Summer Grief: Introduction
What is grief like? We asked Staci Bu Shea to edit a series of writings from individuals who have faced the loss of someone deeply important to them. Published every Thursday through the early weeks of summer, we share new texts from Yessica van den Berg, Chus Martínez, Katja Mater, Dina Mimi and Jumana Emil Abboud. Each writer offers a glimpse into how they shape and are shaped by grief, and every text is published with a photograph by the artist and poet S*an D. Henry-Smith.
We understand that grief is the pain and sadness related to loss, but we are beginning to feel and know that it’s more. Decolonized perspectives on grief show us that it always has been more. Our ability to turn towards rather than away from grief helps us better tune with natural cycles of life and death. Grief is personal and political: its specific texture is felt and formed through varied experiences of changes we do and don’t choose, of expected and unexpected loss, unavoidable and preventable deaths. Slow and immediate violence contour the difference for how grief is lived with. Beyond adherence to the five stages, grief overflows from the container of psychopathology and a productivist timeline. We learn that grief is a natural emotion and it never ends, but grieving, one’s adaptation to loss, changes, and it informs the experience of grief over time. In that sense, more space for the truth of grief, as opposed to its minimization or problem-to-be-solved, strengthens one’s spiritual ecology of both the seen and unseen throughout our lifetimes. Grieving is not absent of joy, but an expression of praise that sizes up to the love of our attachments.
As a death doula, I am encouraging and in awe of the ways in which people give voice to their grief and grieving. For Metropolis M, I have commissioned writing from Yessica van den Berg, Chus Martínez, Katja Mater, and Dina Mimi that will appear over the next weeks. Each of them experience grief in relation to the death of someone close, someone who is part of the virtual design of their mind. This means that their relationship is experienced as a more tightly woven braid of time, space, frequency and attachment, where death necessitates a particular neurological remapping in adapting to the present. Mary-Frances O’Connor writes in The Grieving Brain (2023) that grieving is ultimately a type of learning, and since learning is something we do our whole lives, seeing grieving as a type of learning can support us with the patience and compassion needed to allow this remarkable process to unfold, for both ourselves and others. This brings up important questions for one to consider about the spatiotemporality and agency of grieving, who has access to grieving and how they are supported. Conscious grieving is inconceivable while in the midst of survival. It is thus a privilege, but it can also be radically insisted upon as a form of solidarity and fuel which honors life as dignified and sacred. As we age and accumulate more losses, I think wisdom is the practice of learning how to hold different kinds of grief with more depth, nuance, and respect.
This series can’t possibly cover the myriad of experiences of grief and grieving, and so the selection of writers is personal, all whom I know or who are connected through a dear friend. My invitation to each of them centered around the question of how grief has shaped them, their experienced sense of being in the world, which is inspired by the writing of Ida Hillerup Hansen in their thesis Being Through Loss: A Queer Performative Reckoning With Grief (2023). I see each of the writer’s texts as evidence that grief not only shapes us, but it is also a process to be shaped and can be done so with attentive, sensuous detail. As Camille Sapara Barton shares in Tending Grief (2024) about the generative force of grief when space is made for it individually and collectively, tending to it “can enable us to feel a wider range of sensations including intimacy, empathy and interdependence.” The writers in this series share moving descriptions of materials, recollection and reconciliation, and each text reveals additional losses as well as discoveries of what perhaps might have always been and will remain. In shaping narrative and relationship, each writer demonstrates their continuous bond to their someone, and that taking loss seriously inspires more reverence for the relationships in one’s life. To accompany us through this series are the photographs S*an D. Henry-Smith, an artist and poet whom I admire and whose works capture transitory feelings of a vibrant present.
Many thanks to the writers and artists in this series. I would also like to extend my heart to grievers everywhere, and my solidarity to all those filled with love and liberation for a free Palestine and an end to systems of domination. May we all do our best to minimize harm and suffering and take part in healing the past, present and future.
Staci Bu Shea
is schrijver, curator en stervensbegeleider / a curator, writer and death doula
