When I have grieved most urgently, I have known deep in the tough, rubbery muscle of my heart that no one felt what I felt. When my mother died, I had three siblings who had also lost her mischievous ways, her unshakeable love, but still I felt terribly lonely. I wandered in a place so cold and featureless there wasn’t even a tree to speak to. Every human I saw lived on the other side of an uncrossable river. Everyone else spoke a different language, one with words for sunlight and delicious, words that had no meaning for me.
The profoundly individual experience of grief is why cliches are so unhelpful, as the poet Kim Addonizio describes with cutting humor in her poem, “This Too Shall Pass”:
…Some moments can’t be eased
and it’s no good offering clichés like stale
meat to a tiger with a taste for human suffering.
When I hear the word miracle I want to throw up
on a platter of deviled eggs. Everything happens
for a reason: more good tidings someone will try
to trepan your skull to insert…
(And really, read the whole poem, which is not long but is so incredible at doing the job of transforming grief.)
But why is grief so lonely? Because even though others have experienced the loss of a beloved person, pet, home, or health, they did not have the exact same relationship with that lost person/thing that you did. I remembered making my mother laugh with a silly quip when I spilled dog food on the driveway. I remembered that the green blanket I had as a child smelled like her. My siblings had different memories of her. They didn’t have more or less grief than I had; they just had different grief.
To the understandable question How can anyone else possibly understand my grief? I can only respond, The only way is for you to tell them.
And I know even that’s not easy—it’s difficult to understand our own feelings and thoughts sometimes, let alone tell them to someone else. We might think this isn’t the right time for a serious conversation, or worry that our friends and family members are sick of hearing about it, or we fear our own sorrow will rise like a flood to drown us.
I decided to offer writing workshops on grief because I wanted to help other people find ways out of that loneliness. I wanted to help draw out those words that help others understand their particular, idiosyncratic, absolutely unique grief. I wanted to create communities of people whose purpose, at least for a little while, was to witness and understand each other’s specific experiences and feelings.
There’s no cure for grief, and no list of easy ways to beat loneliness. But sometimes there’s poetry. Sometimes there are paragraphs of true life writing. Sometimes the metaphors and the details get us close enough to each other to remember that despite it all, we’re not actually alone.
“There’s no cure for grief… But sometimes there’s poetry.” Yes.