Warming our grief

One reason for doing the work

• Join me and my friend and brilliant acting/performance teacher Justine Wolf Williams on May 11th in Brooklyn for a single session in-person Somatic Grief Writing Workshop where we will explore a combination of movement and creative writing exercises as a means for working through grief of any kind. Please click here for more info and to sign up!

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Months ago I was invited by a kind person from the Cooperman Barnabus Medical Center in NJ to give a talk about grief at an upcoming Palliative Care Symposium. I have given many a talk before but this is the first time that I have been invited to speak specifically about grief, and I was/am so very grateful for the opportunity to try to synthesize some of what I have been working on this year.

It was quickly apparent when I sat down to try to put language to the subject that my thoughts about the grief work I have been doing are still swimming in a fairly amorphous soup. Partly this is because of the nature of the undertaking - working with creativity as well as with emotions, you don’t as easily get numbers or stats to use as “evidence” of what you’re doing, and even that “what you’re doing” is diffuse and unclear. These are frustrating truths that I am well used to after more than two decades working in Narrative Medicine; difficulties of research and measurement have plagued us all along.

But here, no one is asking me to “prove” anything, and still it is difficult to describe the work. So far this academic year I have held three Grief Writing Workshops, which have all been wonderful. Each of these workshops has been unique, as specific groups always are, with their individual identity and set of unique concerns. Each group has held a variety of griefs, and where initially I may have worried that specific griefs — loss of a person, loss of a kind of identity, loss from something other than death — should be kept apart, I came to see that the breadth of grief, and the commonality across that breadth, is a strength in these groups, part of what works. In each group, participants dove in wholeheartedly, writing to prompts that invited them to place their grief in real scenarios, to inhabit their memories in embodied and newly imagined ways, in short to do things that took real courage. And I saw them surprised by what they had made, nervous to share and then exalted by what they had shared. In so many ways, the theories behind why this works don’t matter — it just works.

But nonetheless I’m interested in the why and the how, and I continue to pursue those questions.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow + current knitting project

I recently enrolled in a grief ritual training program run in part by Francis Weller, psychotherapist and author of the book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, a beautiful book about grief that I read last summer. Weller’s work is of deep interest to me, and I am excited to continue to learn more from him.

“We live,” Weller writes writes, “…in a grief-phobic and death-denying society.

Consequently, grief and death have been relegated to what psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow. The shadow is the repository of all the repressed and denied parts of our lives. We send into the shadow the parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable to ourselves and to others, hoping to disown them. Doing this, we feel we may be spared the discomfort of having to face what has been declared unwelcome… [But instead,] our refusal to acknowledge grief and death has twisted us into a culture riddled with death. One of Jung’s more chilling observations was that whatever we put into the shadow doesn’t sit there passively waiting to be reclaimed and redeemed; it regresses and becomes more primitive. Consequently, death rattles through our streets daily…Death pervades our culture, becoming a presence we cannot contain or ultimately honor.

This book was published in 2015 — of course at this moment one could argue death is more pervasive in our culture than ever…which of course means that grief is too, whether we honor that or not.

“We have forgotten,” writes Weller, “the primary language of grief.

As a consequence, the terrain of sorrow has become unfamiliar and estranged, leaving us confused, frightened, and lost when grief comes near. The haunting silence that Wittgenstein speaks of [‘What we cannot speak about, we pass over in silence’] lingers as a fog over our lives, placing large areas of experience outside our reach. When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms.

All of this feels profoundly right to me. In my personal experience, this has been true, and continues to be a battle; I can recognize how much damage I did to myself as a young person by allowing my own grief to grow cold and to harden, refusing to speak about my losses even to those closest to me.

Weller hypothesizes that at the heart of all of our collective (American) sorrows is the “feeling of emptiness and loneliness, the feeling of lack” that comes from our white western ideologies of individualism. “The self that arises out of individualism,” he said in a recent lecture, “is wary and unsure, empty, interior, private, and highly boundaried” — all of which are qualities that contribute to the instinct to turn inward, to keep our grief and sorrows to ourself.

As an antidote to this, Weller speaks about the importance of “keeping the grief warm” — as with clay, if an emotion is warm then it is malleable, and can therefore move. Frequently, he argues, our non-attention to grief turns the grief cold, and it is when it is cold and hard that it becomes dangerous, becomes stuck.

So this is one answer to the “why,” then, in doing this work — we do this to keep the material warm, both in our own bodies and minds and also in the collective body. We do this to speak the grief, to unlock it and surface it in new and surprising ways, and to witness one another as we do. And we hope that this warmth might ripple out beyond the smaller collective to the larger one.

The idea of ritual, as Weller uses it, is relatively new to me in thinking about this work, but also feels relevant and like something for me to further explore. Weller defines ritual as “any gesture done singly or communally, with emotion and intention, that attempts to connect us with transpersonal energies for the sake of healing and transformation.” One goal in ritual work, says Weller, is “to activate a mode of perception that is beyond reason - beyond the mind's capacity to grasp or figure it out.” If that doesn’t describe creative work I’m not sure what does! This seems to describe so directly the amorphous work being done in those creative workshops that I feel now that part of what is happening there is ritualistic.

In addition to the grief writing workshops this year, I have also been running a writing group for folks impacted by the LA fires, and, just in the last two weeks, have begun running a group for (all now former) USAID employees. It didn’t occur to me, at first, that these were both also grief workshops, though of course they are. Their format is different — more like the traditional narrative medicine workshop that I’ve been doing for many years — but at root the subject is the same. Together we are keeping the grief warm, we are attempting to connect with transpersonal energies, we are aiming to activate a mode of perception that is beyond reason. We are sharing space, we are witnessing one another, we are creating a container for even a tiny drop of the grief to go into and be held, be seen. It is powerful work and I am excited to continue to try to understand it.