In the waning days of 2020, in the space between pandemic Christmas and New Year’s Day, my friend Leah took her own life.
It still takes my breath away to type these bare facts. It hurts, with an ache that I understand will simply be present from here, to remember.
In this context, and against the otherwise astonishing backdrop of January 2021, I made a plan for 8 weeks of sabbatical leave. I want to be alone, said my heart unto my brain, and it was the truth. I wanted time without structure, hoped for space without clutter, felt desperate for thought without interruption. And underneath these things, with an urgency that seemed inexorable and thus scary, the physicality of grief made claims on not only my metaphorical heart, but my actual body.
I have been a mother for fourteen years, a wife for sixteen, a cohabiting partner for 22. My husband and I were so young when we moved in together that our several geographic separations occurred for things like “study abroad” and “serving as a camp counselor” and, eventually, “seminary intensives.” And during those times apart I did not live with my partner, but I also never lived alone. I have, in fact, rarely been alone for any real length of time, and perhaps this is why in middle adulthood I am a person inclined toward spending days off ensconced in spaces where talking is forbidden, hidden in a city where no one knows me, and why I relish the solo road trip, and why, amid a year in which the other members of my family have declared themselves satisfied never to leave our house, I have felt my own words and sense of space and eventually even delineations of selfhood slipping away.
I arrived on the Cape desperate for some silence, but I also came armed with a plan. I brought econ and statistics textbooks, a pile of pdfs I’ve been meaning to read, highlighters and sharpies and three pads of post-it chart paper. I had two writing projects in process and designs on a third; what is space if not something to be filled?
And against my better judgment, I also came bearing words from the oracle of Provincetown herself. A leader and mentor in my congregation, hearing description in late January of the “math book” part of my sabbatical plan, drove to my house that very day to leave a note and a compendium of Mary Oliver poems, “to balance out the economics.” I laughed a bit—our beloveds just don’t understand us, do they— and then packed that book dutifully into my backpack. Where I left it, and in fact forgot it entirely, until a day came when I felt so unmoored that I needed poetry simply to discern whether I meant to sing or scream.
There is something brutally beautiful about the way that grief opens us. I don’t know anyone who would choose this blessing in exchange for what it costs, but frank gratitude and small noticing become saving habits in the desolate terrain of heartbreak. Hollowed out, we are called to accept what isn’t, but as a matter of survival we also get better at naming what is, and in this space between before and after, epiphanies and watershed moments find us.
It is in that sort of moment that I grabbed that poetry book, opened it at the middle, and started reading. My little cottage had a couch and a dining table, a desk and chairs, but I when I look back on that hour what I remember is sitting hunched in a corner of the bedroom on the floor. I see myself, back to the wall, chin on my knees, reading a random poem which begins, “Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches/of other lives,” and hits the punchline four stanzas later, still in midstream.
Listen, Mary said, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
I am, I thought. I was. I don’t want to anymore. But I wasn’t sure how to move differently without beginning from a different place. And so, I put everything down. I decided, at least for a few weeks, that I would do only and exactly what I wanted to do, and I would trust that this small thing would be enough.
That seemed achievable for perhaps 11 minutes. Then I felt vaguely hungry, suggested to myself “have a banana,” and realized that, ridiculous though it was, I could not say whether this was something that I wanted or not. Or more honestly, I realized that I did not want a banana, caught myself in the should/shaming script that may run constantly in the background, but which I rarely have cause to notice (“But bananas are good for you. If you don’t eat it, who will. It won’t be any good after tomorrow”), and, while sitting alone on a sofa not-my-own, I took a short journey from, “ok, I don’t want a banana” to “wow, I have no idea what I want” to “something might be wrong with my brain; who doesn’t know, at a very basic level, what they want?”
Wanting. We don’t, I have realized, particularly trust it. We undervalue the urgencies of the body, quitclaim in the name of “science” that which can be ascertained by our own senses, and cut ourselves off from those ways of knowing, both personal and collective, that hew to different gods or deeper rhythms than modern economies know what to do with. Witchcraft and womanhood: two dangerous domains ruled by the inconstant sort of people who want things.
And I do. Want things. My body, my mind, my soul and spirit. I harbor needs, wishes, preferences, hopes. I have things I would choose to look at, move toward, eat, make incarnate. These yearnings inform my journey and choicemaking; they are tied up with my wholeness, and I am holding the idea that they might bound up in the world’s as well. I am far from the first to say this; it is, in fact, what I take to be the fundamental thesis of adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism: what our bodies want can guide us toward what our collectives need.
But wanting can be dangerous; isn’t the rapaciousness of extractivism, the unseeing greed of winner-take-all capitalism, also about wanting?
Friends, I’m not so sure. Feeling and acknowledging want is about staying in touch with ourselves and trusting the tactile, sensory inputs that we have. It’s about hearing a still small voice, and then offering a truthful witness of how it guides us. It’s acting as our own willing partners in determining what should come next, whether what is needed is the courage to shift toward something new, or compassion as we acknowledge, commemorate and ultimately release our yearning toward what cannot be.
We fear, in the end, that waste and wreckage are the inevitable byproducts of wanting, but truly, they might instead be the tolls we pay in cutting ourselves off from the bodily and earthly inputs that tell us what we need.
Slow down. Tread carefully here. This is awe. Jump for joy.
Thus, I’m back for round III here at Rust, and we are going to dive back into the texts after we discuss a few things about healing. I want to offer both some compass points and some practices, because the truth is that in many ways and throughout our lives, we are people moving through the urgencies of grief. And we are also, inevitably, people with bodies, people beholden to hearts that beat, to skin and senses that give us information, and to complex processes that tend neither to begin nor end in our brains.
What we are willing to feel flows directly into what we are willing to see, how we are willing to care, and what we are then willing to do.
Seeing this, we might understand our history and our contracts as matters of relationship, and frame “what next” as a hopeful inquiry toward what we owe one another, those who came before and who will come after, and the dreams we might share.
In this way, I honor what it means to have loved and lost, which is, as I understand it, a primary meaning-making endeavor of being human in this world.
And so, forward from here, once again. Probably on days other than but possibly including Wednesdays. :)
In loving faith,
j