Stumbling Through Grief

In my grief, I have found it fascinating to read about the ways humans have processed grief throughout history. In ancient Ireland, there are tales of Banshees—ghost-like women who wailed outside people’s homes to signal death. The people who viewed them described them in different ways: some said they were beautiful young women, some said they were scary old women, some said they were fairy queens. Those descriptions aren’t even close! Make up your mind storytellers! But the details of the stories that stay the same is that the Banshees were grieving women, possibly a supernatural version of the “keening women” in Ireland, professional mourners who’s job it was to moan, wail, and lament the dead. Professional grievers have been a part of the grieving process throughout the history of humans, from Ancient Egypt to ancient Mexico to the Bible.

I recently heard a story that when someone dies in China, they hire professional mourners to come to the memorial for the deceased. They CRAWL across the cemetery to the place of the memorial wailing the name of the deceased and sobbing things like, “Dad! Why oh why did you leave us? How will we survive without you? How will Mom survive without you when you haven’t spent a night apart in sixty years?” Or something like “Kim! How could you leave us? You who brought so much love and compassion to the world! How could you leave Marci, your twin soul, when you had planned to be cat ladies together when your hair turned gray? She needs you!”

The professional mourners don’t know the deceased, but they pretend they do, and they get to wail and sob all the things the loved ones are thinking and feeling, but not saying. Why? Why don’t we do this at our funerals?

At my father’s funeral I spoke in a clear voice. At Kim’s funeral, I chose not to speak, but I did wear a fairy wings and a tutu and my sparkly cowgirl boots and climb up a ladder and sat in a treehouse lit with twinkle lights. I think Kim would have loved it up in that treehouse with me. We would have talked and sang and giggled and thrown acorns at people.

So when I imagine people CRAWLING through a cemetery (I don’t know why I love this visual so much) wailing and sobbing, I imagine them with dirt on their faces, torn clothing, twigs in their hair, and a regular person might think, “That is so morbid and weird!” But I am in an altered state, the state of grieving, so I think, “HOW COOL!”

And people get paid to do this?

This might be a good job for me right now because I often feel like I’m crawling through a cemetery anyway, even though I’m just going about my day.

I read more about these professional mourners in China, and I learned that after they deliver the eulogy in a sobbing way backed up by musicians playing sad dramatic music, the music changes to an upbeat tune and a BELLY DANCER takes to the stage to signal that the wailing is done. In China? A belly dancer? Really? Count me in!

Once again, I’m totally overqualified for this job—a deeply grieving professional belly dancer! But I’m also perfect for it!

My imagination was captured when I learned about these professional mourners, and I started fantasizing about creating a fashion line of mourning clothes. I’m on the Fashion Council at the Boston MFA and sometimes they pull things from their archives to show us, and the thing I remember most was Mary Todd Lincoln’s black mourning jewelry. She wore it when she lost her son.

It seems appropriate to have clothing and jewelry that sets apart grieving people from the regular crowds. But my ideas for mourning clothing is different than the somber black ensembles of Victorian times. My grieving fashion line would be pink tutu fairy-style clothing, and it would be torn and shredded and covered in pretend dirt. Part of the look includes dirt on the face and hair ratted to it’s largest and wildest, ala Pat Benatar in her music video for “Love Is A Battlefield”. (Something tells me I watched too much MTV as a teen since her hair is burned into my brain. I don’t even like this song, but then again, Love truly is a Battlefield, maybe the most brutal and bloody battlefield of all, so maybe Pat Benatar was some kind of sage.)

I told my bestie, Tristan of my idea for a new fashion line and without missing a beat he said, “Darling, this is called a “meltdown”. You’ve crossed into Crazy Land. Come back! Next you’ll want to smear your face with strawberry jam and accent the color with a lollipop and call it fashion. It’s just tragic, that’s what it is.” We laughed really hard imagining me with mud and jam smeared on my face, my hair ratted out, my pink fairy tutu shredded, swaggering about and calling it fashion. It’s a vision that isn’t that far from how I feel—torn, shredded, covered in dirt.  

But he had a point.

Sometimes it feels like I’m being buried myself, and I’m trying desperately to claw my way out of the ground. Sometimes, I prefer to lay still and quiet underground, even though it’s hard to breathe. And sometimes I feel so golden and glittery that no darkness can touch me. (For this category, I’m usually dancing, roller skating, or with children.)

One thing I know for sure is that you can’t control grief when it crashes over you like a tidal wave. Grief doesn’t care if you are in the middle of a performance, swimming in the ocean, baking cookies, or giving a lecture at a university. It comes whenever it comes, and there’s nothing you can do about that but let it wash over you.

That’s what makes it hard to operate in the regular world. I usually have to warn people that I am grieving in case I need to rush out of the room sobbing. I’m a barrel of monkeys when I end up at social events—if you want to be brought down, come sit by me!

Here’s an example of a terrible moment: I attended a massive party at the MFA to celebrate my friend’s incredible exhibition. It was a huge celebratory party, and I thought enough time had passed that I could be out in public without sharing my sad stories. I did okay for most of the evening, except that I have absolutely no tolerance for small talk. Me, who has always loved nothing more than hearing every single person’s story, had no interest in what people were wearing or saying or what was happening around me. I just wanted to go home. But I was trying to be festive. A friend called me over to her table, and everyone was cooing over my champagne purse, which is always a big hit wherever I go. A woman next to me got on her phone to try to find the champagne purse for herself—that’s how much she loved it. She asked who designed it, I said Kate Spade. She said, “How sad that someone could create something so sparkly and fun and then be so distraught that she hung herself.” I replied, “I don’t think she was distraught. My best friend killed herself a few months ago in the same way, and I spoke with her that day, and I don’t think they are distraught. I think they are mentally sick, like a broken neck, but a broken brain, and somehow leaving this lifetime will make everything better.” As you can imagine, this was a conversation stopper. The entire table stopped and stared at me, their mouths open in horror. I trailed off, realizing that I just brought the entire table to a massive halt. I wasn’t even making sense! How do I know what the hell people are thinking when they hang themselves? I don’t know! I don’t know what Kate Spade was thinking, or what Kim was thinking, or what anyone is thinking ever.

It was hugely apparent that I was in no condition to be out in public.

And so I acknowledge where I am—I am in mourning. I shouldn’t be at parties. I can’t pretend to have fun. I can’t pretend that everything is great. It isn’t.

Sometimes I wonder how I even get up in the morning, because sometimes it sounds really good to curl on the floor in the corner and just stay there. Or I think maybe I’ll become a barfly and just stay drunk all the time like Charles Bukowski, except I don’t really like alcohol. Or maybe I’ll be that crazy lady who roller skates around the neighborhood with a lollipop and jam smeared on her face and a torn tutu.

The reality, my friends, is that I am going about my life incognito, a grieving person in disguise as a regular person.

I don’t attend parties at the moment, because I know my limits. I just made pumpkin muffins for the kids and I’m sitting here writing in my incredibly colorful and sparkly living room with my dogs at my feet and my cats sitting around the room like living works of art. I’m about to go get in my black cat dress, accented with a pink tutu and pink shoes, and I’m going to make slime with twenty kids and teach them some dances for our performance of “Where the Wild Things Are” which goes right along with all of this, because where am I, if not in the Land of Wild Things? Then I’m going to pick up my beloveds from school and we are going to have dinner together and I’m going to ask them to tell me the magical moments from their day, and then my daughter will break into her musical theater numbers around the kitchen while we are doing the dishes, and my son will half watch her (she demands his audience participation) while he does homework, and I will be amazed and grateful for this brutal but beautiful life.

Is it true that caterpillars turn to liquid before they become butterflies? Because I can relate.

Also, if you want to read up on some very cool grief traditions, listen to the LORE podcast on grief, and NPR did an awesome piece– https://www.npr.org/2013/06/26/195565696/belly-dancing-for-the-dead-a-day-with-chinas-top-mourner