On Grief, pt. 2

grieve. so that you can be free to feel something else."

-Nayyirah Waheed

I know, I know. “Wait a minute, where’s On Grief, pt. 1?”

Y’all.

I have started this blog post eleven times. Over the course of 2020, there has been so much to say about grief. So many angles from which to analyze, but somehow writing about and through the exact same agonizing punch to the gut over and over again.

I started this essay when Kobe Bryant passed — as incredible as it seems, that was also this year (January 26, 2020). I came back to it when the pandemic first started, before its full effects would be known, when the things I was grieving included missed travel opportunities and an altered schedule for the year. I tried again once if became clear that life as we knew it was forever shifted by the pandemic. I didn’t even try to pick up a pen after losing my godmother this spring. I returned to the page when wave after wave of black death hit our communities this summer, as we marched and prayed and mourned, again. I came back again when my relationship crumbled, hoping there was something I could say about the creativity that a broken heart can bring forth. I tried to add a few more words after Chadwick Boseman passed; the loss of my celebrity crush had a real impact on my heart too.

Finally, I came back here to write a part 2 to an essay part 1 that I never finished. I like to think that there’s something inherently sad in an unfinished ending, the reason why a loose thread pulls at one’s heart and imagination the way a finished garment, no matter how detested, never could. You’ll always want to know what could have been. You give your heart the tiny pieces and it craves an answer that makes sense.

Like many of you, I’m sure, I am tired of grieving. I’m tired of feeling my way through the pain and loss and heartbreak, for weighting my losses and trying to assess if this was worse than that, or if that even deserved to be grieved, given the immense strain on our collective hearts that this year has already imposed. I can’t keep track of the number of things I’ve cried about this year: the death of a loved one, a friend’s postponed wedding plans, a much-anticipated concert being canceled, uncertainty and anxiety about the future, erasing my whiteboard with all my 2020 trips meticulously planned for the year, not knowing what to eat for dinner tonight, and of course, the sheer and utter exhaustion at having to grieve so much in such a short amount of time.

Grief reveals what we are already carrying around inside us, shows us what is already there, what is always, always, harder to face. Confronted with loss, we do anything to make the absence a departure from the normal, to try to bring back permanence and stability as the normal once more. It’s easier to say “good night” than it is to say “good bye.” We press in our language for certainty, with phrases like “when this is all over'“ or “when everything goes back to normal.” Life as I knew it may never go back to “normal,” not the way I was living it before the pandemic. The things lost this year may have cleared space for the beckoning future, for the new, but damn — I really ain’t wanna lose them in the first place.

I started this blog to document my joys. I wanted to find ways to share the world I see around me as I see it, through the words I write, through the lens of my camera, through the poems I record, through the thoughts I share on how I see the world. I couldn’t finish grief pt. 1 because I am not yet finished grieving. The thesis of that essay was going to be on how creatively generative grief can be… and then I proceeded to experience one of the driest periods of creativity that I have felt in a long time. For a writer, there’s such pressure to match the words to the immediacy of the moment, but I never can write the poem until I’ve finished living through it.

I don’t have a neat, polished ending to offer, no conclusive findings about what I’ve learned. I don’t know what grief does anymore, to the soul, to the heart, to the body. I still feel its effects every morning, every night I struggle to fall asleep, every moment during the day I question what can still be possible this year. I’m simply here, facing the page again, attempting to see what rises, what I might create.