Feeding unwelcome guests

How do you answer when Grief knocks?

“When grief comes, give her something to eat.”
Báyò Akómoláfé

Setting a place at the table for Grief is an everyday metaphor and useful tool for re/imagining how we live with loss.

As a child … if you’ve read me before, you will know that I used to pack a lunchbox and bike down to the cemetery to hang out with souls and graves, the long grass and the views. In my adult body when things feel weighted or overwhelming, I visualise my child-self, sharing a sandwich with what is hard or heavy. I never thought about it too much until fairly recently when I read Akomolafe’s quote.

The Dinner of Broken Dreams by Glen Martin Taylor

Accepting an Invitation
To invite our grief in, suggests inclusion, respite, ritual, a welcoming and belonging; a returning.

There’s hospitality in setting a place for Grief; generosity,

come in, take a seat, I’ll put the kettle on, have you eaten?

When Grief makes herself known, she (and her emotional entourage) are more often thought of as unwelcome visitors. 

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In being cracked open by loss, society insists we hold ourselves together. The dominant cultural grieving narrative says, soldier on. We are praised and acknowledged for keeping ourselves together, being strong in the face of adversity, getting back to work, for getting ‘back to normal’. Though I’m not sure there is such a thing as ‘going back’, more ‘going with’.

Ignoring the knock
We’ve come to inhabit what Francis Weller calls a societal fiction, “If I am happy I am productive, if I am productive I accumulate comfort, premium choice, wealth. I am happy when I am in control, assured, successful and independent.”

I’m supposed to be happy, that’s what Life tells me; the goal of life is to be happy. Isn’t it?

Image: Mr Men, Little Miss

When Grief comes to visit, it rains on our Happy Parade. Grief blows a storm through our comfort, we hunker down, deny entry or hurriedly usher it on its way numbing out, keeping busy, filling the days to keep distracted from what is asking to come in.

We find ‘strategies’ to work around it.

To lean into acute pain or emotional hardship seems counterintuitive - avoidance feels safer - grief diminishes us. Small and shattered? We don’t know what to do with that.

If I’m vulnerable, I’m broken, no good to anyone, I’m not productive, I become a societal burden.

Art and Image: Glen Martin Taylor

Why would anyone want to open the door and welcome in sorrow, disappointment, floods of tears, keening, red hot holy anger, brain fog, overwhelm, trauma responses, being utterly floored …?

What if the ground opens up and swallows me? What if I cry and can’t turn it off?

A trusted life companion
The gritty and brave - those seeking to, as Weller says ripen as elders - they open the door. They say,

hello Grief, my faithful companion, I’ve been expecting you, come in. Let us sup and see what you bring. I will practice being a generous, compassionate and curious host.

The gritty and brave know there is nutrition and good medicine in what is unpalatable.

Tomaz Goornicki, Masaccio” from PORTRÄTSPIEGEL exhibition with @czarnobylxter In @galeria_sztuki_szokart_poznan Photo by @damian_kasprzak_

Relationships can be built on shared experiences - consistently showing up.

Grief, consistently shows up.

It is very very old, Stephen Jenkinson says grief is older than we are. It is the one thing we can genuinely count on. A sure thing. Weller says similarly that grief can be trusted.

Flowers in a Vase Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) Manchester Art Gallery

If we are not praising the winter, how can we fully appreciate the colours of spring?
Continuing the metaphor of setting the table for Grief, let’s remember beauty and place some proverbial spring bulbs in a vase. And as we admire their scent and jovial hues, we might also acknowledge they too have experienced a time of wintering.

Beneath the earth their roots reach down through the resistance of the soil whilst a new tender stem stretches toward the light; emergent, budding, blooming.

May we acknowledge the whole cycle, says Stephen Jenkinson, not just the parts that benefit us.

Never did I hear a bulb say, I’m unproductive here in the dark? Or this dark is too dark. The bulb knows deep in its cells it is growing, contained by the earth and that without good roots it cannot ascend - it won’t thrive.

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Failure to thrive
If we are happy, we make the people we love happy. If we’re not ‘happy’ we’re somehow not fun or successful - we are seemingly failing.

Failing feels like: exhausted and enraged, drained and alienated, disbelief, embarrassed, ashamed … nothing much feels like it has meaning. Loneliness, even in the company of others is prevalent.

In the fog of failing at life, we may lose our sense of self, sense of direction.

Yet there, amidst the stumbling, a soft light through a kitchen window, beckoning. A flicker, someone has lit the candle to allow some light in. A place for Grief at the table.

Grief is communal; with candles and blooms and many places set, it is a shared experience. One of tear soup, ritual, reverence, one of belonging. One of returning.

Around the table there is listening and sharing, and a spaciousness for suffering. We sit in our seats separately, together. We are not at the table to fix, we are here to stay curious to witness, to presence each other in what surfaces. To notice and pay attention to each and every guest. We take our time. Swap seats for a different perspective.

At the table, we create a larger container than ourselves to hold what asks to be held.

Life is fast. It’s busy, we juggle all the things and don’t often enough take time to tend to who and what needs love, presencing and praise.

Grief is a guest for life, omnipresent though often unseen in daily conversations: the small disappointments, the banished parts of ourselves we perform around, relationship malfunction and rupture, ecological degradation, species extinction, genocide, intergenerational trauma, deception, aging parents, an empty nest, unmet needs, desires, aspirations, unfulfilled promises and expectations … We are griefly creatures who have learned how devour love without tasting the essence of grief on our back palette.

Grief might be deemed an unwelcome visitor, and though it may snarl, it comes baring gifts. I practice and share this metaphor of setting a place at the table for Grief because it feels loving, familiar, old and wise and nutritious. Fortifying.

Weller and Jenkinson too offer me a kind of homecoming, both offer places I continue to return to.