Grief is a shapeshifter by Priya Jay

Two people hugging each other outside, one has long dark hair and the other is wearing a bright yellow jumper

Image by Priya Jay

1. Grief carries and is carried

On a Tuesday afternoon, in a Zoom room, mid-sentence, between words like “feeding” and “life”, someone said “I carry my grief and my grief carries me”. Spoken from her animate thumbnail, the words fell through the screen and settled in the space between my heart and stomach. My eyes must have softened for a few seconds as I imagined two creatures, walking heavy-footed, taking turns climbing onto each other’s shoulders when their legs got weary. I’ve tried to find words that fit the shapes of grief, until now they’ve been: sticky, sharp, vast and achey. Now I know that grief is a shapeshifter. No arc of progression, no loyalty to fact or form. Something that lives within and among us, purely in service of transition and renewal.

2. Grief wakes something sleeping

It’s been just over a year since I was first invited to facilitate a grief gathering with Fevered Sleep. The world has burned, bled and cried a lot since then. We are living in relative isolation, with a virus that impedes our breath, while “I can’t breathe” rings in our ears. Then, uprising, explosions and expulsions, daily doubt and death figures. Amidst all of this, calling on my own grief as something that was more than private felt like waking up out of a sweaty fever dream. Sudden dark clarity. Has this lump always been in my throat? The edges of my grief melt as I walk towards it and join others in their walking.

3. Grief beats in our bodies

Grief only sometimes looks like tears on a long face. So often it doesn’t look like anything at all. It stays tucked behind our eyes, between our teeth, or in the folds of our skin. It’s in our gut and blood and breath, so when people say to let it go, I don’t really know where “it” could “go”. To remind to myself and those that joined me in the grief gathering, that this body could be a place to start and end and start again, and that grief like all the other things beats within our bodies, I invited them to lay their hands on a place that hurt. And to stay there a while, and breathe. Eyes open or closed. I scanned the Zoom grid-circle and observed how this prompt moved through seven pairs of hands to land on a jaw, a throat, a belly, a chest. We began from there.

4. Grief requires no proof of ID

During the two grief gatherings I facilitated, a sense of under-preparation or shy “fraud” hovered like an asterisk as we introduced ourselves. I added my own asterisk: there is no fraud here, if we feel it, it’s real. But what I really wanted to say was something like: what if grief could be so warm and wide, that we could each stand around it and offer all demands for proof and mastery into its flames. Or what if gathering around grief is so primal that our efforts to prepare are ritually dismantled by our instincts. Martín Prechtel tells us that our first lived grief is for our first dark watery home, and upon being born, our cry is one of both loss and life. We knew then that the only way to mourn watery release was more watery release. We stretch in all shapes and sizes of brokenheartedness. All valid, all worthy. How, then, could you ever be fraudulent?

5. Grief is a riot is a language of the unheard

This year, living is particularly lonely and dying is particularly public. Aisha Mirza says “The lack of acknowledgment of grief is a tool of civil control used to gaslight the masses into believing there is nothing missing, but we know better.” State-sanctioned permission to grieve is violently selective. One of the grief gatherings was the day after Remembrance Day. It’s not fair, said one of those gathered, they choose to remember and they choose to forget. And we get lost in the forgetting. What about our dead? Suffocating between the intersecting pandemics of virus, austerity and brutality. And still, Grief the Shapeshifter, compels us to find ways of holding this transition, to mourn together and re-constellate. Funerals look like pixellated video calls and mass protest. Voices gather as “No justice, no peace!” and our griefs coalesce to ask: what counts as a liveable life and a grievable death?

7. Grief undoes

When opening the grief gathering, I emphasised that anyone can speak or stay quiet, that we don’t need to rush to fill silences, that we are not trying to fix anything. “This is an invitation to hold and be held. All I encourage is tender listening.” (I imagine walking out of my front door onto the street.) Reflecting on the space we made and shared, I keep coming back to this active witnessing and how there aren’t many public places for us to safely collapse and come undone. (And falling to my knees.) And our coming together had its own kind of intimacy and intervulnerability. Just one and a half hours of grief space on Zoom was enough to move us to name our dead, to cry, to be frustrated, to join the dots between generational grief and our own, and to declare what we needed and wanted. (I wail from the deepest part of me and claw at the shirt that’s keeping my heart from bursting.) What we wanted was more of the same. More joy of coming together in our grief. (My neighbours come out and join me kneeling.) Gargi Bhattacharyya says that “pain must be turned outwards. That survival, if possible at all, must be in togetherness.” (We sway, hum, sing, cradle and shudder between tears and laughter.)

Learning from/thinking with:

Bayo Akomolafe — Slowing Down in Urgent Times

Camille Barton — The ongoing grief of colonisation

Gargi Bhattacharyya — We, the heartbroken

Judith Butler & Nelly Kambouri — Ungrievable Lives

Cee Frances — On Queer Grieving: The Community Crisis of Vicarious Trauma  

Cindy Milstein — Rebellious Mourning — Prologue: Cracks in the Wall

Aisha Mirza — Queeries: everything is going back to normal but what do I do with all this grief?

Martín Prechtel — The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise