Ever since the holidays, strains of “In the bleak midwinter . . . ,“ have been accompanying my thoughts on my wintertime walks. Yet the first line strikes me as absurd, for “bleak” is the last word I would use to describe these glorious winter days. The sparkling snow, the dazzling sunshine, and the deep blue of the sky against the white tree branches all offer solace to my soul. Still, the song rings true, for in this midwinter, bleakness – a sense of desolation, loss, and despair -- shrouds the land. In the first year of the pandemic, I lost several people in my life, mostly older or ailing, two of them some of my closest friends. However, this year the losses are not my own, but of those near and dear to me. Friends have lost brothers, mothers, sisters, children, friends, partners and spouses – to cancer, suicide, alcohol, a hit-and-run driver, injury from a fall, dementia, sudden death, and sheer despair – each of them too young, all of them tragic. Beyond the finality of death, an aggrieved world spins out tendrils of affiliated losses -- of community and companionship, safety and security, watersheds and wild places, touch and tenderness and trust; family and faith -- whether in god or humanity or the future. Thousands have lost the tangibles of jobs, shelter, savings, and physical capacity, and millions more the intangibles of dreams deferred, hopes for a nation, and belief in the basic decency of our fellow humans. And then there are the ordinary, everyday losses. As a friend recently posted, “I am grieving. I miss Sunday breakfasts at the cafe. Live music. Dinner parties. I miss seeing people smile in the grocery aisle” (Jana Studelska, Facebook Post, 1/9/22). We are all suffering utter and ongoing loss.
In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller illuminates what he calls the five gates of grief: 1) loss of someone or something we love; 2) the places that have not known love --“the profoundly tender places . . .[in us that] have lived outside of kindness . . .” (31) — the shadow places of trauma and shame that we hide away; 3) sorrows of the world – the loss of nature and the existential crises of an increasingly uninhabitable planet; 4) what we expected and did not receive -- to be valued for our gifts, to feel of worth and purposeful, and simply to know that we matter; and 5) ancestral grief. The first we collectively grieve with family and friends in rituals of mourning. We bring food, comfort the mourners, gather together, are present to all that arises, understand the need for time away from the ordinary. We are also finally beginning to recognize the very real impacts of the last, as we learn more about historical trauma and the ways that those living today carry the wounds of past generations. But we have no funerals for the traumas and wounds we hide away, no flags flown at half-staff for an embattled polity, no wailing walls for an earth on the precipice of irretrievable climate change, no coffins to hold the tears for all we had at one time hoped for, if not counted on -- whether that be that our work in the world be valued, our needs for health and well-being be respected, a shared sense of reality, a collective desire for the public good, or simply a smile in the grocery store aisle.
As a society, we are not good at grief. We don’t allow it. Three days max, then we are expected to be back to work, keep the economy humming – shop, go to the movies and the mall, “put on a happy face” and “smile though your heart is aching.” We are uncomfortable with sorrow and pain. Expected to wear a cheery countenance, we deny our suffering and the suffering of others. However, loss unacknowledged compounds its effects, creating more damage and harm. Grief will unleash itself somewhere. Unrecognized and unpermitted grief may manifest as excessive consumption – of food, alcohol, Netflix, stuff – anything to fill the void; or in unquelled anger, violence, hatred, enemy-making, and scapegoating -- all of which have erupted onto our world; or in the unmetabolized pain we pass on to the next generations. It is essential to our individual and collective well-being that we welcome grief, and that we tend it.
In the Sumerian tale of Inanna*, we find Erishkegal, Queen of the Underworld, in mourning. Her grief over the death of her husband and her displacement from her seat of power and reign, unacknowledged by the world, have left her angry, bitter, vengeful, and murderous. When her sister, Inanna, hears Erishkegal’s anguished cries, she journeys to the Underworld to comfort her, but in her bitterness, Erishkegal turns on Inanna and orders her killed. Prior to her descent, Inanna had asked her faithful servant, Ninshubur, to send help if she did not return in three days. Help comes in the form of two creatures formed by Inanna’s Father Enki, who instructs them to cry when Erishkegal cries. It is only when they reach Erishkegal and moan with her moans, cry with her cries, scream with her screams, feel her every pain, validate her loss, and tend her woundedness with compassion that she begins to heal, and finally releases Inanna.
Asian American feminist thealogian Rita Nakashima Brock shares a similar Shinto tale of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, who, wounded and angered by the rageful and desecrating acts of her jealous brother, retreats into a cave of silence, and winter descends upon the land. She is finally lured out by the noise of celebration outside the cave. The gods and goddesses have placed a mirror at the entrance to the cave, and so fascinated is Amaterasu by her reflection that they are able to block her return. The moral Brock draws from this story is of the need for good mirrors who will reflect back to us our pain, our brokenness, our suffering. In order to begin to heal, we must first be willing to acknowledge and share our pain to those who will mirror it back to us. Brock writes, “In our pain is the power of self-knowledge that brings us to a healing wisdom and compassion. We will not be made whole and healed until the truth of our lives can be seen and told, . . . telling our own pain in a community of sisters who hear our gentle murmurs of loneliness and suffering and mirror ourselves back to us” (240). We must be those mirrors to others as well, to moan with their moans, cry with their cries. “We must learn to listen to, hold, and support others for their empowerment and ours” (237).
We can release the grip of grief in our lives. We need ongoing ways to share our losses, especially those we hide away, to have them heard and mirrored back to us and compassionately tended. The particular cruelty of the pandemic is that it denies us what we most need to heal our grief — physical comforting, spaces for sharing our stories, singing and sobbing together, coming together in consolation — so it is especially important that we both seek out and be those good mirrors to each other in those places that we can.
Healing is also to be found in the company of our more than human relatives. Bring your losses to the trees, to the waters, to the four-legged and the winged ones, and they will hold them. “The cure for susto**,” writes Linda Hogan, “ . . . is written in the bark of a tree, in the moonlit silence of night, in the bank of a river and the water’s motion. . . . in the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of sunlight, the waking human in a world infused with intelligence and spirit” (157-158).
A modification of Job 12: 7-8 has also been accompanying me on my walks of late, reminding me in this midwinter of our lives to -
Ask the beasts, and they will heal you;
the birds of the air, and they will comfort you;
ask the plants of the earth, and they will give you peace.
*”The Descent of Inanna,” inscribed onto tablets around 1750BCE, was discovered in the ruins of Nippur, Sumer’s spiritual and culture center, in an excavation between 1889 and 1890. It would be decades before the 14 cuneiform tablets were translated and woven into a coherent tale.
**Indigenous peoples of Latin America understand trauma and its accompanying grief as “soul loss,” or susto.
Notes
Brock, Rita Nakashima. “On Mirrors, Mists, and Murmurs: Toward and Asian American Theaology.” In Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ, eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. New York: Harper Collins, 1989. 235-243.
Hogan, Linda. “The Great Without.” In Hogan, Linda and Brenda Peterson, eds., Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism, and Awakening. New York: North Point Press, 2004. 154-158.
Strouse, Charles and Lee Adams, “Put On a Happy Face.” Strada Music Company, 1960.
Turner, John and Geoffrey Parsons, “Smile.” Bourne Co., 1954.
Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2015.
Wolkstein, Diane and Samuel Noah Kramer. Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.