good grief Bright Spirit
good grief Bright Spirit, your tye-dying matched the many colors you showed us. You were bursting with so much life that it couldn’t be contained in you and splattered over your fingernails, your hair, your clothing. You showed everyone just how bright the world can be.
good grief Bright Spirit, I’m not supposed to accept gifts from guests but I was always bending the rules for you and this was no different. I still have the box you gave me, something tangible, something that showed your generosity and sweetness, something that would become even more important than it already was to remember you. I don’t regret it.
good grief Bright Spirit, you told me you were going to Walgreens for your birthday- big plans that didn’t involve big partying. I was proud of you, I didn’t want to have to worry.
good grief Bright Spirit, I was only a half mile into my run on my first day off in 17 of back to back to back to back to back to back shifts. That’s when I got the call. Nothing like not being able to breathe on the weekends now.
good grief Bright Spirit, we had already brought you back from the edge 4 or 5 times before, and the 15 Narcan scattering the floor proved we thought we could do it again. You had 9 lives. We thought you had at least 3 left.
good grief Bright Spirit, you were only one of the many deaths that spring and you’re still the one I’m talking about. Except in our world people weren’t dying of Covid, the diagnosis was loneliness, and many times, it was fatal.
good grief Bright Spirit, word was spreading before anyone was supposed to know. We had people wailing outside our windows hoping that what they heard wasn’t true. I couldn’t say anything but one look said more than enough. I can still hear the knowing ripping through them.
good grief Bright Spirit, we tried to clean up before your parents got there, but nothing could cover up the wrongness of a quiet room with you in it. There was a Juneshine kombucha on the dresser and their motto doesn’t hold up for me anymore: there was nothing lighter and brighter about it.
good grief, Bright Spirit, is realizing everything I was afraid of happened, no matter how hard I tried to avoid it, and I survived. Loss is inevitable but it doesn’t have to be annihilating.
good grief, Bright Spirit, is focusing on the practice of healing instead of the desired relief. Any healing practice can become avoidance and distraction if you get creative enough. And I’ve decided I’m not here to manage my responses like an accountant during tax season trying to make it all add up. I’m here to be human, to experience all of it.
good grief, Bright Spirit, is changing up my whole routine: what I ate and drank, how I exercised, who I was around, and adding meditation to the mix. None of it fixed anything but it gave me an inch's worth of space to start returning to myself. Enough of a lift to clear the constant hum for a moment or two at a time.
good grief, Bright Spirit, is building a relationship with sorrow like Mary Oliver told me to. It’s forming community that’s ok to be sad in and ok to be joyful in. A community that understands the course of loving and losing doesn’t always make sense.
good grief, Bright Spirit, is realizing we all need different conditions to thrive. Some people do better in communities, some do better by themselves, and a lot of us do best in some kind of mix. But what we really need is to be able to trust one another and ask for help when it’s the hardest.
good grief, Bright Spirit, is holding a memorial service that your family comes to even if I can’t cry at it. We encourage everyone to take care of themselves, but at the end of the day, I’m still the boss. And someones gotta hand out the tissues.
good grief, Bright Spirit, is knowing that grief can be more than a woman in black crying. It can look like people dancing, watching the sunrise, riding a bus by yourself, going through a closet, driving and driving and driving. It can be both a communal and individual process if we let it.
good grief, Bright Spirit, is remembering you as an explosion of light. Total confidence and charm, unafraid to have all eyes on you. I choose to remember you this way with full knowledge and understanding that only that much light can have an equally dense darkness.
good grief, Bright Spirit, is texting your mom on the anniversary of your death and remembering all the different ways you were in the world: young, vibrant, loving, creative, connected. I try to make these the memories I replay of you.
good grief, Bright Spirit, is visualizing the day to day of you not being here as a changing landscape. Sometimes it’s a vast desert, sometimes a dark forest, sometimes a lush meadow. Each offers a different experience of beauty and opportunity, but the point is to see them all through. Encounter and love each for what it is instead of what it’s not.
good grief, Bright Spirit, is building community around getting over the fear of grief. I eventually realized the things I’m scared of, I can handle.
good grief, Bright Spirit, is protecting my compassionate response to others’ suffering while also not letting it drown me. I want to be able to do my part. I also want to be able to breathe.
good grief, Bright Spirit, is thinking of you whenever I see the moon. I’ve been trying to reflect some of your light into dark spaces to remind myself we’re never in this alone.
each good grief participant was given the opportunity to contribute something to the project
see below for this participant’s contribution
a selection of words on grief to share
“The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe”
“Sorrow is part of the earth’s great cycles, flowing into the night like cool air sinking down a river course. To feel sorrow is to float on the pulse of the earth, the surge from living to dying, from coming into being to ceasing to exist. Maybe this is why the earth has the power over time to wash sorrow into a deeper pool, cold and shadowed. And maybe this is why, even though sorrow never disappears, it can make a deeper connection to the currents of life and so connect, somehow, to sources of wonder and solace.”
spell for grief or letting go by adrienne marie brown
Adequate tears twisting up directly from the heart and rung out across the vocal chords until only a gasp remains;
At least an hour a day spent staring at the truth in numb silence;
A teacup of whiskey held with both hands, held still under the whispers of permission from friends who can see right through ‘ok’ and ‘fine’;
An absence of theory;
Flight, as necessary;
Poetry, your own and others, on precipice, abandonment, nature and death;
Courage to say what has happened, however strangling the words are…and space to not say a word;
A brief dance with sugar, to honor the legacies of coping that got you this far;
Sentences spoken with total pragmatism that provide clear guidance of some direction to move in, full of the tender care and balance of choice and not having to choose;
Screaming why, and/or expressing fury at the stupid unfair fucking game of it all (this may include hours and hours, even lifetimes, of lost faith);
Laughter, undeniable and unpretended;
A walk in the world, all that gravity, with breath and heartbeat in your ears;
Fire, for all that can be written;
Moonlight – the more full the more nourishing;
Stories, ideally of coincidence and heartache and the sweetest tiny moments;
Time, more time and then more time…enough time to remember every moment you had with that one now taken from you, and to forget to think of it every moment;
And just a glimpse of tomorrow, either in the face of an innocent or the realization of a dream.
This is a nonlinear spell. Cast it inside your heart, cast it between yourself and any devil. Cast it into the parts of you still living.
Remember you are water. Of course you leave salt trails. Of course you are crying.
Flow.
P.S. If there happens to be a multitude of griefs upon you, individual and collective, or fast and slow, or small and large, add equal parts of these considerations:
– that the broken heart can cover more territory.
– that perhaps love can only be as large as grief demands.
– that grief is the growing up of the heart that bursts boundaries like an old skin or a finished life.
– that grief is gratitude.
– that water seeks scale, that even your tears seek the recognition of community.
– that the heart is a front line and the fight is to feel in a world of distraction.
– that death might be the only freedom.
– that your grief is a worthwhile use of your time.
– that your body will feel only as much as it is able to.
– that the ones you grieve may be grieving you.
– that the sacred comes from the limitations.
– that you are excellent at loving.