I am a synchronicity junkie. And today’s is powerful.
I’ve been editing this post on the potency of everyday grief—how it lurks and hides in the nooks and crannies of our ordinary lives—in our homes and hearths.
And this morning, the Facebook algorithm gods sent me a wink. The estate sale for my family home of almost 50 years happened on this day ten years ago after the deaths of my parents. Perhaps, it’s a reminder that home stays with us, always and no matter what.
So, where does grief live?
I think it’s in me and with me all the time—not in the old books, porcelain teacups, and big plastic bottles of glitter my mom collected. Grief is a part of my connective tissue and a part of all humans who love fiercely. I will never stop missing my late son Elliot. Sadness and melancholy are steely threads that entangle every fiber of my being—permanent strands of sorrow. About my other significant losses, well, I feel sad, of course, but Elliot is different. I gave him life. And as Rev. Dr. Fran Shelton said to me last night, he gave me life. His death is still unfathomable—almost five years later.
When I ask grief where it lives, it quips: “Well, Elaine, wherever the f$#& I please, including every cell in your aging body.” Grief is a snide little cuss. However, if I sit with it a bit and get curious, I understand. In fact, grief’s sass makes me giggle, as it reminds me of a particularly excruciating moment from my youth. I attended St. Michael and All Angels Church Day School through sixth grade. We went to chapel every morning with white-lace doilies Bobby pinned to our tousled locks, because women, even young girls, were not allowed to enter a sacred sanctuary with bare heads back then. At least, that has changed. The boys never wore doilies.
One first-grade morning, we had just completed a bonus verse of God is Working His Purpose Out, one of my fave hymns, and Father Comegys, an affable guy with big black-framed glasses, had begun leading us in a sweet prayer ritual that involved gesturing to different parts of our bodies. “Jesus is in my head; Jesus is in my heart. . .Jesus is in my right arm, my left arm, and so on” . . . Then suddenly, I felt compelled to shriek with great concern:
“Oh no, I’m getting food all over Jesus.”
There were snickers, pointing fingers, hisses, and shushing—followed by a swift grab of my wrist and brisk trot down the hall to the head priest’s office, the first of several. Humiliation is its own fresh kind of hell in church, but it pales in the hierarchy of grief. Just gotta say.
Anyway, the pain of losing my brilliant and complicated 26-year-old son Elliot Everett Wright far exceeds all the other losses and humiliations in my life combined, but I have discovered it also acts as a kind of emotional accelerant like the flammable residue CSI might detect in the ashes after a horrific fire.
It has the power to incinerate.
Profound grief is like that—a virulent, unstable chemical compound that can ignite even innocuous psychological debris in a heartbeat. The spontaneous combustion of new griefs inflaming ancient wounds makes carrying the most unbearable of all losses even more precarious. And vice versa. I contend the fire metaphor is even more visceral than the wave concept.
And while we are talking about incendiary substances, I am reminded of the pungent odor of turpentine spirits that would hang in the air and seep into every surface of our house growing up. My mother, Ann Cushing Gantz, an exquisitely prolific artist who was ferociously frustrated by the fickle art world, liked to repurpose those dark brown B&M baked bean jars, the ones with the subtle honeycomb design embossed in the glass, to soak her paint-caked brushes.
The small, amber containers covered every table, every shelf, and ledge in her cluttered studio over the garage—messy and mesmerizing, like an overgrown garden of potted pigment. I can’t catch a whiff of that harsh bittersweet aroma without thinking of my mother—stringent at times, but uniquely unforgettable. Anything can trigger a grief flame, even years later. And every loss is its own.
Yes, my grief often rants and shouts at me—but sometimes, it’s just a persistent, quiet whisper underneath everything that happens. It’s an inside job to deal with—getting grounded in the now and establishing healthy techniques to soothe my frayed nervous system. I am no longer that frightened little girl who grew up in an atmosphere of confusion and secrets, so I need to stop trying so hard to fix things that aren’t mine to fix. That is where I need to live.
Now, I’m feeling like Masha from Chekhov’s The Three Sisters:
In Act One, Masha says, “I’ve got the blues today, I’m feeling glum, so don’t you mind what I say [laughing through her tears]. We’ll talk some other time . . .”
She might be on to something. Laughing through her tears. Acknowledging the despair but finding a way to laugh. The authorities at The Atlantic concur. Expressing seemingly incongruent emotions can actually help moderate intense feelings—tears of joy, smiles of sadness, etc.
In the end, everything is bittersweet.
Well, Masha, I’m going with that . . . laughing through my tears, and we’ll talk some other time. And check out Fran Shelton’s book for this week’s featured spiritual practice that will help you navigate the most stubborn of your bittersweet memories—whether in your heart or your home.
Find solace in The Spirituality of Grief.
Elaine Gantz Wright 