gather your grief

Yesterday, my friends and I held our third annual grief gathering. Good Grief we call it. It’s built around the notion that there is not space in our culture for grief; it’s not normalized; we lack a language for it and practices. The first year we did it, a small group came spurred by Covid and the collective saturation in loss – loss of connection being a big thing those two years took from us.

Last year, the turnout was meager, and we spent a fair amount of time talking about why. We shared the reactions we got to our invitation to attend a grief gathering. “Who died?” “Are you okay?” There seemed to be a general sense of discomfort with the idea.  

I’ve longed for an annual grief gathering ever since happening on to the celebration of Día de los Muertos in San Francisco’s Mission District. Impressive altars strewn with marigolds, seasonal fruit, favorite foods of the people being remembered – chocolate, whiskey, a pack of cigarettes – were constructed in storefronts and parks and alleyways.They were as beautiful as they were ephemeral. I later learned more about that specific celebration, and how a confluence of the historic Latin neighborhood, the Mission, with the AIDS epidemic taking so many lives in the abutting Castro neighborhood, and the great number of artists living in both areas sprouted this beautiful community-wide event that provides solace.

Solace comes not just in publicly remembering those who have been lost but in doing it together. This togetherness is what we so badly need. Yesterday, we read a poem by Rilke that speaks to this:

I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.

You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.

Our grief needs to be witnessed. Whether we’re wailing or speaking quietly. Whether it’s a dog that has passed, a marriage ended, a fire that’s felled thousands of redwoods, a child who is emotionally adrift, a war announced in headlines – whatever the source of grief (and they are so so many), we need to be able to speak it aloud and for others to hear us.

This speaking aloud cracks us open and makes us ready for healing. When we don’t do this, we push it deeper underground, we hold on to the anguish and tell ourselves it has gone, it has no power over us. But really, it’s just stuck, ready to come out in other ways.

When my two friends and I met yesterday to clean my garage (the humble space for the gathering) and figure out the order of things, we shared emotional tensions that had been bubbling in our worlds throughout the past week. At the hospital, one friend experienced ugly words being thrown by one coworker at another, to the point where HR had to become involved. I had been in the midst of anxious texting among members of a board, each one arriving urgently in UPPER CASE, frantic calls to IMMEDIATE action that set my nervous on high over, essentially a party.

This is what unresolved grief looks like. We are all taking in so much world grief every day – the earth’s fires and storms, violence in the form of wars and shootings, the greed of public leaders – that there is no way we can metabolize it. And so it sits in us and comes out in bursts.

I was struck yesterday as people shared stories of what they had offered to the group altar – photos, bunches of flowers, a handful of wool – of how deeply personal the pains shared were. There was only one mention of the war in the Middle East, only a few brief mentions of the natural world. The griefs shared were extremely specific, very intimate. And yet nearly all of them felt universal. No one spoke whose experience did not in some ways feel familiar to my own.

The backbone of this annual ceremony are The Five Gates of Grief, an approach developed by Francis Weller to understand the different kinds of loss. They are:

• All that we love we will lose

• The places that did not receive love

• The sorrows of the world

• What we expected but did not receive

• Ancestral grief

We spend a lot of time swimming in the first and the third, pulled into grief by the loss of a friend or a world event that manages to pierce us. A lot of us have become more aware of the fifth—the familial lineages of trauma and sorrow. Certainly, many of the wiser conversations about what is happening in the Middle East reference this. But the second and the fourth are often new ideas to people. These lenses help people understand emotions they’ve held for years and felt confused by, as though they were being petulant or even a bit crazy to have such feelings.

The places that did not receive love are those parts in us that haven’t been recognized or seen. Our gifts that were shunned by our families and communities. The fourth is our yearning to be in communities that provide us with intergenerational love and mentorship, to be part of cultures of ritual and story, to be ushered through our life cycles with collective wisdom.

Yesterday there was anger and fresh sorrow as people expressed how alone they’ve often felt in wanting this belonging and not receiving it. Of feeling invisible. Of having their gifts taken by a culture that does not know how to value anything that isn’t part of a monetary transaction.

We ended our gathering last evening with a song, then everyone left to go home and warm up. Chilled as we were by the dropping temperatures, I am confident the most important warmth came from knowing none of us was alone. Our specific griefs had been spoken into a circle of community, received with open hearts and nodding heads that said, “Yes, me too.” We are here to accompany each other.