The floodgates of grief will reopen
Three essays on ritual and grief + this hate that I'm carrying
I’ve always been intrigued by the ways in which we mourn, how our needs and wants and expectations vary by culture, region, body. But over the past six months, that intrigue has left me in shambles.
Last month, I read this essay from Lauren Evans in Catapult on the history of the traditional American funeral service and her late grandmother’s unusual ask. Just a few days ago, Sarah Elizabeth Richards wrote about losing her mother in the LA Times, and the pain of waiting for a better time to hold a gathering in her honor the way she would have wanted it. Would delaying make it less meaningful? she wondered. In May, this ZORA Magazine piece from Bibi Adams on how the global pandemic stripped her Black family of giving her grandmother a “homegoing” caught my attention. “As a part of an evolutionary protective mechanism, we have in some ways dissociated,” psychologist Rose Moten told Adams re: the disconnect in grieving in our current reality. “(Many of us) have desensitized, and we’ve numbed ourselves. Eventually, the floodgates of grief are going to open for all of us.” This morning, a friend sent me this sometimes funny, always painful essay by Ebuku Anokute titled How to Lose Your Dad in 8 Days: A Guide to Grief in the Era of COVID:
“Don’t ignore your body in this moment of shock — that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach? It’s not dread, it’s your bowels. There’s nothing to dread anymore, because the worst thing that could have happened, just happened. And as if you weren’t truly sure that life would go on, here comes your body with a timely reminder. Take a shit, hold your head in your hands, and acquaint yourself with the deafening silence that is your father’s permanent absence from the world.”
One of my best friends lost her father to the virus last weekend. The news hit us—my other best friends and my family—harder than we may have anticipated. My grandparents, who had only met him once or twice, fondly remembered and mourned him like he was a member of our immediate family. My father spent hours crying in a dark room, trying to pray for a miracle. I only knew this after the death. To my face, my dad had been reassuring me that nothing would happen despite seeing his own patients worsen in a matter of hours again and again and again.
There is so much anger in our hearts right now, anger and frustration and, in my case, hate toward anyone who’s remained lax with the rules, to people within our own community holding irresponsible, potentially deadly gatherings and celebrations. My best friend couldn’t touch her father as he fell ill, couldn’t be in the same room, not even in the same building. She had a moment of magic with him just minutes before he passed, a moment I hope she holds onto forever. But his face, we wouldn’t see his face at the funeral. We wouldn’t get to hold our best friend and her mother. We wouldn’t get to squeeze her hand and never let go just as her throat would tighten. All we had were our eyes and a furrow of the brow—if we were lucky to be within driving distance at all.
Like most of the word vomit I post here—and I know I’ve been neglecting this letter since the pandemic hit—I’m not sure where I’m headed, point wise. I’m having trouble connecting the dots. I’m grieving not only what we might be losing when we lose the clamor of mourning rituals, but when we lose the ability to touch the grieving. I have never needed to hug my friend more. And in a way, my pain feels selfish; it’s a need I’m feeling, yet she’s the one with one less hand to even grasp for.
Sending you all love.
—fiza
A big hug to paying subscribers Cary Adamms, Sam Kruger, Arielle Lewitt and Salima Makhani.