Grief is Chaos

The Beautiful World is Not Safe's first guest post!

Grief is a slippery, dancing, horrible, unavoidable thing. We have so many ways to talk about it, even us deathworkers. We talk about moving with and through it. We say blessings to others of peace and strength. Sometimes we discuss “getting to the other side” of it. Grief isn’t a wall you scale (though it can feel that way). There isn’t a line you finally step over where all of present life returns to the sharp focus of before the grief. Your first grief (though you were too young to know its name) is like your first time having sex, the you afterward can never be the you that was prior to the experience. There is no returning to them. 

When the world shatters you into grief, it is chaos. Loving someone, some thing, any thing means you’ve struck a bargain with grief. When it stomps through the door, it shoves you down, hard. You struggle for air, the rooms are topsy turvy. Everything tilts, shimmers like mirages, and nothing fits – furniture is uncomfortable, clothes rub the wrong way, sounds are deafening or whispers. You are upside down, floating in a debris field you cannot dodge. 

As time moves around you there is less debris, but you see it in the edges of your vision. Chaos lessens, but doesn’t become order. Eventually it settles into a still pool deep within you. As long as nothing ripples the surface, you do feel some peace and can plot your way through this new normalcy.

One pebble. That’s it. One tiny pebble and your still pool splashes that grief back up through your soul, scorching, shoving you down, teeth bared, gleefully taking its next chunk. 

What time does is make the splashes smaller, mostly. Until the pebble is a rock. Then, chaos. Grief doesn’t give way to order. Grief gives way to knowledge. Grief imparts wisdom from that still pool that stays behind. Grief schools us on surviving loss, on the price of love, and on our blessed mortality.

I’m not quite cruel enough to say, “embrace the chaos”. You can’t fully prepare for it. Everyone gets the chaos, there is no secret back path around it. You can expect it. However, walking around every day expecting grief is no way to live. Best when chaos hits to simply remember it. Remember, because you’ve encountered grief since you were born. Remember eventually it settles into a still pool. When it does, embrace the life you’re living as well as you’re able to in that moment until it’s disturbed, again. 

As a Deathworker and intimate partner with Chaos, perhaps you were hoping I’d have better advice, a faster fix. This is the best I’ve got because I too signed those contracts with the blood of incarnation – to love means to grieve later, to take a first breath means to exhale a last one. May we all love and live fully making those contracts worth our blood. Hail! 

Boneweaver is my colleague and co-facilitator in the death rehearsal work we call Unwinding the Elements. You can find her online at her website, Lean In To Joy.