If Grief Is A City – Reflections on Attending a Recent Grief Gathering by Philip Cowell

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This Grief Thing by Fevered Sleep, photo by Richard Tymon

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This summer, I took part in one of Fevered Sleep’s Grief Gatherings. When I saw the email I didn’t much think about it, I just signed up. I love what The Sleep do and knew it would be good.

And gathering is a good word for grief. As in the gathering of flowers. Beauty, longing and woe all held together by time. 

But grief seems bigger, harder, scratchier? More a heavy sheaf of hard-won wheat in the wind of our poor old hearts. Agricultural labour, not home decoration.

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About ten years ago I wrote a poem that started: “It is the dead who wake us,/ In their jumpers, with their wheat.” There’s the wheat again. And I still like the jumpers image. Because they’re freezing!

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The genius of the Grief Gathering, it seems to me, is that it acknowledges the inherent, but not much talked about, interdependency of grieving. 

So much of the over-arching grief narrative is about self-care, working through things on your own. (I’m sorry for your loss.) And this is important, of course. But it can lead to a culture of delicacy. That we mustn’t interrupt the grieving. 

But why? And what if it’s the other way round? What if no-one can grieve until we all can? What if we put signs on our doors that say: PLEASE DISTURB.

Of course, the point is – we mustn’t interrupt the grieving. Not when they are speaking. We must give them the loving of our listening and gathering. 

Oh how we listened to each other’s grief with such spaciousness, allowing each plait of meaning to unfold with time and world enough.  

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That our griefs and grieving might depend on each other – and be more intermingled than we know – felt like the open secret of our gorgeous late summer night Grief Gathering.

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Each in our little Zoom boxes, with varying degrees of daylight diminishing to evening, we tenderly shared our lives. 

Of course, grief means different things to different people. It’s not so much a word as a crystal, shining a million lights. (We don’t gather grief, we refract.)

One woman talked about a life of loss with a voice that crackled like a ship radio. Some of us wept as she spoke.  

Another, lampless (and by the end of the event a silhouette of sadness), spoke very cheerfully about her pain. It was useful. 

Someone’s loss was so recent, when she dropped it into the cool pool of our listening, it fizzed. 

One gatherer reminded us: grief isn’t always about death, you know.

Everyone spoke, knowing we didn’t need to speak. We could just be there, quietly, and that would be OK. 

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Thich Nhat Hanh said it is possible that the next Buddha will not be an individual but a group.

The Grief Gathering is for everyone and though I am not a religious person, I’d read this before, possibly even understood it before, but for the first time – during the gathering – I really started to feel its meaning. 

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At the end, I said something like “it seems to me, grief is a city”. It felt right. Together, we were travelling a vast and sprawling network of meaning and incredulity. We showed each other round its changing neighbourhoods, took its side streets, ventured down dead ends and round roundabouts, stood still in its bustling tourist zone. We even shouted in the raging wind of the financial district – WHY???????? – and took elevators up skyscrapers, not so much to look at the view but to see how sore our faces had become in the reflections of the windows. We breathed again in the City of Grief’s great park.  

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Flowers, jumpers, crystals, cities: so many metaphors for grief, so little time. The thing is, the poetry of the gathering, for me, was the ordinariness and openness of how we spoke and listened with each other, under the gentle guidance of Fevered artists Sam and David. (Was the whole thing a work of art? No, but not no, too…)

There is no last word on grief. Isn’t that the point? As I discovered in the last of the light that night, it is enough just to gather with strangers and talk about it.