Dearest one,
July has been complicated and this email will talk about death. If that doesn’t feel right for you at the moment or at any point while reading, please bookmark it for later.
I started out this month planning my birthday, after a year where I have so much to celebrate.
But a couple of weeks in, it’s turned into a more painful story. Someone important to me is very sick, and this is a time of deep grief for my family.
If you’ve been here a while, you may know that I launched this newsletter in 2020 during another period when I was grieving. I’d just learnt of the death of an old classmate, and combined with the pandemic, isolation, and a heartbreak, the news sent me into a blackhole of suicidal grief. In many ways, this newsletter began as an attempt to have that conversation – about grief, and with it.
But as the explorations accumulated; as life shrivelled and shrunk, and then bloomed back open; I realized that this conversation has also been about possibilities. It's been about expansiveness. About dreams. About bearing witness. About celebration. It’s always been about finding ways to bless this broken world, finding reasons to stay.
Being here has changed me, and I don’t grieve the same way anymore either. I am not sure if this new way is the right way or best way, but it’s the only thing I can tell you about right now.
So here, three years later, my Instructions on How to Grieve 2.0.
1. Cook for yourself, something immediately delicious, and then something you need to work on to make delicious. Cook for someone else.
2. Move your body, let it remind you of what’s still living, what’s carrying you.
3. Touch grass. Strip your bed sheet and take it to the park. Find a spot that’s just grassy enough without the grass being too tall (you don’t want to find out what the tall grass houses!). Lay down the sheet, sit, look at the trees, breathe them in.
4. Plan a party. Invite all your friends. Brainstorm a few games and give them names like ‘Apple Mafia’ and ‘We are the Constellation’ (I am not even certain what the second game is, but I see us moving in circles when we play). Obsessively think about the perfect party food. Give yourself something to look forward to.
5. When you feel guilty about said party, remember that you are allowed joy. You owe pain no allegiance, you do not have to prove the validity or veracity of your grief.
6. If your grief wants to split the world into binaries, give it a timeout. Ask it to stand in a corner and contemplate how there is a more compassionate lens, one that is closer to the truth.
7. Does the grief feel healing and the healing feel sad? Are you unsure where one ends and the other begins? Perhaps they are not so separate after all.
8. Arguably the most important on this list – tell your people where you are at. If they don’t hear you the first time, repeat it. You are worthy of care; even if you don’t feel it, act like it.
9. Speak to a therapist, they help.
10. Compartmentalize. It won't be perfect, you can't neatly tuck the pain away from 10 am to 6 pm. But you can hold it at bay with a gentle "later". Your pain listens to you more than you realize.
11. Stare at the wall, the ceiling, your laptop. Do nothing but feel. Feel the lump in your chest grow heavier. Feel it heave against everything that is still tender and hopeful and beautiful within you. This juxtaposition, life itself.
12. Read a book. One you should like but don't. One you shouldn't like but do. One you don’t like but kind of do. This too, life.
13. Look at the sky for 27 seconds. I'm talking sky uninterrupted. No window bars, no mesh net, no car glass. Just you and that wide open nothingness. That featherlight everythingness.
14. Make the decisions that feel easy. Sometimes we only have the smallest and most immediate answers and respecting that is the way forward.
15. Listen to other people's problems. Celebrate their joys. There’s a different hue to their world, drink it in.
16. Organize something, preferably something heady and nostalgic like a cupboard of all of your mother’s and grandmother’s sarees. But even a stationery drawer will do.
17. Buy gifts for people. Remember what's purely material in this world, money, objects. Remember what's not of this world but in it, love.
18. Snuggle something. A child, a dog, your lover, a soft blanket.
19. Buy yourself a gift, just the one, but make it special. You are grieving and deserve it.
20. Pretend like it's okay sometimes.
21. Allow yourself the knowing that not okay is a type of okay if you lean in at the right angle.
22. Please cry. At least once, and very loudly. The heavens are kind of obtuse and seem to need unambiguous signals.
23. Talk to people who are not aware that you are grieving. Carry this secret with you and wonder how different the conversation would be if they knew. (It probably wouldn't be all that different, but in the not knowing, and only in it, the possibility of perfect care can exist.)
24. Call someone up, committed to laughing in the first 2 minutes. Make it happen.
25. You may feel like a coward for not allowing yourself 'to go there' in your mind. But cowards survive. And maybe there are other ways to go there. And maybe it's a love for life that keeps you from surrendering everything to the heartbreak of grief, and choosing that is brave too.
26. On really bad days, apply some pain balm at the center of your temple. It isn't proven that Vicks Vaporub does not work on the soul. (And many of us swear otherwise.)
27. You may not believe in a second life or the afterlife but right here, in the living world, the dying sprouts a rebirth, a kinder self, a wiser life. I won’t pretend it’s worth the cost, but there will be goodness and worth-stayingness in what comes next too.
I understand that no part of grief is easy. But I’ve learnt that some parts of grieving can be simple if we allow them to be.
Lastly, if you ever need a friend, I’m here, forever contemplating the weight of this world. As Ginsberg said, under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction, the weight we carry is love.
💌
All of mine,
Soumya
Recommended 📚✍
One of my favourite writers Andrea Gibson was recently diagnosed with a cancer resurgence. This conversation that Andrea has with Glennon Doyle and Aby Wambach about it is a gift for anyone grieving right now.
Andrea’s partner Megan Falley is a brilliant writer too! I love how Megan breaks down using the right metaphors in the right places in this post, this one, and this.
This could be the ultimate imposter phenomenon article. It covers everything from the origin of the term to its uses, misuses, and limiations.
How to relax your own rules.
Jam 🎵
Thank you for reading! 💞
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Love this so much!
Thank you for this list! I need to write my own. Grief touched my life in a large way Jan 2022. You are an inspiration.