056: How do we grieve?
Welcome to Collected Rejections, a newsletter about writing, rejection, and the writer’s life. In here you’ll find essays, short story prompts, writing challenges, and interviews with other creatives about how they handle rejection. Why not join us?
Hi friends,
Here we are, back on our normal essay schedule, though certainly not at the normal time. It took me four tries to write an essay today—I have three drafts to finish in the future though. So while Current Valorie is spitting, Future Valorie might be grateful for it.
The Writer’s Notebook challenge was lovely and I’m happy to have done it. I feel like I unpacked some interesting things and got some inspiration for future essays and projects from it. I’m currently working on a novel for NaNoWriMo, which I’m getting very excited about.
If you haven’t been around for long, let me introduce the premise here. Every other week, I publish an essay that is, in some way, connected to the practice of being a writer. Some (like today’s) are only tangentially connected. Some are very focused. On the weeks I don’t publish an essay, I publish an interview with another creative who has dealt with rejection and kept creating anyway. They’re always uplifting and inspiring stories, and I highly recommend you check them out.
This essay is a little heavier than my usual fare—I think people struggle with accepting death and grief in their lives. But let’s hop into it.
This year I’ve lost two of my uncles, one to brain cancer and the other to Alzheimer’s. I was closer to both of them as a child, when I had whole summers free to wile away with each side of my family. But even though I didn’t see them as much as an adult, I remained fond of them. I miss them both.
Grief is a strange thing. There was a lot of discourse earlier this year about how Americans are uniquely bad at processing grief (or any kind of trauma). I think there’s a hell of a lot to that. Both processes require a community of care, a social web that we have largely done away with. Americans demand self-reliance from themselves and each other and that pressure makes grief an alienating and isolating force, even when experienced within a group as large as ‘everyone who lost someone during COVID’.
The result we get is that people don’t know how to be there for each other when grieving, nor are grieving people able to ask for help. We send a few text messages—“hope you’re doing okay” and “let me know if you want to talk.”
I’m not immune to this. A few months ago I was with a friend who grieving and I texted two of my friends, asking them what I could say to her. I actually asked, “Any platitudes you’ve got that I can use?” They reminded me of what I already knew: There aren’t any. No single sentence makes grief easier.
But we want one, right? We want the ease of short phrases like, “they’re in a better place” to actually work, to mean something.
English sometimes catches flack from people who claim that it is not a good language for processing pain. On the one hand, I disagree. After all, according to thesaurus.com there are more synonyms in English for ‘pain’ than for ‘happy’. On the other, I think all languages are inadequate.
More often than is probably healthy, I think about a video from the artist Shirin Neshat, in which grieving women bury something or someone in sand, and the whole time they’re half-singing-half-wailing. It’s words and it’s not, the anguished cries clearly relaying a message that’s meaningful but not always intelligible.
Because grief doesn’t fit into the tidy rules of language.
There are no cards or text messages or gently worded sentences that make grief less painful. You just have to feel it.
But I was thinking today about how death used to be much more integrated into our lives. We were more aware of death, it was a more visible part of life. And not just because a hundred years ago you might have lost 5% of everyone you knew every winter to brutal conditions and the flu—Death had more public ritual to it in general. A poet, Jay Hulme, recently did a long Twitter thread about pre-20th-century Christian burial practices, and I’m just going to quote part of it here:
But then we moved graveyards out of the centers of towns. Society secularized further. Medicine advanced and we started sanitizing more than just our hands—we started sanitizing life. Death became unwelcome, relegated to the outskirts, something we only acknowledged when it showed up on our doorstep.
In the novel that I’m writing during NaNoWriMo, the character is grieving for most of it. She loses her daughter and her husband in quick succession. She makes some pretty intense decisions for her family, and her youngest son dies as a direct result.
Because of this, I have been doing some research about Medieval beliefs around death and grieving. Celtic-influenced cultures in Brittany, Isle of Man, and Scotland believed in a character called L’Ankou, a psychopomp who escorted the dead into the afterlife. There was a unique Ankou for each village—it was the person who died last the year before. That person escorted their fellow villagers into the afterlife, and only joined them after their replacement was installed.
It speaks to how many people were dying per year that they had to clarify that it was the last person who died in a year that escorted people out for the next year. (Most villages have populations of around 500-2,500 people; Medieval towns had populations of around 5,000-10,000 people. I’m not sure what’s between 2,500 and 5,000.) This was the time of enormous plagues—the Black Death first hit Europe in 1348.
So L’Ankou collected dead souls, driving around town in their wagon to pick them up, accompanied by a barn owl. It was said you could only hear the creaking of the wheels if you were close to death yourself. Additionally, L’Ankou protected the graveyard from people and spirits who would disturb the dead. But they had another important role: The promise that death wouldn’t be completely unfamiliar. L’Ankou was your neighbor, your friend, your family member. Even if your death was terrifying, there was going to be a familiar face there to help you through.
And for your loved ones, there was the comfort of knowing you were in good hands after death. Even if they didn’t believe in the Heaven/Hell paradigm of the afterlife (Celtic cultures, after all, had begun to accept Christianity by this point, but it hadn’t fully supplanted all of their pre-Christian beliefs) the knowledge that your loved one would meet someone familiar after death, and that their spirit would be protected by them, was comforting. It made death a little bit more akin to a rebirth than an end.
I say all this because one of the consequences of the secularization of society is that for many people these sorts of beliefs have fallen to the wayside. Without religion, death is final. That’s often too scary to confront and so people have shoved the evidence away until death doesn’t touch their lives at all. When it does show up, we don’t know what to do with it. We don’t know how to deal with it, how to talk about it, how to help someone through it.
What new rituals will we create to help us deal with death next?
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Want more of my work? Last week on my podcast, Unruly Figures, I talked about Herman the Recluse, the monk who might have enlisted the Devil’s help to write an entire manuscript in one night.
I’ve been writing a TON lately, including several pieces I’m pretty proud of. In Fresh Cup, you can read about a brief history of coffee & revolution. In ROADBOOK, check out my piece about hiking through mountains destroyed by wildfires.
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