Looking for Grief (in all the wrong places)
It started with just three lines:
Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
Last year I made a file and called it "poems-grief."
Now, as the file grows, I don't know if this brings comfort or alarm. Each addition feels like a weed multiplying in a once-tidy garden. There is too much sadness, too much loss, and not enough blooms.
With each sickness, with each death, I searched for comfort in poems. I wanted someone to know my grief, to speak the words I could not find, to carry my heart in words.
Much to my surprise, it was difficult to find good poems. I searched for books specifically on grief, and while there were plenty of collections none seemed for me. And I searched online endlessly, and again there were plenty of poems but nothing that wrapped me in comfort.
Admittedly, my criteria was strict:
No sappy or sentimental poems.
No happy endings.
No predictable poems.
No rhyming (which often feels forced)
No hippy-dippy, in-a-better-place, happened-for-a-reason poems.
No old poems, of a "classic" era with thee and thou and dost
And, oh, no more Mary Oliver.
(Yes, yes, I like Mary. We all like Mary. She's good and prolific and written many good poems that I have loved and shared. But she is also sometimes too known and rote, too nature-is-inside-us predictable).
Instead, I want real expressions of grief's relentless presence, its weight and fear. I want a way in, but not too much, and a way out, but not too quickly. I want someone to get it.
And so my hunting and gathering increased and my collection grew with many good poems. But it was only a few months ago that I found one that really spoke to me. And once found, I sent it everywhere. Copies and copies were shared with friends who had lost a mother, a father, a pet. And colleagues who grieved an aunt, a brother, a son.
This week, I read the poem over and over to myself, for myself. I whisper the lines like prayer, and write them down, word for word copied to paper, as if the ink could bleed itself into my heart to form a pulse I would recognize as my own.
Blessing for the Brokenhearted
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
— Henry David Thoreau
Let us agree
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better
to have this pain
than to have done
without this love.
Let us promise
we will not
tell ourselves
time will heal
the wound,
when every day
our waking
opens it anew.
Perhaps for now
it can be enough
to simply marvel
at the mystery
of how a heart
so broken
can go on beating,
as if it were made
for precisely this —
as if it knows
the only cure for love
is more of it,
as if it sees
the heart’s sole remedy
for breaking
is to love still,
as if it trusts that its own
persistent pulse
is the rhythm
of a blessing
we cannot
begin to fathom
but will save us
nonetheless.
— Jan Richardson
from The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief
