The practice of grief
I had this post all written out, and then this morning the news arrived. Quietly, between morning coffee and journal pages.
Another one. We lost another one.
The power went out in our little town around 5am, and with a career that requires mostly virtual presence and internet access I found myself unable to slip into the monotony of checking emails and scrolling social media.
It was just past 7am when I laced up my running shoes, hit play on a podcast, leashed up the puppy and we walked. Step by step, each kilometre taking us farther out of town, away from houses and towards canola fields and gravel roads.
It’s scenery like this that reminds me why I love the Alberta prairies.
I was listening to an interview with Stephen Jenkinson on divinity and the fall of civilization, agriculture and biblical stories and the ripples of death that have made their way through culture.
At this point I didn’t know that my friend, who was also a transplant recipient, had died, or that another woman I know had delivered her baby stillborn.
Stephen brought up this point that, as a society, we have become so far removed from death. We think we're above it, somehow immune to death and decay and this cycle of living and dying and then our lives being used as fuel for the next living thing. We’ve masked the idea of death in pacifying language, taken extraordinary measures to prevent it, and in all of this I can’t help but think there has been a great disservice in having created a life so cleansed from death. We have forgotten what it means to die well, and in turn we have forgotten what it means to be radically alive.
Everywhere I look, I see systems and ideologies propping up this very idea. I’ve had this thought time and time again: we’ve lost the fucking point.
In an excerpt of my book, I unpack a moment I had right after Paris died when I attempted to return back to work at the yoga studio I was at at the time. And this experience of I was sitting in the parking lot, having experienced so much death in my body, and realizing this idea that I’d been upholding - one that up until that moment I’d associated with being a good yogi - was one of being above death. Which I wasn't. I’d done everything right, and my son still died inside me. What I saw being sold in this vegan, love and light, only good vibes culture was a striving for separation from death, or to be above it.
Living and working in transplant, there is a lot of talk about the gift of life (and if we have any kind of personal relationship you’ll know how I feel about that phrase.) There’s so much emphasis on living, and being alive, and I’m guilty of it too. More than how you celebrate your gift of life, I want to know how you grieve living so close to death. Grief and death work is a vital part of transplantation.
I live profoundly aware every day that I am living with death. I am alive because someone else isn’t, a stranger’s organ is inside my body and that stranger is dead and I feel this intense emotional intimacy there, I gave birth to my dead child and my body became his coffin. There’s this familiarity here with death and dying that isn’t found anywhere else, and I’m talking to patients every single day and no one taught us how to grieve well.
No one taught us to contend with the idea of death and dying because the inspirational narrative is one that surrounds living. We’ve used extraordinary measures to starve off death, and as someone who without a doubt would not be alive if it weren’t for these extraordinary measures I look around and wonder what we’ve done.
We’ve lost the fucking point.
I want to talk about death, and what living so closely to death feels like, and how we live with that grief, and what it means to die well. I want to live each day acutely aware that one day I will die, and that my self will then be consumed by the next person who is still very much alive, and that I will be fertile soil for something else to flourish. I’m not immune from death. Neither are you.
I see no better a community to have these discussions than the chronic illness and transplant communities, and yet we avoid it. Because mortality is terrifying. Because no one likes to think about the fact they’re going to die. Because if we asked the hard questions, we might come face to face with some hard answers we then have to contend with that might shift everything.
I saw a quote a while back, and I don’t remember the source, that was saying grief is not something to be endured, it’s something to be practiced. We practice grief. Grief and death have been the most valuable teachers of my lifetime. Grief and death are the doorway into the most radical life.
As IV and I walked for hours, practicing grief, I was reminded of these rituals and the ways I strive to integrate death and loss into my being. I am practicing grief, allowing myself to be deeply changed.
And let me tell you, it’s changed everything.
