Beginnings but Endings
From an older version of my brain, to yours.
January is supposed to be a month for beginnings...
but we all know that’s made up anyway, so this month, I’m starting with some musings on death and grieving.
If that’s not your jam, or that’s not something you’re able to handle at the moment, please skip past these musings to In Other News.
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My uncle died during the holiday break. I had a thought to eulogize him a bit in this month’s Musings, but to be honest, I don’t want to share the memories I have of him quite so publicly. I admit, happily and without an ounce of guilt, to hoarding them. They are precious to me, and dear.
Grief, however...that, I will always gladly talk about and at length. To wit:
It’s the topic of one of my favourite blog posts.
During the initial edits for the second Lola Starke novel, IN FOR A POUND, my editor highlighted the phrase, Grief makes people strange, with the comment that she could feel the complicated emotions behind those four simple words, profoundly. I also spent a lot of care considering and creating the death rites described in that book, and their purposes.
Many readers consider IN THE DARK WE FORGET a version of “amnesia thriller.” It’s also an exploration of Cleo’s grief, for her parents, for the life she didn’t know she had, and for the woman she thought herself to be.
A question I find myself grappling with, over and over again is, what does grief look like when we don’t allow it time nor space? How does it get subverted? Into what behaviours? How does grief get twisted into harm and what are the consequences?
I originally started this paragraph with a list of things happening in our world, things that have already created, continue to create, and are about to create even more death and destruction, the world over. I deleted and started over because it hurt too much.
Is that cowardly of me? Is it self-preservation? It might be both. You might be thanking me for skipping the laundry list of humanity’s ills. Or, you might be curious if my list matches your own. Or, you might just be impatient for me to get to the point.
Modern society’s preoccupation with capitalism and its worship of productivity and never-ending, ever-ravenous growth squeezes out anything approaching a healthy grieving process. How do I know? Well, for example, I looked up Canada’s Labour Code. Here, you get up to 10 days for bereavement leave, by law.
Ten. Days. To be fair, if one has a compassionate employer, if one has unused days off, that 10 days can be a minimum. Honestly, though, should that really be left to chance? Ie., to having a kind boss, or to having vacation days left over?
And you know what? Those 10 days aren’t even for grieving. That’s just the maximum time off work an employer is legally required to give you, to handle the details. That’s just for logistics. And only in the case of a death in the immediate family. Which means, I wouldn’t, in this modern society, be entitled to a single one of those miserly ten days.(Caring for a dying family member is another conversation altogether.)
Maybe a healthy grieving process is simply incompatible with modern society. I can’t think of anyone who can step away from their job or career for an indeterminate amount of time without negative impacts. There are bills to pay and/or employees to pay. There are children to raise and/or pets to care for. There are the issues of food and shelter. Aside from the whole unhealthy productivity mentality issue, capitalism heartlessly guards the gate against emotions. So messy, so...unproductive.
But the thing is, a healthy grieving process is simply incompatible with modern society—unless you say differently.
I wish I could tap into my powers as a Crone and wave my wand to make it so we have flexible work circumstances or UBI or any number of legislative, societal, economic, and cultural updates that would make all our lives so much more humane and dignified. (Truly, those are wishes of mine: to be a Crone; to have a beautiful wand made of gnarled ensorcelled wood; and to ensure our collective happiness.)
Since I can’t yet make those wishes true, sadly, I guess it’s up to each of us to create that space and time for our grief—and for the grief of one another. Maybe, collectively, we can nurture and grow the idea that grief is both a universal experience and a painfully unique one. Every human being feels this specific flavour of heartbreak, but we live with it in individualized ways.
A dear friend said to me that the cost of love is grief. I usually agree with my wise and lovely friend. I sat with this thought for a long while, actually, and in this case, I respectfully disagree.
I think that grief is how we feel or experience a love that’s no longer tethered at its other end. When a loved one is dying, we feel that tether, that bond, fraying. When they’re gone, that love remains anchored in our hearts, and the discomfort of grief comes from feeling that missing at the other end.
Grief makes people strange because, for a while, especially early in the grieving process, we’re not quite ourselves. That loose tether feels horribly wrong. Our hearts feel too sensitive, and achingly vulnerable.
What I wish for, is that we give ourselves the gift of grieving at our own pace. That we don’t subsume our grief below the demands of modern life, that we don’t hide it in order to pretend to be okay. That we don’t strive to hurry up and move on. That, instead, we allow our grief to simply be with us. That we acknowledge it, and move with.
Because, eventually, we’ll get to that moment—that first incredible moment—when we carefully tug on that untethered love and we feel not only the emptiness at its other end, but the memories of all the things we braided together into that bond.
~ In Other News ~
Grieving means I have less energy for pretty much everything. But here are a few tidbits I hope you find newsworthy:
I’m working on revisions for the suspense book, much more slowly than I’d planned, but it still brings me joy and I’m grateful for that.
I might be doing a workshop for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association in early summer. **fingers crossed**
As a member of Crime Writers for Trans Rights, I’m helping to organize an online auction to raise funds for The Transgender Law Center. Bidding will open in late March. More details to come.
Oh, there’s just one more thing...
I have a wall calendar in my office that I fill out every year with my projects and deadlines, events and other small details. It’s the middle of January, but I only noticed a handful of days ago that I still have 2024 up.
If you also are finding your way into 2025 very very slowly, I raise a hand to you in the spirit of fellowship. We’ll get there, eventually.
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