Rarely is grief straight-forward

Rarely is grief straight-forward. More often it’s crooked-backwards; then a bit forward; then back again. Like a rosary or a musical refrain it repeats and returns - inviting us to feel through it lyrically, over and again, different each time. Grief does not invite a neat linear approach. Nor is it obedient.

I remembered this as we sat with a friend, after a bereavement, and felt the wisdom and the rhythm of this approach. We sat up late, drank together, told stories, laughed and cried and he reeled his new new loss towards him, then loosened fingers and let it spool away again – exchanged for gossip and diversion and cuddles instead with the kids. We sat and allowed for this tidal lap of towards and away with ordinary, everyday conversations as our supports as we navigated this foreign new place together - a place in which his compass points had shifted so entirely that even the tenses with which he described the things that he loved were changed. There is an inuit word for this, qarrtsiluni meaning sitting together in the darkness, perhaps expectantly. It was easy and intimate and beautiful. 

Hollywood would have us believe that we will all use fine words and polished soliloquies as we grieve the things we lose but Hollywood would leave a lot on the cutting room floor - ways that are valuable, slower, a realtime, conversational way of metabolising the change as it happens around us. It turns out that we can do many many takes as we grapple towards difficult truths - messy, clunky takes with an invitation to riff and return over and again – ideally this is done aloud, done together, without judgement, unhurried and with good grace. Whiskey can help.

We won’t have whiskey but you are warmly invited to make messy repetitive sense of what is being broken and lost around us while finding touchstones among the familiar and the ordinary, together. We will be at Jake’s, as usual, this Wednesday 7th January from 7-9pm. Do join us then.