My sentences have been feeling heavy, clotted with grief, and I have been trying not to write sad sentences. I want something more than sadness to move through language. Yet, this is hubris. I have been searching for the right preposition. Wisdom has it that one cannot bypass feeling—one must go through it. The dictionary tells me that “through” is synonymous with “from end to end” and “into and out of.” And I do not think that particular through describes griefwork. I am getting ahead of myself. I mean to say, describing grief as “into and out of” misunderstands the experience of grief. How it attaches, how it is attached to, what it transforms.
Yes, this is about Eddie. It’s also not about Eddie. Eddie names a friend, yes. Eddie is also one of those points of concentration, a place where many focused and unfocused griefs have accumulated, and there is a name to attach to them. That sound clotted. Let me try to be less so.
I have been thinking about how we are supposed to truncate grief, to restrict it to a particular period—between a death announcement and a funeral; the period of a memorial service; the time off one might get from work, from a single afternoon to a few days; the moment of a funeral announcement; the brief 5 seconds when we learn of loss and murmur our pole. Grief is supposed to managed by life and, more cruelly, by the demands of capital. It should not interrupt work. We are to have it and get over it.
Increasingly, I have felt that grief accumulates. Every condolence we offer to friends and strangers piles and piles and piles. And there have been so many condolences to offer. Every touch with grief marks us in some way. It adds to a pile that we are not supposed to acknowledge. Or, as Anne Cheng taught us, we can express as grievance, not grief. We are touchier. More sensitive. Less patient. Apt to explode, whatever that exploding might look like for us. (How else can I write if not with and for and as a dispersed us?) And I think a focus point emerges, a particular loss into which we pour that pile of accumulated losses. Not consciously.
Judith Butler taught us to ask why some deaths are more grievable. It’s a question about whose lives are considered more valuable, more human. It’s a question about disposability. About the ease with which some lives are so easily transformed into numbers while others have attachments and poetry and prose and names and dreams. I have been misusing Butler’s question to ask what it is about particular deaths that seems to concentrate the experience of loss. I am not trying to find an answer. Or perhaps I am simply sitting with what reading John Keene’s Punks and Biko Mandela Gray’s Black Life Matter have made possible, John as he writes about the ordinary ways we remember others, some of whom we have known casually, for a way of walking or dressing at the club, for instance, and Biko as he asks how we continue to sit with the dead, who remain with us. Grief as intimacy.
My friend Neo asked about what I can only think of as queer grief: how does one mourn a friend when mourning rituals in Kenya are built on intimacies that exclude friends? We ask that families and loved ones be given space to perform whatever rituals. I have no desire to attend funerals—I find them unbearable, and have done since I attended my grandfather’s when I was 7 and my father’s when I was 14, and I wondered if I was living in 7-year cycles of loss.
It is this, of course: that each fresh grief returns us to all the other griefs that have marked us, all the other griefs that are embedded in our blood and bones, all the other griefs that we do not go through, but sit with. Linger over. And at certain moments, moments we cannot control, a particular death gathers all the griefs it can.
What, then, might it mean to imagine freedom alongside sad sentences? Or through sad sentences. I do not know. It might be that practicing freedom might offer the space and resources to live with grief, not to think of it as something that intrudes and interrupts and diverts attention away, but as how we live with each other, how we practice compassion. How we acknowledge the ways we are bound to and with each other.
Forgive me if I persist in writing sad sentences for a little while longer. I am not writing through grief. There is no “into and out of” that writing will do. I can simply try to honor whatever feeling I—we—are experiencing.
Thank you.