On Grief

This week, we’ve started research for a new project, that hopes to address – and refuse – the silence that gathers around grief and those who are grieving.  It’s been a beautiful, sad, challenging, illuminating, hopeful week already.  This is just a short reflection on what we’re thinking and feeling right now.

Grief is like the weather.  It’s changeable, unpredictable, surprising, and turbulent.

Grief follows no pattern, it heeds no rules.  Everyone who grieves grieves in the right way for them.  There is no right way.  There is no wrong.

You are an expert in your own grief.

Grief is not an illness.

We need to make more spaces for grief. Conceptual spaces for thinking and understanding grief.  Physical spaces for talking and listening to each other.  Public and private spaces in which we might choose to fold ourselves into a quiet careful conversation, or in which we might unleash rage with a hammer, to smash things apart.

Grief has colour.  It has texture.  It has words.  It is in the body.

Grief is emotional, and psychological, and physical.  It’s exhausting.  It’s intimate.  It’s private.  It’s public.  It’s within me.  It’s between me and you.  It’s social.

We need to practise grief and grieving.  Practise it, so as to know it and do it and live with it, better.

To witness.  To acknowledge.  To be permitted.  To give permission.  To hold.  To let go.  To incorporate.  To love.

What happened to our rituals?

Courage.  Responsibility.  Love.