Reading Grief

A repost from June 24, 2023

“There is . . . a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.” ~Leonard Cohen

The last month has been a lot—the last week, also challenging. Today? Downright messy. I’m either sneezing or in tears and fortunately, my therapist is back in town, so I’m headed there as soon as I click “Publish.” For that reason, I’m playing the “Throwback Thursday” card and sharing an essay I wrote a couple of years ago. It was right after I had received all the submissions for an anthology I had the audacity to think I could create called Everyday Grief.

Since then, as constant readers know, the grief I’m navigating has doubled down and I sometimes feel like, “who better to write about grief than me?” It’s not a topic I’d choose to become an expert in, but here we are. And I thought I’d bring up the anthology because—ta-da—it is a book. The title has been changed and it’s still a few weeks out, but you can bet I’ll share details soon. For me, a community was created by the writers who contributed, a community nobody wanted to join, but what they’ve shared about this universal but singular experience is amazing. Just wait until you read the stories—they’re beautiful, heart-rending and honest. So honest. I look forward to sharing them all with you all soon.
See you next week. xo
Cindy

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June 24, 2023

This week marked the final day that submissions were accepted for my anthology, Everyday Grief. (At some point during the open call period, I stopped referring to June 21st as a “deadline” because it seemed like the wrong word to use.) Although the official submission period has closed, there are a few poems and essays trickling in that people have contacted me about and I’ll probably wrap it all up in the next week or so. And then it will be time to read through the almost 80,000 words of grief that people have sent me.

A close friend of mine, who is considering writing her own story, texted me with a brief overview. I encouraged her to write more and after a few more back-and-forth texts with further details, she finally texted, “God. How do you bear to do this?”

Honestly, I don’t really know. This project began as a way for me to find my own path through the avalanche of loss I was nearly buckling under. The typical conventions of grief as I understood them were to be in shock, mourn, move on. Until the next one. We get three to five days off from work—per loss—and then we’re back on the job. We don’t really ask anyone about their grief because it’s too personal, too insensitive, so questions go unasked. Even with all the books and websites and research about grief, the people who are dealing with it still feel like no one really talks about it. At least that’s what I’ve found.

One way I deal with grief . . . keep their obits open on my phone.

I’ve received submissions from friends and family; strangers and colleagues and the feeling that “nobody talks about it” is a thread through all of them. I am in awe of the hundreds of ways people are finding their way through the turbulence of emotion and pain that is grief. And yet with nearly each email bearing a story of loss, there were also words of gratitude. The light from a dark place. The writers were grateful to have somewhere to share a difficult experience or felt good about finally writing it down. The mothers and sisters and husbands and sons were glad to have an opportunity to tell their story or the story of someone close to them. Even the loss of a pet was revealed to be a much deeper loss than many are comfortable admitting to since one of the questions I got was, “Is this too trivial?”

Of course not.   

So, back to reading all the submissions—it’s not that I haven’t read any, but I’ve had this weird, vague boundary in place that I adhered to which was that I wasn’t going to read them until they were all in. Of course, I’ve seen them—I’ve seen every single one as I’ve logged them in, checked the word counts, recorded titles and topics and read through the pages.  I took note of all the writers and the subjects of their heartache. I felt as though I was handling a newborn each time an email arrived with another essay, another poem. It did occur to me many times over the last few months that reading so many stories about grief might be difficult—particularly as I’m dealing with so much of my own. But now that my self-imposed limitation has lifted…I can’t wait to read every single one.

I’ve thought about it a lot since I began this project. I may not have known how to do this when I started, but I know how I’m going to finish it: It will be a book. A book that has been entrusted with the most important stories that people have to tell, and in the telling, create company and understanding. I’m not going to let any of them down.

I’ll let you know when you can pre-order it.

I had to update the open tabs on my phone…sometimes, I imagine them all together, in a place like Maine, having coffee and doing crossword puzzles, watching for loons.