Grieving Alone
By Catherine Ricketts
When my brother died four years ago, my loss was made bearable because of the physical presence of others: My cousins, who knew how hard it had been to love Joe, and who loved him still. The cadre of artists and addicts to which Joe belonged. The friends who deep-cleaned my apartment, their hands and knees speaking sympathy that couldn’t be uttered.
Today, amid pandemic, the bereaved are unable to gather as readily as they once were. Familiar rituals for grief—the friend who catches the first flight to the widow’s side, the crowded funeral service, cousins who linger long into the night, shoeless in stockings and still wearing black—may need to be postponed. Yet rituals are needed now as much as ever.
Rituals serve as containers for the uncontainable. I learned this from Gertrud Nelson, whose book To Dance With God guides my holidays and milestones. Rituals, Nelson says, help in times of transition, when our emotions are complex and overwhelming. It’s like this: At the ocean, a child toes up to the shoreline where waves crash at her ankles. The sea is vast and awesome, unsearchable, terrifying. She stares, enthralled and paralyzed. Instead of stepping into the abyss before her, she turns around and digs a shallow hole. Slowly, the long waves lap and fill it, and in this tiny sea, she’s safe to explore. She pulls up a handful of sand-mud, a bulb of kelp, a shell, a sand crab small as a thumb. Rituals do this for the bereaved. They contain just enough of the stuff of our complex emotions for us to safely explore our grief.
How can the bereaved find meaningful rites for grief when they’re unable to be together? Remembering Joe’s death, I see that when the hymns had been sung and my community had scattered, the rituals I practiced alone, while simple, were some of the most important in my grieving process.
First: Sleep. Grief has a way of laying the body down. In mourning, I slept late. When I woke, I had to remind myself: Your brother is dead. I recited this new liturgy silently and whimpered aloud as my eyes focused on the sun’s slender glow around the curtains. I laid there, heavy as stone. My body, live as it was, needed to move slowly. Once, years before, I stood up a friend for a breakfast date because I’d slept through my alarm. She forgave quickly, saying, “Think of that extra sleep as a big hug from the Lord.” The sleep of grief is like this: an embrace we shouldn’t loosen too quickly.
Second: Write. The summer he died, I often woke with vivid memories and rushed to write before they dimmed. They came as flashes of presence. They came as gifts: The singular instance when Joe gave me a shoulder rub. The brilliance of stars overhead the night we spoke more clearly than ever before. The timbre of his laughter, almost audible. As I emerged from dreams, my memory was lucid, so morning writing became a discipline.
Third: Cook. Cooking was the most potent expression of Joe’s care for me. When he showed up for family occasions, he was always in the kitchen, cooking enough to share: black beans, tempeh, shrimp ceviche. In his absence, I cooked in his memory. The food he made was always too spicy. He added Sriracha to everything. I began to endure more heat because I was cooking for him.
Fourth: Fast. My brother died of a heroin overdose. Afterwards, for months, I gave up alcohol, one of my own great comforts. Every craving for a summer cocktail with friends or a glass of wine to unwind at twilight was an opportunity to turn my attention to Joe, who lived and died craving. I had always struggled to understand my brother, and had always hoped that as we grew, we would find ways to move toward one another. To crave was a way to know Joe better, to shoulder a portion of his burden, even in his absence. In foregoing drink, I joined my grief to the grief of so many in history, who’ve observed fasting as a ritual of mourning.
Fifth: Call. At night, I stayed up late with Joe’s friends on the phone. We hadn’t been close, but they quickly became my most important people. They shared his humor and his interests, and they held years of memories that I did not share. In knowing them, I knew more of Joe.
As the adage goes, everyone grieves differently. Maybe you’ll dance at dusk to the song you loved with the one you’ve lost. Maybe, like my friend Beth, you’ll swim with all your clothes on. Because everyone grieves differently, perhaps solitary rituals for grief are more vital than we give them credit for. For me, the simple and private rites of grief threaded the reality of Joe’s death, and the complexity of my love for him, into my everyday life. My rituals have not given me a way through grief but have woven grief and love together and formed a new way of being.
This piece was originally published at charlottedonlon.substack.com.
Catherine Ricketts’s writing about the arts, grief, and spirituality has appeared in Image, Paste Magazine, Measure, and Relief, and online at The Millions. She studied writing at the University of Pennsylvania and holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University. By day she works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she orchestrates performance programs. Find her on Instagram at @modernbelief.
*Photo by Alex Sawyer on Unsplash