Until recently, I don’t feel like i ever learned how to truly grieve. after relatives died, when wars began, when terrorism struck, when someone in the family was sad or struggling with feeling contentment, when someone was sick, i felt as if there was no outlet. while there was space to be sad, it always felt like something had to be done about it—distraction, cheering up, “perspective”. My dad once told me that “grief is personal.”
Looking back I think what he really meant is that everyone grieves differently. i was left with a sensation in my heart that grief is unwelcome, and that it is a personal obstacle i have to overcome myself. the grief, i can see now, does not belong to me. In thinking back, what i really hear my father telling me is “i feel alone.”
there is no grief without other people, it is shared among family systems, communities, society, the whole universe, and those places outside of it. grief itself is sadness for our separateness.
my mom asked if i want to celebrate july 4th with her. I said it’s a more “throw blood on american flags kind of feeling.” She said she understood and proposed we maybe get together and just “celebrate life.”
That familiar feeling arose in me that my grief was not welcome here.
Of course this feeling is accompanied by the knowledge that her household didn’t allow for grief either, and also the knowledge that she is doing the best she can with the tools she has.
To me, grief is a celebration of life, it’s allowing yourself to feel whatever comes up…and then allowing yourself to feel whatever hard feelings arise about those feelings….and so on and so forth until you’re in great reverence to your weakness and power at the same time. i am infinitely powerful, i am infinitely powerless, this is what it’s like for me to see the god in my self.
i feel ill equipped to exist on this july 4th.
i’m grieving jaylen walker, i’m grieving the policemen who used him as an outlet for their grief and handcuffed his lifeless body—even in death they didn’t trust themselves to see what they had done, what all their pain and anger looked like externalized.
I can’t blame my parents, or their parents, the story of america is misplaced grief; independence rather than interdependence.
The grief of my privilege is knowing i’m powerful in many earthly realms but often feeling powerless in the realm of spirit. On earth, i see the victims of this grief—often black, brown, or wombed—experiencing the flip-side: knowing how powerful they are in spirit but feeling powerless in earthly realms.
and when i feel into this, a cathartic image arrives where every being shares one another’s grief rather than keeping it to ourselves.
alas, as long as the judeo-christian white-supremecist capitalist heterosexual patriarchy doesn’t grieve its spiritlessness and claim responsibility for it’s earthly power with grace and acceptance, and until we renounce its effects on us inside and out, this violent shit show will continue.
i hope to spend the day welcoming grief into my heart and into my home.
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