Grief, Ghosts, Lamentations

“I always recommend writing an essay,” Carolyn[1] says. A good practice at any stage of life. 

I can’t seem to write, though; I can’t even focus, my heartbeat feels too big in my chest, my brain wants to shut down. 

I need rest. 

Why is rest resistance, Tricia Hersey?[2] Because we are expected to work. What if we are resisting ourselves, our own (art) work? Rest is resistance. I refuse to focus. I choose rest. I don’t know if I’m joining the revolution or running away from myself. 

I know I need a nap. Several naps. A trip to the Korean spa; a long massage; a steam bath and tears. 

I need to touch the earth and stare at the sky. This is why I am still – in my head if not with my hands right now – building a dwelling. 

Tom[3] says that the original meaning of to “dwell” was to tend to the land - to garden. What is a tending-to? What can we attend to? 

I am not without form or function. I am still me. Am I? 

I can still notice, even in my suppressed state that wants nothing but to stay indoors, in bed, under blankets, in ignorance and in my middle-class (both exploited and exploiter) comforts. I can still notice the tang of autumn in the air, the cold that seeps into my toes. I can still see the mold blooming delicately across the paintings left out in the dewy yard. I feel oddly comforted by the decay, the ritual loss of letting go, giving over to nature. I see what changes, day to day, and what stays the same: the posts, the earth, the grass growing and glowing green this time of year. Abundance and decay. The modern calendar has just turned over to October. Spiders are filling the yard again. The new wooden pallet walls fit right in: makeshift, elegantly reclaimed, splintering yet sturdy enough for one more winter at least. Temporary, joining us while we are here. 

We are here. In this space, in this place and time. This is what has happened in the last month: my brother died. My sweet, funny, kind, musically talented, generous, hardworking, loving, and loved brother, the youngest of the six of us, ended his life after a difficult battle with a horrible mental illness. It grew and took over his brain, perhaps for many years, proliferating over the last two, growing lethal over the last few months. He was not himself, in the end, even though his amused chuckle and dry, absurdist sense of humor still bubbled to the surface now and then. 

One day he was here, and then he was gone. The world stopped that day, but of course it did not stop. I got on a plane. I held my family and cried. I felt guilt, grief, anger, loneliness, longing, and pain. I felt regret and relief, fear and confusion. I felt numb. I still feel numb.

What does this have to do with “Matrescence: Becoming Mother Nature”? Everything, it turns out. I have been building a dwelling space, literally and metaphorically, to hold monumental grief, change, life, and death. It is simple, but not easy. I have been trying to learn what the Earth has to teach me, in letting go of our very human existential crises and giving in to the ebbs and flows of time. It has taken me so long to get to where I am today, and I’m still not finished. And now I look out into the backyard and see it taking shape: the beams, the roof, the walls, the hands that will hold up the weeping sky coming through, and I know that it’s exactly where I am supposed to be. Even though every part of me wants nothing more than to hide inside, forget about Sam, the Earth, the sky, the songs, the rhythm, the laughter of babies and toddlers and kids, the pain and awe that consumed me as I painted the words, “I had a baby and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” What if that baby dies before me, one day? It will still be (and perhaps even more so?) true. 

The truest thing we can ever face is ourselves. Who am I, now? How can we be here, alone, yet together? Myself and my child; myself and my brother; myself and my grandmother, also dead from the same illness, before I was born. We are woven together, held by nature and time: generations, laughing and dying, birthing and being reborn, painting and drumming, singing and dancing and loving and living and living on. Am I one person, or two, or more? 

Mariam-Saba[4] once told me during a spiritual healing session that my grief is being poured back into the ocean of grief, and god holds it all. I am swimming in grief, being scooped up and held and poured back into myself by the hands of my creator. All grief is love. All love is grief. 

When I had my child I was split in two. My body was torn, my mind was torn, my spirit was wounded, my womb was a wound the size of a dinner plate. All of this is considered normal (yet up to 50% of birthing parents experience birth as a traumatic incident [5]).  I am still learning how to heal, how to hold my infant self, and my own daughter - a new consciousness I am responsible for, but cannot control. I am broken, and also more whole than when I started. I am a full circle: my grandmother, my mother, my daughter, and me. 

My brother joins my (biological) father in the afterlife, with my maternal grandmother – my three ghosts, looking out for me, looking over my shoulder, sitting with me as I dwell in this temporary, temporal, grief-stricken place. This healthy, normal, healing place. This body, which is tasked with holding all pleasure and all pain simultaneously. My ghosts dance around me, but they are not me. My mother and my daughter are with me, but they are not me. 

What is this “me”? Can I be the Earth now, please? Can I softly slip away into stillness, silence, as the human world zooms past on their fast cars, the freeway so close and yet so far away - just over the wall behind my backyard. The trees that create the high crown around me have grown up over decades, maybe centuries, further towards the sky than I am from the freeway. The sound drenches me in buzzing and chaos that churns like a river night and day. Where are we, wherever we are – where is “here”? Whose land is this? Are we alone, or together?

This is not how I hoped this year would go. I wrote about grief and healing, trauma and presence, yet somehow I never imagined I would need it this much: time and space. A healing, made from mud. A project created with and from community, those that are aware of it and those that aren’t – everyone who connects me to the physical crafts, nature, place, ideas, and identities that have brought me here. A re-weaving. Something new, made from old things. I am still here, but I am not the same. Nothing that changes can ever be un-changed; nothing that changes us can ever go back again. 

***

What is an essay? My parents are English teachers, so I know this one. The simplest form of an essay has an introduction, a thesis sentence, three paragraphs supporting the thesis, and a conclusion paragraph. 

A thesis and supporting ideas: what is my thesis? 

My project thesis is not a statement to be defended. It is a series of questions that are just out of reach (represented, perhaps, by the long trailing fingers on open hands, splaying open palms to the sky – supporting the literal and metaphorical weight of roof beams, yet open-ended, waiting for a bird, or a fleeting thought, to alight). 

If I had to write the thesis (a statement), maybe it would be this: 

Birth is a shocking experience, for the birthing and the birthed. We spend our whole lives trying to process the significance of this, because time and environment are constantly shifting such that we cannot fully grasp the ephemeral significance of change. The best we can do is experience God (all pleasure and pain) in a single moment; the way to do that is to sit, rest, be still, and notice: the fear, horror, trash, art, joy, growth, beauty, grief of a single moment in space and time.

or this:

Mother and Earth need to rest. 

or:

All mothers and all children experience pain. There is comfort in acknowledging all the pain and trauma in a space made sacred by attention and intention. We can be both things – all things – at once. 

Maybe my thesis is this: 

We are changing, we are changed; whatever has changed us has taken as much as it has given. We can acknowledge the growth and the pain. We can heal. To learn how to heal, we can watch the earth growing, dying, and simply existing. It is a marvel and a wonder to live.

Or maybe this:

Can nature teach us how to live, to die, to heal?

But that is no longer a statement.

I love art because it’s more question than answer. I cannot prove anything; I can only hold up artistic truths to the question, to see if they fit.

***

What have I learned so far? I have stretched myself to build, when my body is weak. I learned I need help, community, support, that I cannot do this alone, no matter how badly my ego wants me to be able to. 

I stretched myself to go outside more, to work in all weather, to confront nature and sit with the reality of rain, heat, dirt, bugs, bees, mold, slime, wind, rot, wild animals, cold, damp – even the sounds in the air, which are mostly human-made (traffic, airplanes), but outside I have less control over what reaches me. I learned that I am not as interested in this as I thought I might be. It is still very difficult for me to dress correctly, overcome the limitations of my physical body (chronic fatigue syndrome; fibromyalgia; and a tendency towards poor temperature regulation — a condition called Reynaud’s that causes a disproportionate cold in my toes, fingers, ears, and nose). I learned it is not so easy to overcome my human condition. 

I have learned that maybe humans, at least some of us, weren’t meant to live in nature. How sad. I feel like an outcast, unfit to live the life my “mother” lives with ease – how fitting, this alienation, as a metaphor for the new generations trying to make their way in a digital age. 

Yet I also learned that by challenging my assumption that art stays indoors (or at the very least is engineered to resist the elements), I have mentally broken down of the walls between human and nature -- a breaking down of the belief that we can keep things safe, protected, clean, dry, controlled. A dissolution of the belief that we can last forever. 

***
This semester happened to start with an assignment to read Judy Grahn’s Hanging on Our Own Bones, which turned out to be a collection of poems described as “contemporary lamentations.” She writes of what she knows of the history of lamentations: a spectacle of grief, traditionally performed by widows and women, in Italy and the Mediterranean area of Europe. A wailing, singing, rending of clothing, scratching of faces, but also a commentary on social ills such as war that had taken loved ones away. Grahn writes: “A lamentation, then, pours out of a poet’s heart not only from a deep sense of loss, but also of outrage and justice needed or denied; it takes its own time exploring the emotions and implications, and aims at the possibility of transformation, both individual and collective…” 

I thought to myself, oh my god. This is what I have to create, now. A new lamentation, for Sam, for mental illness and healing, for the injustice of systems that failed him, and for the grief of the possibility that nothing that could ever have saved him. For the emptiness that is the space in the middle of all this loss, the calm quiet place that is just trying to make sense of the new world I live in. 

As I research the materials to craft my outdoor sculptures – ones that will help keep form and shape for such a time as to sit with them, yet allow nature to take them over in its right time – I am struck by how unfathomable this goal is to our collective industrial identity. 

There are products for sealing things “permanently” and protecting them outdoors, but they are made of acrylic (plastic) and all plastics, no matter how much we pretend otherwise, are slowly breaking down and microplastics now permeate the soil, seas, rain, food, and our very bodies[6]. There are “nontoxic” sealants (that won’t poison your kids or your pets) but that aren’t environmentally friendly, and even those are more likely to need to be reapplied on a regular basis to ensure “protection” for your projects from the sun, wind, and rain. 

What they don’t say is that nothing can protect us (or our projects, products, or progeny) from time itself. 

Nothing is permanent. Nothing lasts forever. Some things barely even exist before they disappear, leaving only memories, legacies (for better or worse), and a psychic imprint behind. 

Life is the ultimate performance art: we are here, we make choices, and we leave again.  

Is it even art, if it can’t be held onto? I remember being shocked and mildly appalled at first learning about the idea of performance art as art. How can you say that a moment in time is the art itself? What if it was just as deserving of hanging in a museum for hundreds of years as any 18th-century oil painting? How could it just be…gone?

What if the intentional letting go of something is what activates grief and meaning in the heart of the viewer (and the artist)? 

A contemporary lamentation. ■

October, 2024

[1] Carolyn Cooke is a writer and professor at CIIS, and my MFA project advisor. http://www.carolyncooke.com 
[2] Hersey, Tricia. Rest Is Resistance, New York : Little, Brown Spark, 2022.
[3] Thomas Kerr is a writer and fellow interdisciplinary art MFA candidate at CIIS.
[4] Mariam-Saba Ahmad is a friend, artist, teacher, and spiritual healer. https://www.mariam-saba.com
[5] Jones, Lucy. Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood, New York : Pantheon Books, 2003.
[6] Balch, Bridget. “Microplastics are inside us all. What does that mean for our health?”, Association of American Medical Colleges, 27 June, 2024. Retrieved 16 October, 2024.