I am shivering, reading cold northeastern prose
and there is a word for what I do
but I do it anyway,
carefully setting dinner on the table uncooked,
before setting the table on fire.
— David Berman
On the body of my memory, there are these bruised spots, bloodied and tender and raw and purpling, that hurt like hell to remember. Every time I press a finger of awareness into one, my face uncontrollably flinches, winces, tenses, and twists like I just swallowed a serving of battery acid, like I’m Bugs Bunny turning twelve shades of green, like there’s something bitter I need to hurl up.
A therapist would call it unprocessed emotion. I call it life. Trauma in motion, crying out for redemption1.
And maybe these painful memories won’t go away. Maybe pain doesn’t just bruise. Maybe it brands. (After all, even Jesus kept his scars).
I haven’t been able to escape, despite my efforts, the urge to articulate grief. This is partly because I like trying to understand deep and complex emotions, and partly because talking about deep and complex emotions is cathartic in a way almost nothing else is.
Yet grief is almost impossible to snare in words. We can point at stories or paintings or people that depict it, we can gesture toward it with other inept words like “sadness” or “pain,” but to describe the thing itself, grief incarnate, like I fully understand it, like intense emotions were ever meant to be contained by language, feels foolish.
Here, then, is the conundrum: the need to articulate an inarticulable thing. All while being careful not to confuse words with the thing itself.
Opposed to an essay, which makes an implicit claim to know the intellectual landscape and traverse it with a consecutive chain of clear logic, a list of notes, jottings, and fragments, the kinds of things I would scribble on scraps of paper and stuff in my pockets and try not to lose, seems a better way to capture this particularly fugitive feeling. The form allows for unfolding. A reaching and straining and circling toward what the essence may be, even though I’m not sure where or what it is.
I’m going to try a lot of “cut-ins”. Different ways of grappling with grief that have accreted in my mind and in my notebooks over the years. Some may be interesting, others may be weird, all may start to sound repetitive and sad. Feel free to skip liberally, etc etc.
And if you are wondering or concerned or just generally alarmed, I am OK. Anything we can find words for has long been dead in our hearts2.
Here are my notes on grief3:
An almost physical ache, like my brain hurts so bad it has to share the pain with my body. Or maybe it was all one to begin with? Despite the metaphysics being mostly unclear, what is clear is that there is a necessary and inescapable physical response to the outpouring and overflow of pain. Grief fills you, it can seem, entirely.
I would say orchestral ache, and try to pass myself off as a minor poet, but it’s not that romantic. It’s neither fancy nor nuanced. Rather, it’s hard and blunt and heavy and just plain hurts.
It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion, except I am the car and I am also the crash. But mostly the frightened, reluctant pedestrian on the sidewalk, watching the smoking wreckage, exhaling timidly and thinking how much the damage is going to cost. Perhaps, I am also in the passenger seat, a split second before the crash, bracing, tensing every muscle in my neck and shoulders and back and jaw for impact.
It’s like I was hit square in the solar plexus by a dodgeball. Not one of those soft, small foamy ones but the big, mean rubber ones you can barely get your hand around with sharp grooves for grip that burn the tips of your fingers to throw.
Or like someone dropped a bowling ball on my stomach from the top of a painter’s ladder, leaving me gasping, sucking for air, like my trachea suddenly shrank to the size of a soda straw. Like my lungs are filling with fluid.
Or like a small but staunch middle-aged Italian man, with big meaty hands and hairy knuckles and sleeves rolled up his thick forearms, hit me with an uppercut to the gut, low enough (due to his smaller stature) to get right under the ribs, right into my soft and exposed organs4.
A deer in truck headlights. Frozen with fear. Physically wounded. Reminding me of a story I read the other night about a butcher who, when a bull was bucking and bellowing and putting up a fight on the way to the slaughterhouse, grabbed a kitchen knife and turned around and stretched his arm through the cage to jab both the bull’s eyes out. Afterward, the bull was quiet as a lamb. No longer wanting any part in the world.
A guttural groan like I’m passing kidney stones at surprising intervals.
Grief makes you feel alive, unbearably human and aware of the stakes, in a way that seems significant. There was a certain blindness you had before that you can no longer return to. A certain loss of the capacity to delude yourself. This has something to do with wisdom.
Anger appears, often without announcement. An instinctive response to abandonment.
Hoping for something to calm the nerves and wick the sweat and steady my shaking hands, because whenever I try to write anything, the point of the pencil trembles and scribbles on the page like an old cardiograph.
It’s to realize the rock I thought I was building on was really a pile of gravel, with a fair bit of loose sand in the mix.
Like I’m choking on something, this mass accumulating at the top of my stomach, expanding, pressing into my diaphragm. Fear and confusion. A forgiveness I cannot or will not swallow. A vague but unvacant fear of complete cosmic rejection.
I don’t know why I’m giving so many stomach similes (or so many similes, period). Other than the fact that it seems to be where grief likes to live. Somewhere in the centre. Our acidic insides.
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” ― C.S. Lewis
It’s not fear exactly, but the sensation is like fear. The same anxious restlessness, the same nervousness, the gulping, lack of appetite, attempting to swallow. Yawning, opening my jaw wide, then wider, trying to pop my ears from an invisible pressure.
And it’s closer to fear than it is to sadness. At least, in the early stages. Sadness describes a coolness, but fear burns. Despair also gets close, in that it gestures toward a kind of stuckness and helplessness that accentuates the general angst.
Like a bad dream. But worse because it actually happened. Like a bad dream you are dragged through, a dream there is no awakening from and all you can do is stare stupidly at the surreality that is now reality. And try to cope.
Pain was always part of the deal. You knew that. But that truth looks very different from an abstract distance, comfy in the philosopher’s chair, compared to being close up, having its warm breath down your back, chilling your spine. The realization that real loss is not just something that happens to other people. That you do not live in a land where only other people die. That you are all in on this thing called life and, no matter what, it’s going to kill you.
Good grief, Charlie Brown.
It’s poetic and cool to say things like, “Love is the pain of being truly alive.” “Grief is love’s exit wound.” Or even, “What is grief if not love persevering?” But, I’d submit, people who parrot those kinds of impotent and annoying aphorisms either don’t know or have badly forgotten what the experience of grief is actually like. Theories don’t help.
I say I’m writing about grief, but I’m not. Not really. I’m writing about something like grief, because writing about actual grief is like staring at the sun: it hurts too much to look at, so all I can do is vaguely comment on the things it illuminates.
Even still, grief does not stand in opposition to love, but as an affirmation of love’s existence. It is love scratching its name on the tablet of your heart. Maybe pain is just another form of love: Love enduring through loss. The only way it can. The only way it knows how.
“Somehow, even deep within extreme grief, the worst pain is knowing that your pain will pass, all the sharp particulars of life that one person’s presence made possible will fade into mere memory, and then not even that”. (Wiman)
I wrote most of this in the throes of grief and although it doesn’t really make sense to me now, I knew it did then. I waited for wounds to turn scars, but the scar-brain can’t understand what the wound-brain vividly understood. It’s impossible to understand grief unless you’re in the thick of the fear and nausea and stomach-level topsy-turvy sickness. I cannot explain my grief to another. I cannot even explain my grief to myself.
Grief is a wordless intensity, straining through words to reach you.
And maybe Nietzsche was wrong because I could only find words for these things when they were alive in my heart, when they could be written in blood. Now they’ve dulled into a kind of gray distance, the words seem dramatic and depressing and unnecessary and annoying after a while. What was once important and essential to communicate now feels feeble, forgettable, almost weak. That’s the thing about complicated and deep emotional realities: because they can only be understood from the inside, they’re isolating in an immense, totalizing way.
Does time heal all wounds? Always? What’s the difference between healing and forgetting? That question, by the way, haunts me.
How much of grief is simply drowned in daily cares? How much is simply dropped because we have no choice but to keep up with the non-stop turning of the world, for which we need both hands?
Even now, every time my mind flashes back, I take a sharp, unnatural, involuntary inhale through my mouth. Without knowing why. Without knowing how not to.
It’s not wanting to be alone or for things to be quiet, but also not wanting to be around people, for anyone to talk to you or ask anything of you, because you are unwilling to bear the psychic cost.
“She did not want to talk about her grief, and with this grief in her soul she could not talk about irrelevancies.” (Tolstoy)
Grief is reflexive in a cruel and unusual way. Not only are you grieving, but you are simultaneously aware of the fact that you are grieving, thinking about your grieving, analyzing your grief and whether it’s too much or not enough, and what this says about how much you care and your overall emotional health.
“And just like that, I am thrown back into an interior darkness, a kind of nauseous foreboding, like something terrible is about to happen, a ball to drop, strangely, because the terrible thing already did happen. And the most frustrating and disappointing part is how much effort and time and patience it will take to pull myself out of the muck. Again. That I even have to write about it, like I’m doing, to have a hope of it leaving me alone.”
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” ― William Shakespeare
There are some ways in which we do not want to be consoled, refuse to be consoled, get angry and indignant at other people’s seemingly empty, templated, ready-made phrases of consolation. There are some ways we hold onto grief, try to keep the wound fresh. Make the daily sacrifice of a broken spirit.
It’s also, as someone trying to support another grieving, impossible to say the right thing because there is no right thing to say. Grief is not a problem to be solved but a process to be experienced. Someone grieving cannot be rescued, but they can be accompanied. That is good and enough. That is compassion (the Latin com-pati). To suffer with.
I think the reality of grief is partly why I am a Christian. God can feel abstract, distant. “Christ, though,” in Wiman’s words, “is a shard of glass in your gut. Christ is God crying I am here, and here not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you, but here in what appalls, offends, and degrades you... The notion of God not above or beyond or immune to human suffering, but in the very midst of it, intimately with us in our sorrow, our sense of abandonment, our hellish astonishment at finding ourselves utterly alone, utterly helpless.”
The sinkhole all this seems to be circling around is the idea of grief as a kind of foreign and unwelcome sickness. A physical pain. A nausea, shudder and convulsion and shortness of breath. A certain bodily ailment that every cell in your being wants nothing more than to purge, if it wasn’t for how weak and helpless and incapable and immobilized it makes you feel.
Despite my efforts, what is left here is a grief-shaped hole. A small but infinite space where no words can live. Where language goes dumb and mute.
By attempting to articulate what grief is, I have mostly gestured toward what grief isn’t: something that can be explained to other people. Something that can ever hold the same intense vacancy in your heart, mind, or stomach as it does in mine.
Words are not the feeling. Words are the effort to untangle the knot of sensation that abides in your organs, lives in your blood. To make sense of it, so maybe it will lessen or leave you alone. But we forget that pain did not need the permission or even the existence of words to be born into us.
Intellectualizing grief seems to only send me into a deeper hole, or perhaps a more acute awareness of my hole’s depth. But, strangely, it’s also the way I find a foothold to begin to lift myself out. Only by confession, undressed confession, a meek but honest attempt to talk about all this that’s inside of me, much of which I’m confused and bewildered by, do the chains fall. Only by confession is my conscience unburdened. Only by confession is freedom found5. To you, it’s just words. But that is what we are given. So that is what we must take.
See, to be human is to be on trial. To be human is to need witnesses.
The light only grows from here,
Essays like this one are written, rewritten, and revised over many months. Sometimes years. If you’d like to support the creation of more essays, consider becoming a patron:
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To be clear, there is good psychological literature indicating that experiences more than 18 months old that still carry a negative emotional response/valence haven’t been properly processed. Writing about these experiences, despite the pain, in a stream of consciousness helps to process them and let go. Something I’ve done and would recommend.
Paraphrasing Nietzsche or Freud or one of those other vaguely Germanic, proud and pessimistic armchair fellows. I can’t remember which.
I’m hesitant to share any of this. Partly because it’s heavy and depressing and who wants to be such a downer? Partly because it may look, at least at a superficial level, in conflict with faith. But I don’t think the world needs more Christians who rapturously gloss over the hard parts of life or pretend faith is a shield of invincibility. I think the world needs more Christians who are willing to stare soberly into the darkness and affirm the goodness of being anyway. Who are willing to partake in the infinite mystery of Christ’s final utterance on the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Humans, by the way, are anatomically unique and ridiculous because we are the only obligate bipeds in existence. Meaning we have to walk around upright on two legs, leaving all our vital and vulnerable parts completely exposed to attack. This, I think, says a lot.
Confession does not always imply guilt or crime. Rather, confession is a deshackling of the weight your conscience is carrying. Whatever that may mean to you.
“I worry you don’t love me like you once did”. Or “My body is so broken and misshapen and I’m so angry about it and feel so abandoned every time I look in the mirror.” Or even “I can’t stand how lonely I am and how ashamed I feel because of it, because I am no good alone and want someone to fill in the other half I’m missing but it’s been years and still nothing and I’ve been patient and good and I’m gonna scream.”
Although we can feel guilt for grief, how self-immersive it can be.
I do not usually comment on things as it always feels like I am yelling into an abyss, but I have not read anything that has resonated so strongly in a while. As you're familiar with, there is nothing else to be said past remorseful pleasantries in regard to your feelings of grief, but please know that they are all implied (in our parasocial relationship, I felt as if we were past the pleasantries). I just felt the immense need to let you know (whether for your own benefit or mine is arguable) that I hear you, I understand you, and I too have an endless black hole in my abdominal cavity that is slowly working its way up my chest, waiting until it has enough gravitation pull to swallow me whole.
Thank you for this.