Song for Metabolizing Grief

Song for Metabolizing Grief 

Written by: Alexandra “ahlay” Blakely

Even as a grief tender, I sometimes catch myself running away from my own grief. The kind of grief where dreams and sleep feel safer than the agony -- until, that is, I awake in the darkness, to find grief laying right there waiting for me to rock her like a baby. The kind of grief where I seek to fill my days with busyness, community gatherings, exercise… anything to keep the grief at bay. But even then, I can feel grief lurking in the shadows, right behind the center of my throat. The kind of grief where, if I just stopped for one second, she would come rushing in, debilitating me for who knows how long. The kind of grief where I am not sure if I will purge or wail. The kind of grief where bed beckons like a tempting escape. Food, Netflix, and blackout curtains at 1pm. The kind of grief where I wish I could cancel everything and just disappear. 

As someone who dedicates a large portion of her life to grief, to the sorrows of the world and the grief that others carry (both human and more than human), I need to strategically build joy and pleasure into my life. When I first began grief work I found succor in the famous quote by the poet William Blake, "The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy." I understood this to mean that the deeper into my grief I allowed myself to delve, that the pendulum would naturally oscilate back and forth between these two binaries. And after years of waiting, and that not happening, I realized that I might have misunderstood. 

What I have come to learn is that grief is a skill we build. It is a skill that is difficult to build, in part, because we live in a grief-phobic culture. We must practice it to become agile in it. And my, oh my, have I become agile in it! My grief muscle had become strong but my joy and pleasure muscles on the other hand had become weak and malnourished. I had gotten lost in the strength of my own grief. And although I do not regret that process at all, I did find myself longing for an equilibrium. I longed for something other than grief, something that would move me toward my fullest expression of being alive. 

If I wanted to come back to a more central place from within the circle of my wholeness, I needed to cultivate practices of joy and pleasure. I started to pay attention to what practices had the capacity to shift my energy when I did them. For example, things as simple as focusing on my belly button when I inhaled and exhaled, walking in the forest, dancing, cold plunging, discovering more about my own desire and… drum roll… singing. 

Not the singing you do alone in the shower or when no one else is home. Singing with others. Community singing has become a medicine to shift my energy. It isn’t a panacea for grief. I still sometimes end up on the floor in my sorrow. But in that heaviness of heart, I am not alone. I am surrounded by a village of song that supports the metabolization of the emotions that are waiting to move through me. Sometimes, through the singing, I am able to access ecstasy, sometimes I find an ineffable sense of inner calm through the collective co-regulation of nervous systems, entrainment and attunement. Sometimes it takes a few songs before “I feel better.” On the odd occasion, I don't feel better at all, yet somehow I always feel less alone.   

Author and educator, Martin Prechtel says that in the Tz'utujil community from present day Guatemala use the same word for crying as they do for singing. And my mentor and colleague, Aaron Johnson, says that singing and grief are not separate. Singing, says Johnson, is a form of touch.

I am convinced that no one thing works for everyone. I am also convinced that we are living in a time when singing together is being remembered by the mycelial brain that is our collective knowing. It is this kind of communal singing that, despite colonization and genocide, many Indigenous cultures still practice today. The communal singing that my people forgot over 500 years ago and perhaps even much longer ago than that. For centuries, my ancestors also utilized communal singing in the oral tradition as a technology to pass stories and memories through time like time capsules to the future ones. Communal singing marked our initiations, rituals, ceremonies & celebrations. Communal singing was practiced by those that knew that song is medicinal. And through generations of assimilation into US culture, communal singing was sadly forgotten. Communal singing fell off the radar more and more as we were able to listen to music through machines. And gratitude to those who never forgot the magic of singing together, we are riding the ripples of their sacred work so that we can remember we’re not crazy for feeling the depth of our sorrow during times of collapse, that we were not alone, and that we do not need to do any of this alone, ever. Singing or grieving. 

In my own experience, grief, more than anything, wants me to acknowledge her presence, honor her existence and alchemize her into something else. The way I have learned to do that best is through breath, the movement of my body, fresh air, cold water, and above all else: singing with others. Paradoxically, processing my grief through song has also become a way that I have learned to experience some of the greatest joys and pleasures in my life. 

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Alexandra “Ahlay” Blakely lives on Coast Salish Land. She is a song carrier remembering that which was meant to be forgotten in her lineages (Ashkenazi, Scandinavian, Finnish, English, Scottish, Irish): song technology as connective tissues of the communal body. She blends song, body percussion, dance, stillness, breath & silence with the deepest intention to support others in remembering their inherent birthright to singing and rhythm. To learn more about her song circles and grief retreats visit her website and her current project WAILS: Songs for Grief, an album entirely dedicated to grief ro be recorded in summer 2023 with over 150 voices in the State of Washington. The album is inspired by the five gates of grief from Francis Weller’s book, The Wild Edge Of Sorrow.

Alexandra "Ahlay" Blakely

Alexandra "Ahlay" Blakely (she/her) is a song carrier, grief tender and ceramicist  remembering that which was meant to be forgotten in her lineages. Her ancient ancestors of Old Europe (Ashkenazi, Scandinavian, Finnish, English, Scottish, Irish) sang, grieved and played together while building, creating, birthing, working & being in reciprocity with the Land. She understands these technologies to be fundamental in the expansion of one's internal capacity to participate in the collective shift towards life-affirming conditions. An underlying prayer in her offerings is that they may contribute to the shared effort to transform white culture into being more connected with our bodies, emotions, Land & the animate world around us. 

To learn more about her work visit Healing at the Roots. 

To support the upcoming album WAILS: Songs for Grief (an album entirely dedicated to collective grief) visit the gofundme. 

Coffee, Death and an Ernest Discussion

"Any rite of passage, and its transition from one way of being into another, can be symbolized as a psychological experience of death and rebirth. This year’s Community Grief Ritual (November 21, 2020) and Patti Kwok’s thoughtful essay Coffee, Death and an Earnest Discussion present two different approaches to the intertwined but unavoidable realities of grief, life, and death. As I write this introduction just a few days after the end of the election, we are also transitioning into fall with hope for recovery and looking forward to the new life of spring after a most difficult year. Patti's essay introduces the novel meeting space of the Death Cafe, and beautifully expresses how it beckons us into authentic, open-ended, conversations where, to our surprise, we also discover how to be most fully alive."

- Tamara Walker, Chair, Community Program Committee

Coffee, Death and an Ernest Discussion

By Patti Kwok, Grieving Time 2019 participant

The Death Café—a solemn but creative invitation to wake up and face our own deaths and possibly create a new ethic. It has been over 40 years since the anthropologist Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for his work The Denial of Death. Becker’s main intention was to persuade us to face how irrational and destructive we’ve become in our feeble quest to deny death. As Terror Management Theory suggests, reminders of finitude often produce a desperate need to bolster psychologically protective mechanisms. But where might one go to strip away this resistant armor of immorality?  I invite you for a sneak visit to the Death Café.

Intrigued by the name, I recently attended a Death Café gathering here in Seattle. Twelve people met at the Dilettante, a local café and chocolate bar, for an unusual and informal discussion about death. People of all ages and backgrounds sign up for these events on Meetup.com. On a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon, a caffeinated and lively discussion fired up almost immediately. Within a few minutes we agreed to exchange our long table for two square ones pushed together into a quiet corner, where everyone had a chance to be heard. The waitress was extremely accommodating as she moved our napkins, water, coffee and chocolates to this more secluded section. Once settle in, we fervently began sharing our fears and frustrations about the way we handle death in this country and why each of us chose to show up for such a taboo and dismal discussion. Medical institutions and cultural beliefs about death have created an individual loneliness and isolation that only adds to the fear of mortality. Once we wake up to this face there is no turning back, and one is left with the absent God of cure; sometimes an absent God altogether. Becker described this feeling of separation as the barren loneliness of individuation. One becomes immersed in the realization that no science or faith can cure death. One woman in the group admitted that “…every time I am unhappy or fearful about something, what seems to be at the bottom of it always is my own death anxiety.”

It was good simply to have a place to admit such vulnerability and defenselessness. Perhaps the caffeine tainted brew and mutual support for our mortal wounds is what Becker intended when he described: 

With the right intensity and scope of shock, we might even ask ourselves what we are to do with our lives. We might then begin to think of how again to give to people a secure feeling that their lives count, that there is a heroic human contribution to be made to cosmic life in a dialogue with a community of one’s fellows (Liechty, 2005, p. 236).

In the Death Cafés, meeting in many cities already, people from all walks of life and beliefs get together to philosophize about the other half of life that is often avoided. The objective of the Death Café project is to increase awareness of death and help people make the most of their finite lives. Bernard Crettaz, a Swiss sociologist and anthropologist, set up the first Cafes Mortels. Jon Barsky read the announcement in the Paris Independent newspaper in 2010 and decided to organize Death Cafes beginning in the UK, with Sue Barsky Reid, a psychotherapist, co-facilitating the initial groups. The wildly successful cafes sparked start ups in many funky places across the UK and other countries, in facilities such as convention centers, cafes, private homes and even yurts. Since 2010, death cafes have emerged all over the world. 

After two wonderful and insightful hours of discussion between folks of various ethnic backgrounds and spiritual beliefs, the final request was to reflect on how we might be more alive in the world. The conversation was stripped bare of any simple faith, bible quotes or antidotes. At times we became joyfully infected with a more sensitive and realistic strain of death. As one woman summarized, “At 56, I am older than my father when he died. I'm four years younger than my mother when she died. Coming from the German culture, it feels natural to engage with death. I long for the opportunity to allow death to exist in conversation. It seems to me that, at all times, we can characterize ourselves as living or as dying. Both are true. Why choose between them? I'm living and dying.”

As I strolled across the crosswalk after this meeting my steps felt just a little lighter, though I also understood that physically I was two hours closer to death.  Suddenly there is a slight boost in my hope that a social embrace of death might possibly precede physical death; a revelation that despite aging and dying, I still have a place in this world. When hope dies, so does life. I now sensed on a deeper level the intense vibrancy of fall, its warm palate of minestrone and fresh brioche, leaves like roasted sweet potatoes, steaming artichokes bare their throbbing hearts, red and golden beets succumb to their own decay—pendants of copper and fool’s gold surrender to sidewalk cemeteries. The cold autumn winds caressed my face and neck as I transcended with the trade winds of a warmer softer world, no longer buried by the fear of a cruel and neglectful death. In brief exchange for finitude, an intimate setting spiced with coffee and chocolate served up an earnest and caffeinated discussion about the other half of life! We decided to meet again a month from now if, one person pondered,… if I’m still here.” Now that’s a latte on our minds!

Reference

Liechty, D. (2005). The Ernest Becker reader.

Seattle, WA: EBF/UWPress.

Patti Kwok, PhD, ARNP

For 30 years, Patti, a registered nurse and nurse practitioner, has cared for individuals diagnosed with cancer in the greater Seattle community. She has worked in nationally and internationally recognized medical settings including major academic institutions and health maintenance organizations. Patti is currently directing the Cancer Survivorship Clinic at Swedish Tumor Institute where she is passionate about helping patients in their transition from active therapy to long-term surveillance. Integrating knowledge from her Ph.D. in depth psychology and mythology, Patti helps patients to find meaning in life and reclaim what it means to be human by exploring existential beliefs regarding illness and mortality. In her own life, Patti finds healing and meaning through writing narrative medicine and creative personal essays in many different forums.

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Deepening Grooves

By Tamara Walker

Dear Journeys Community,

The story in this week’s blog is longer than usual. I wrote it a few years ago, just weeks after my husband and I euthanized our 16-year-old canine companion, Kali. At that point, I’d been a veterinarian for many years, and the journey saying goodbye to Kali was a collision of two worlds for me. I was the owner of the clinic at which my dog was being euthanized, saying goodbye to one of my most beloved friends in the world. But, at the same time, I also held memories of all the dog and cat families whose grief I’d been present to in their own goodbyes in the exact same room. I still miss Kali almost every day, but now the missing feels like a testament to the depth and staying power of love rather than the sharp pain of losing something vital.

We’ve chosen to publish this piece on Journeys’ website because we believe it holds some of the grief, and the love, and the questions, we’re all struggling with as we move through Covid-19 and what it means for our lives, our country, and our loved ones. I’ve always felt that engaging with difficult questions involving our animal family members allows us to have conversations that carry less baggage, guilt and regret than our far more complicated human relationships. At the same time, the love we have for our companion animals is real and moves our hearts in the deepest of ways. So, I share this because it’s like sharing a piece of my heart with all of you in one of the most challenging times our country has ever faced – and perhaps gives us hope that our enduring memory of this time can also transform to one of love rather than loss.

Deepening Grooves: 
Honoring Grief and Loss in an Old Dog’s Goodbye

In that moment before waking, when a dream might still be floating if I could just catch it, remember to remember, it comes to me. The fog rises, slowly at first, like I know something’s not right but I just can’t quite….“Oh. Our brown dog’s in our freezer.” She’s with our American Alps cow, because two years earlier, I checked the wrong box, and we were delivered half a cow instead of a quarter, and it had taken an eternity to eat all the beef. I’ve wanted to call the cow something for a long time now, but not knowing her/his gender, I get stuck between Bessie and Ferdinand, thanking her for his life every time we have meatloaf, spaghetti, steak. Our freezer had been a small sample of my life, its blocks of meat organized in walled off compartments according to size, use and texture, but Kali’s arrival changed it into chaos. Our brown kelpie dog with amber eyes and fruit-bat ears was now a shocking resident of our freezer. 

My husband, Steve, and I euthanized her a few weeks earlier in my veterinary hospital’s exam room #9. I found the whirring of her intravenous pump, the pale lamplight, and the brown leather couch surprisingly comforting. I worked as a veterinary surgeon in this same clinic for ten years and shepherded many other people’s beloved dogs and cats into another life in this same room. Now it was my turn to feel my heart twist in place.

A year earlier, my colleague and friend performed emergency surgery on Kali to remove a cancerous intestinal mass that was leaking bowel contents into her abdomen. She was so sick, she spent several nights in our ICU before and after. I’d go home at night, but often couldn’t sleep, so drove back to work in the deepest part of the night. I’d take her to my office, wheeling her fluids with her bed tucked under my arm, while she slowly followed me down the hall. Curling my body around her on the floor, I whispered words begging her to stay. One night I was sure I was going to lose her, and on my way home I walked into the black forest along a trail we shared for years and a hooting barred owl called to me in my grief. I didn’t know if Kali was leaving or staying, but I pleaded with the universe for just a little longer.  

After that, I savored each day we had like a beloved poem with a glass of cabernet. Borrowed time is a precious gift from modern medicine when it returns to you something you’ve understood to have lost. It’s an opportunity to relive memories while making amends for past regrets and guilt. I hate fast-food hamburgers, but I’d go through the drive through and buy two, one for her, and one for me. We took extra walks at the beach, and I relished her heavy head on my body at night, reminding me she was still there. I loved how she ambled along with her asymmetrical lumps or splayed out on the floor to rest content when her tired old legs gave in.  

Kali and I said goodbye in pieces. Toward the end, I expected her death and would wake up in the morning, roll over and hold my breath until I saw her breath on the floor beside me. Still there. Her mind also started to leave, as she drifted farther and farther into a world of her own making, and we lost each other in her growing anxiety and confusion. Our attachment became so thin I could barely understand her panicked eyes and panting tongue. I’d let her outside to pee and she’d forget why she was there. Anti-anxiety medication calmed her, but then her weak legs slid out from under her, and her life became a skating rink of slipping carpets and wooden floors. One time, I bought lime-green grippy rubber paw-boots, but they didn’t fit, and she immediately shook them off in disgust. I tried Paw-Friction, crazy blue micro-balls of rubber that I glued to her feet, but two days later we went to the beach and her sandy pedicure rubbed them off. Another time, fifteen feet from me on the end of her extendable leash, she thought she’d been abandoned. I cried as I reeled her in, waving my hands and shouting her name, hoping to penetrate her terrified haze. 

One day, Steve and I were watching TV while Kali panted, fell down the stairs, and pressed her head into corners as if she’d find some salvation there. Not knowing how to help was so frustrating. “Kali! What do you need?” I begged as I laughed and cried at the absurdity of her enormous satellite ears scanning for sounds only located in the past. I tried to ignore her, then gave her treats, water, a bed. Finally, she peed a huge puddle right in front of us between the couch and the screen, a desperate dog’s attempt to yell back at me. I’ve never been so clearly told or felt such paralysis to understand. Until then, she seemed immune to time, but that night she gathered it up and dumped it in front of me. I knew the final day had come when I came home to our broken house strewn with the history of her lonely day of pain and confusion: a broken mirror, feces on the floor, and a look of panting terror in her eyes.

I carried her in my arms to the car but stepped on a wasps’ nest as we were getting into the back seat. As the car swarmed with wasps, and I yelled at Steve, Kali and I were both stung multiple times. I’d had an allergic reaction the last time I was stung by wasps and so as inner and outer worlds collided, our car and the drive to the veterinary hospital became a mirror of Kali’s panicked world that we all descended into together. 

Not matter how often I participate — as a veterinarian, or as an owner — I never get used to the complicated fact that euthanasia is a choice. Sinking into saying goodbye to Kali, its old familiar question haunted me: Was today really the right day? Could we change our mind and wait a little longer? Kali drifted about the room on wobbly legs with her hair falling out in clumps and plastering my clothes. My sobbing caught her attention, and she came to me, concerned about the noise. I desperately wanted her not to worry about me and shoved my emotion down for later. She still knew, just before going, that something was wrong. I thought I too would die, as she looked at me with her big question mark eyebrows and seemed to ask, “Is something happening to us?” She licked my nose and tried to get up and leave before she was gone: gone, asleep, then gone GONE. 

In the quiet of the room, and the whirring of the IV pump, to both Steve’s and my horror, I blurted out: “We have to take her home.” Before saying goodbye, I told Dr. McNabb we wanted a private cremation, ashes back and a paw print too. But suddenly different words poured out of my mouth. “No, no, I need a coffin please.”

Although this need for a coffin was surprising, it had its roots with another dog I euthanized 16 years earlier. Kruger, my big-hearted Doberman, had died unexpectedly when he was just nine. Kruger and Steve had an uneasy relationship because Kruger was jealous, and Steve didn’t really understand dogs. Kruger regularly put his long legs against the wall and pushed Steve out of bed. We were all adjusting to Steve moving in and me studying for surgery board exams, my home office a white storm of research papers and textbooks. Kruger and I took occasional afternoon runs through the Palouse’s rolling dark hills, but one day he could barely keep up. I thought he was just getting old, but that evening he hung his head over his water bowl, and I knew something wasn’t right. A little later Steve and I were downstairs watching basketball when we heard a yelp and a thump. Running upstairs, we found his big body seizing on the floor. 

Together, as we carried his rocking, knocking body to my car, Steve asked, “Do you want me to come?” He stood on the street and watched me drive away, not yet knowing how much a woman could love a black and brown dog, or that such questions answer themselves, but too late. We spoke of that moment for years afterward, me saying how abandoned, horrified and bewildered his question made me feel as Steve gradually understood that Kruger had been a part of me, a family member, and not “just a dog.” We grew closer as we started to share this relationship with our animals, and by the time we were saying goodbye to Kali, we were grieving together.

After three days of tests and medications and Kruger lying in a coma in ICU, I chose to euthanize him. I desperately wanted to know why he died and agreed to a necropsy — a dog autopsy. But I couldn’t escape my training, and was haunted by images of him in pieces, laid out on the sterile steel table, his inside and outside jumbled together in piles. The final report named his cause of death “liver abscesses,” but this dissatisfying answer just became another impossible question. Liver abscesses? Why? Why? Why? 

Science rarely answers the most meaningful questions in our lives. Perhaps Kruger’s death and necropsy were why I suddenly knew, without considering what we’d do with her body, that I couldn’t leave Kali in the clinic. So many of us leave the bodies of our beloved pets behind at the vet when they die. Before Kali, I never considered doing anything else, and it’s amazing how hard it is to break old habits, but I may never leave another animal I’ve loved, dead and alone, their spirit suddenly gone, wide eyes staring.

After Kali’s body relaxed and I knew she was dead, I wanted to scream, sob and melt, but the business of taking her home calmed me. Folding her into the cardboard coffin, Steve and I carried her out to my Mazda, which was still covered in the doghair and wasps of our wild ride a few days earlier. Driving home with her body in her familiar place in the back, I felt quiet inside. In the past, I left many animals' bodies behind in the clinic, and I was surprised by the difference, and how Kali still seemed partly present. This body goodbye was gifting me a more gentle leaving than I had experienced before. 

Arriving home, Steve and I negotiated over her coffin in the back of the car. I wanted to carry her inside and let our three cats see her body, but he loved the cats deeply too and was afraid of traumatizing them. I thought they’d want to know what happened, and not just have Kali disappear forever. The protective father in him deferred to my veterinary knowing and we carried her inside. Her body was still soft, and I tried to curl her up in a ball, and gently close her eyes, to prepare her for her time of sharing space with the cow. "What are you doing?" Steve asked, as I pushed her into the corner of her cardboard coffin, took her stiffening limbs and her cold brown nose, and tried to wrap her up in herself and her blanket.  "I’m trying to make her small," I said.

Wild Gala was the first cat on top of the cardboard coffin: sniffing, smelling and circling. She was the oldest, the leader, and the most attached to Kali, and she showed the way. Soon enough all three cats were seriously investigating. When Steve and I opened the lid, Gala's surprise and confusion was obvious. Why was Kali so still? She circled and circled and looked and circled. Finally, a small gentle paw reached across the divide of cardboard and blanket, and the living and the dead, and Gala tentatively touched Kali’s frozen face. We then watched her consider walking across Kali’s body, gingerly testing with a step or two, but deciding definitely “No.” Little Moon also touched Kali, but Raven stared with wide yellow eyes. What was this? Gala balanced awkwardly on the adjacent folded cardboard lid and searched for another perspective as if she might find an answer there. Finally, we all sat in quiet darkness and got used to Kali’s still presence. Later, we left them alone for a while and gave the cats space to do what they needed without watching.

In the late evening, I moved Kali to our bedroom. In her coffin, covered in her blanket, she slept that night beside me, as she had for years. I’d wake disorientated, remembering something was wrong before remembering what, but I was comforted by her presence throughout the night. About midnight I noticed the smell: a subtle musty forest floor being turned over. The smell of death. How many of us spend the time to learn its early subtleties, like thin smoke catching in a spider’s web? It grew, becoming green, and old, and sweet as time wore its groove through the night. Its changing character, complexity and light persistence surprised me. I expected death to be heavy, overwhelming, pungent, but here it was entering the room in small steps. By morning, I became afraid of the mess that might be gathering, but there was none, and the odor was her whole body transforming. 

Steve and I carried her heavy body through the quiet morning to the freezer and the cow. I said to Steve, “I don’t know why they’re so heavy when they’re dead.” Maybe it’s because a soft, alive body drapes itself in your arms and molds itself to yours, but when they're dead and all angles, their heaviness has no center, like a tipping awkward piece of furniture, corners without handles. 

I dreamed of a sea burial for Kali, imagining her big brown ears filling with ocean water and her body gently drifting to the seabed far below. But this was complicated and illegal, and we cremated her instead. I don’t know how we learn to say goodbye to the beings we love, but I discovered a ponderous approach gives the mind opportunity to catch up with the tears. Death doesn’t have to be sudden and shocking. There is an in-between where the soul takes time to say goodbye to a dead body, where green and musty are welcome guests, and paddles made of tears can even send the non-human beloved in their canoe across the water to the far shore.  

Those first days after we “put her to sleep” my mind jumped with shock and surprise, trying to find a place to rest. My dad was life threateningly ill at the same time, and the space between dog and no dog seemed as impossible as the space between dad and no dad, but the dog was in the freezer, and dad was still in the hospital having his own cosmic negotiation. The truth of life was falling like a hammer: Everything you love you will lose. I wondered, would I have said “No” to the broken dog with the giant ears and wild golden eyes knowing I’d have to say goodbye in 15 years? But I did know, didn’t I? 

Why do traumas layer themselves? Each new one relives and re-remembers the parade of our lives, and saying goodbye to Kali, I find the eyes of a lifetime of loving animals lined up behind her. My heart hurts. It feels a cracking, a catching, like maybe if I waited a second too long, I’d stop breathing too, because I forgot, or didn’t want to, or it just hurt too much. I also discover I’m mourning most the Kali I used to have, while feeling peace for the confused and anxious one just I lost.

A favorite memory surfaces from our climbing trip to the desert many years ago. I say to Kali in her new place without me, “Do you remember when you and me and our camper van went on our extended climbing road trip?” Steve joined us for a few weeks and he and I climbed Castleton Tower, a spire of Utah sandstone, while you stayed at the base with our gear and some water, living life in dog time. Halfway way up the tower, Steve and I stopped a while to watch you burning grooves in the sandstone, running dusty laps around the base. We laughed as we watched you run by again and again, your long tongue lolling, running for the sheer joy of it. I feel you out there again, running laps, waiting for your people to come down out again out of the sky.

Tamara Walker

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Echoes of Grief - a recounting of Ritual and Reclamation

By Patti Kwok, participant Grieving Time 2019

On this Saturday afternoon, she enters a remodeled building in the heart of Sunset Hill, a neighborhood of Seattle Washington. In the partial sunlight, the community center is washed in the afternoon shades of fading paper whites and dandelions, cream cheese and buttered popcorn; portions of the building just passed over by the approaching fall evening and its unfolding blanket of gray chill. November’s canopy alters from ivory fleece to rosy Camelian, mandarin blush becomes turmeric gold and her gilded anchor sinks into a vast sea of star-studded navy and indeterminate black — a beautifully arranged marriage of fire and gravity. 

Entering the upstairs doorway off the newly remodeled deck, she feels a sense of divinity, trusting the light and its tempting pull of embracing angles; it is a house of belonging. The floors are a beautiful oak, creaking sweetly in places like an old wooden bridge, a horse’s weathered saddle, the atrium of a 19th century hotel, or the slant of a well-worn hallway. Within her first breath, the familiar sorrow rushes back like the unsettled salt of ocean, dry prairie, an acre of soil she can never properly tend. She walks the perimeter of chairs containing a reservoir of grief seen in the dark forest pools of another’s eyes, that arrested posture, the smell of secret longings, a place for uncovered grief to finally rest; tremors of hesitation break the sound barrier of forgotten depths where ritual matters. 

Several people kindly acknowledge one another: a man who lost his wife months ago, a recent suicide, a coveted red Swiss army knife from a brother who died long ago, many stories palpable although not quite felt or heard. Artifacts brought from home — photographs, statues, a small metal bicycle, stones carefully chosen from a basket — objects placed on the altar as a life remembered, an earth deeply loved. She fiercely protects her own burden as the ritual has not yet begun. An older man tells her she must download the new app Finding Fred — inviting Fred Rogers back for the wounded adult, the familiar voice of a revolutionary, a spiritual herald and his radical knowing donned underneath a red cable-knit sweater. Invited into beginning ritual, she enters the depth of love beyond fear. 

We know that we have left death and come over into life; we know it because we love others  (1 John 3:14)

Sitting in a circle of sharing, reality comes flooding back — she, too, will lose everything she’s ever loved; but she knows love cannot be kept in the grave. The ritual begins in sacred drumming, depicting the communal heartbeat of longing, that bridge to a forgotten sense of belonging, the primal rhythm of memory and mother, earth and harvests, prosperity and lasting riches. In chorus of evocation, enacted by each of the three facilitators, they bow in all directions. We are guided by ethereal emotional chants and borrowed lyrics from the gods. We enter the untamed world of muse and her many indifferent seasons. The dance of Kairos and her timeless redemption enters the temple, and she engages with the depths of a forgotten freedom. 

Nature’s mandala is constructed from the center out in green willowy fern, a circumference of soft brocade pillows, shooting stars of candlelight illuminate the protected center of grief, surrounded by three other circles — one of nurturing, protecting, and a familiar village on the perimeter where torment is resurrected and levity and mirth take shape in redeeming shadows, where the painted Bacchae take to the hills of wilderness, dancing more freely. Immersed in candlelight and the sacred movement of ritual, she sings the chorus of soul allowing grief to make evident the forgotten joy after loss. From aching heart to open heart, she falls into a devotional trance that reclaims her deeper meaning towards the lost art of being.   

Thirty minutes into the wild frenzy of scattered emotion, falling like leaves and stars, they have broken through oppressive shadows, beyond the sound barrier of Cronos, into a new dawn of time and place. She is pulled towards the altar of radiance, surrendering to a large silky cushion, sacrificing a known way of being — remembering that we are all children of the earth’s dreaming, now pulled into the center of our own belonging, once rootless now tethered — no longer afraid of the invisible, what seemed impossible to know. Wailing and the lonely scream of hunger opens the sentinel gates of psychic numbing — lose and wild weeds tumble into the turbulent matrix of sweat and tears, the lightning strikes, the rains flood, lungs fill with the alchemy of fresh air, ghosts with painted faces masked in red and black wander in the haze of afterlife, building bridges between the visible, the imaginary, the intangibles; ritual leaves nothing in the dark — flames become a galaxy of stars, shorebirds sing towards a rising dawn, the withered sedge returns along jagged shores. Silver tones of fish from the river’s edge are kissed alive by the cycles of sun and moon and the tilting gravity of a re-discovered soul. We must taste the death of our nature. 

Her stony brick of a wounded heart softens into clay, malleable through the curves of time, pulsing with force through the great dams and arteries of grief. Bodies lie in the fertile soil like cocoons hanging from emerald chains of forest, wings form in the shadows of fallen stars, the center circle of sharing becomes a sculpted topiary of broken emotion, tangled threads of red rage unravel secrets left buried far too long. We are like borrowed dust, but something new has been written in the ashes of our lives; like the caterpillar — we were too small to live. New wings carry the intelligence of stars. We leave death and come over into life.   

Encountering Grief

excerpt of a guided meditation from Joan Halifax

Bring attention to the breath, let the breath sweep your mind, notice if deep or shallow

Recall for a moment a loss or losses that have really touched you, or the anticipation of loss

Offer some simple phrases:

~ May I be open to the pain of grief

~ Notice whatever comes up, not rejecting it, not clinging to it

~ May I find the inner resources to really be present for my sorrow

~ May I accept my sadness, knowing I am not my sadness

~ May I and all beings learn from and transform sorrow

~ May I be open to the peace and joy that grief eventually brings

~Joan Halifax

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