On The Grief Memoir
What I Learned from Reading Sloane Crosley's Grief Is for People
A Poem:
“Grief Lives/Hides in the Body”
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Like a child, it begins in the body.
Someone close to us dies.
Something Else devastating happens.
This is when/how it is born.
Unlike a child, it never leaves/exits.
The body is where it lives/hides.
It’s Day of Death will be the same Day of Death as ours.
Months/Days/Hours pass.
Can we learn to live with it?
Can we?
Learn??
To Live?
It’s not necessarily the type of thing we enjoy spending time with.
In fact, we despise its personality all together.
It’s a car alarm.
A knife-fight.
A trainwreck.
A bloodbath.
But no one else can see it.
It ruins social events entirely.
Its language is visceral emotion—
Venomous, at times.
We do our best to stow/lock it away.
Day after day, like a hungry ghost, it tap/taps us on our shoulder.
At night, it kicks us square in the gut.
We vomit out sadness.
There still is so much more inside.
We curl into ourselves.
We grow so very tired. We stay so very tired.
We stay.
Desperately—s i g h—we appease it.
At our worst, we “befriend” it.
After work, we walk beside it in the park.
On the park bench, we sit and pat its back.
We try anything/everything.
We call out to it:
“Good!”
“Good!”
“Good girl/boy/whatever
We feed it treats.
None of this is a permanent solution.
We somehow—e x h a l e—
Must learn
To accept it.
This damaged piece of ourselves. This bloody fragment—
We cannot wholly love or leave.
We may not want it, but it is ours to keep.
No, we don’t want it.
Yes, we keep it.
This “keeping” exercises our heart.
Opens it.
Grows us wings.
For utility’s/f#ck’s sake, we need some wings.
It’s a long, hard stretch of muscle.
It hurts/hurts
When we break loose.
When we let out our fledgling wings.
They are slow to open.
We hope/pray one day they’ll work.
We’re afraid they won’t/we’re so afraid/of what?
Months pass/Or were they Weeks/Days?
Passings pass.
We “Learn” to allow Grief its proper time.
We “Give” Grief its proper space.
More time.
More space.
Every so often, we feed it treats.
We gift ourselves necessary time.
Necessary space.
Eat a treat.
We hire a professional to Swedish-massage our wings.
We try to open up our lives/hearts/
Wings—
Ever so hesitantly, we let the world back in.
People, places, things—
We call them back.
We tell them we are different/the same—
We’re still Us where it counts.
We’re still Us where it counts?
When the day arrives,
When we “think” we’re ready to let ourselves go/fly
We remember,
We Are
Alive,
We Are
Among
The Living/Flying
Feels
So
Like
Falling.
I wrote the poem above after reading Grief Is for People
What I learned from Reading Sloane Crosley’s Grief is for People
1. Grief Comes in a Multitude of Forms
In almost a mythical fashion, in Grief Is for People, author Sloane Crosley embarks on a journey in which she faces three tiers of grief.
First, on June 27, 2019, her New York City apartment is burglarized.
All of her jewelry is stolen including her family heirlooms. She begins a hunt—tracking down the jewelry—both with and without the help of the police, to find these lost items.
Exactly one month later, on July 27th, her best friend, Russell Perreault, who she worked closely with for years, commits suicide.
And then, while still in the grips of sadness, the pandemic begins.
We feel her looming sense of loss growing like a phantom around her, as the vibrant city she once knew and loved enters its dormant state (of grief).
The memoir poetically paints a landscape that demonstrates how people not only grieve the loss of other people, but they grieve anything dear to them that’s lost—valuable objects, even a place or time that has changed. Nothing is off limits with grief.
2. Sometimes we grieve for a Place or Time that is no longer with us.
One of the most moving parts of the memoir is its description of Russell’s world in the years prior to his suicide.
As a literary publicist—one with high-creative energy and an edgy, sometimes confrontational personality who had "zero facility for office politics”—dealing with the emergence of social media and today’s easy-to-offend, always-on-the-watch culture, for Russell, was like having a safety rug slowly pulled out from under his feet until he eventually had nowhere left to stand.
Russell was the type of person who was both applauded, and punished, for being an unfiltered, authentic version of himself—unable to turn his own volume down.
It saddened me to feel Russell’s world change around him, and so quickly.
Crosley does an excellent job of demonstrating how Russell really had nowhere left to stand in this new world, where everybody is so publicly on display, all of the time.
I was left feeling his utter grief. And possibly my own, too.
I am sad for myself and my children for living in this fast-paced world where everyone is so ultra plugged-in, where cameras are everywhere watching our every move.
I understand grieving for what feels like a better time; and a better place.
Russell may not have been perfect. But nobody alive ever is.
Welcome to the New Now, a voyeuristic world (of blooming narcissists) that promotes perfection, and exploits mistakes.
Please excuse me while I go binge-watch the Dick Van Dyke Show.
3. Writing Through Grief Helps
Because it is impossible as a human not to feel grief—no one will escape it—we are eventually forced to enter it. And deal with it head on.
For those of us going through hard times, journeying with Crosley through Grief Is for People will not remove our own Grief.
But we will see how one person copes. And I believe this “journeying together” goes a long way.
To have Crosley’s thoughts and feelings laid out before us brings clarity to the universal emotions—the messy, angry, guilty, hurting sloppiness—behind grief.
Grief Is for People reminds us, we are human. We, the alive, are together. And for a moment, one person’s grief is all of our grief.
Reading is merely an exercise in the practice.
In the broadest terms, this grief memoir, like all grief memoirs, is a friendly reminder to: Write our grief down so we can better understand it.
Understanding is such an important part of the process. We have to get it out. Give it a place to live outside of us.
No, we don’t have to write a memoir, or consider ourselves writers—that doesn’t matter.
We must only allow ourselves some time to let our hearts and mind gush onto a page.
Writing forces us to look inside and head down the road towards acceptance—which may just mean, getting back to living our lives.
If you are looking for some help in where to start, The Dewdrop offers Writing Through Grief (Keyword: through) workshops. The next one begins on May 1, 2024.
Grief Resources
Since this one is so single focused on grief, I’ll skip the weekly word and instead include a few resources for those who are struggling with grief in their own lives.
Whats your Grief - A Grief Website for the Rest of Us - a website that promotes grief education, exploration, and expression in both practical and creative ways.
The Shared Grief Project - The Shared Grief Project envisions a world where no child grieves alone. To achieve this, they share the stories of individuals who have experienced a major loss at an early age and have gone on to live healthy, happy and successful lives.
Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD - website of the author of The Grieving Brain.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK [8255]