have evolved out of a combination of new-age spirituality and neoliberal-y type shit, is the idea that eventually your grief will turn into something positive, it will be worth it and you’ll gain something from it (how very extractive and capitalist of us). Phoenix-like, you will rise from grief’s ashes better than before. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but for years, I thought this too. I hoped that becoming a funeral celebrant would be my phoenix moment and that once I’d achieved that I’d somehow magically never feel the horrors of grief again. Nah, mate, sometimes grief is just grief and it actually just sucks. Sorry to break this to you, Lottie.

My usual way out of any problem is to read my way through it, but in the early years I noticed that trying to understand my grief by reading the work of experts wasn’t very helpful. I found little that truly comforted me. Nothing spoke fully to the monstrousness of my experience and I felt irritated and embarrassed that I wasn’t resonating with any of the wise words of all those grief experts.

Although I loved Francis Weller’s beautiful prose in The Wild Edge of Sorrow and appreciate his perspectives on collective grief, when all I wanted to do was be on my own, sit in bed and watch endless reruns of This is England4, the prospect of my grief needing to be ritualised in community with other folk felt impossible to me. The three day grief retreats that he makes reference to so many times in the text, seemed like something so distant. For one, as a mother to a very young child, how would I find the time? For two, when I scanned the internet for such an event, I always balked at the price. How is this accessible for most of the population?

I thought Lois Tonkins’ ‘growing around our grief’ was kind of beautiful in the early days, but if I’ve grown round my grief I have the emotional equivalent of a piece of glass in my foot that the doctors have said isn’t worth removing. Yep, the skin has grown around it and I can walk a lot better than when I first did it, but poke it from the wrong angle – a callous comment or an unexpected memory – and it will still ache with wild abandon for the rest of the day. Every August leaves me limping.

Worden’s Four Tasks? Sure. Yeah. Did those. Over and over. And I still felt like shit.

Okay, okay, I’m being facetious now! All of these models and ideas have merit, but none of them really worked for me at the time, no matter how much I wished they would. I desperately wanted someone or something that would give me a framework to make my grief more legible to me. I think I still do.

When I look back, I realise now that I found most solace weeping and dancing in front of big stacks of speakers at raves, letting the bass expand and crack me. Or, in the days when I was still djing, secretly dedicating sets to Al and playing the combinations of tracks that obtusely spoke of my longing.5 (Perhaps these were as close as I would get to Weller’s grief rituals?) I also did a lot of hiding – I really didn’t want people around. I needed to know they were close by, but I was most comfortable being alone. I spent a lot of time in bed and I found that I suddenly liked horror movies for the first time in my life (hello watching Hereditary over and over)6 7

My menstrual cycle also, once again, became a source of guidance to me. I could loosely predict when I would feel most terrible, when the sorrow and exhaustion would be most intense, and try my damnedest each cycle to prepare for it. Cycle nerd that I am, I also counted every cycle that I’d moved through since he’d died. This alternative method of paying attention to the passage of time has given me a strange comfort. There’s not a cycle that goes by that I don’t miss him terribly and that means I know that there have now been at least one hundred and thirteen times that I have opened my heart and longed for him.

 

If you were to ask me these days if there was anyone’s work that I would recommended for the grief-stricken, I’d readily offer up Human(e) by Rachelle Bensoussan.

Sometimes I worry that the way our culture has fashioned us with grief ‘experts’ has created a new binary between the expert who will soothe the grief and the griever who must be ridded of the terrible pain. And all this does it make ordinary folk feel like they’re ill equipped to support their grieving beloveds, when in fact they are often just the right people to be doing it. Grief care should be folk knowledge that all of us can access. Bensoussan’s work shows us that it doesn’t have to be complicated to care for ourselves and our beloveds.

Bensoussan simply reminds her readers that grief is utterly human. She argues for an approach to grief that views grieving as a life sustaining necessity that our bodies must go through. Our job then is to find ways to mourn that enable us to metabolise our grief so that it doesn’t get stuck and inhibit our future capacity for connection and attachment.

What she argues against is the ways in which care for the bereaved is steeped in Western, colonial, pathology-based models that want an easy, time-efficient fix for grief. Vitally, she suggests that there are no ways to grieve that are morally superior to any other. Some of us might let our grief move through us by taking up running or throwing ourselves about on the dancefloor; others will need long periods alone, perhaps in bed; some will need to take up something expressive: writing, drawing, painting; some of us will want to talk it out and some of us will need all of the above.

In one of the most striking chapters in her book she floats out the idea of giving ourselves a grief age. That is, counting the years since our first major loss and approaching ourselves with the requisite care that we would extend to a child of that age. We could think this terribly patronising to the bereaved, but imagine a world where we compassionately cared for our grievers with the same level of patience and love that we extend to babies and toddlers. Let them rest. Let them sleep. Get them the hell out of the noisy place when they start getting overwhelmed. We might not enjoy their tears and meltdowns but we don’t expect them to hold it together. Kids are wild and unpredictable, as is grief. Much as I’m sure some of the parenting experts would disagree, their isn’t a one-size-fits-all manual for raising kids, and there also isn’t a one-size-fits-all model for caring for a grieving human.

Every time I look at my daughter, born 20 months before Al died, I get to loosely be in touch with my own grief age. I can’t tell you what a gift that is on the days when I catch myself whispering harsh, grief-impatient words to myself. If I wouldn’t say it to Tavi, why would I say it to myself?

 

Honestly, it’s felt indulgent to write of my grief. As I sunk into these ideas, my mind has never been too far away from the fact of what an enormous privilege it is to get to mourn; to have the time, safety and resources to feel into my longing. I’m hugely grateful for the grace and space I’ve been given over the years to meet my grief head-on time and time again.

Simultaneously, I’ve often felt overwhelmed as I’ve written this. The more I’ve uncovered, the less I feel I really know. Grief has so many faces; huge and monstruous. No wonder we want to theorise and create models to contain it and make it all feel safer for us.

When I was a young twenty-something hanging out in anarchist spaces, there was a slogan doing the rounds that always stuck with me: ‘If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.’8

It seems these days that the new version of this might be ‘If you’re not grieving, you’re not paying attention.’ The ongoing genocide in Gaza, combined with the West’s inability to speak the truths of these horrors, nor put a stop to the decimation; the rise of fascism and the far right; the stark uncertainty presented to us by the emergence of AI and Big Tech; a polyphony of climate crises and impending collapse; Covid and it’s mass waves of illness, disability and, of course, death. Billionaires. Fucking billionaires with their stupid private jets and obscenely lavish weddings. The chasm between rich and poor cracks wider and wider. Injustice seems to flourish wherever I look.

You know the score. We are living through a time of mass loss and devastation. Many communities, especially Black, Global Majority and Indigenous ones, have been grieving this for centuries (and so much of this has been intentionally invisibilised). The rest of us are just starting to catch up.

But if you’re feeling it, I implore you to not give up on your grief. I’m right here reminding you that grief and love are but two sides of the same coin. We grieve because we love this earth and each other. What if it’s this that just might be the thing that keeps us mobilising and resisting in the face of such cruelties. Perhaps it’s this that just might save us?

 

As September has arrived, this grief season starts to soften. Something about the nights drawing in and the coolness in the air signals to my body that the worst is over – for now. I don’t really understand it, but it’s like I’m released from the sorrow. And I can happily say that although I put two pairs of contact lenses in and cried over a spreadsheet, I’ve also felt more accepting of my grief and all its manifestations than previous years. I’ve watched horror movies, hid in bed and danced all night in front of big speakers, but without the nagging feeling that I’m wasting time or being a pain in the ass. At the risk of sounding glib, I’m more grateful to be able to grieve than I’ve ever been.

Sometimes when I’m dancing, I like to think about things I’m writing and see what bubbles up from the body-riddle. I’ll leave you with these incomplete thoughts (complete with words missing and questionable punctuation) I texted to myself at 2am. Welcome to the mind of raving Lottie…

 

I’ve noticed myself wanted to conclude this piece with some kind of ta da! type ending; a way of tying it all together. But maybe that’s the point – it can’t be. The task of grieving is too gargantuan right now. Too messy. It will always be incomplete, just like my 2am rave self was insisting. Perhaps no theory or model, no ritual or vigil, will ever hold it when there is so much loss to contend with. Can we resist the desire to tame grief, push back on making it manageable and reasonable? Can we keep enabling grief’s wild and uncontainable capacity to undo us even as the losses keep piling up?

As ever, more questions than answers.

But, you know, whilst I still think grief is a sneaky bastard, I also wonder if it just might be one of our best teachers right now.

Thanks for coming along on this trail with me, folks. I know it’s been a long one.

In grief, in love, Lottie X