Listening For Cranes

 

Whether it’s someone we love who died or we’re looking for our birth parents, we are searching for something lost and hoping to find.

 

We are trying to give form to our shadows.

 

            With adoption, you’ve already lost growing up with your birth parents. Even if you have wonderful, considerate, and loving adoptive parents, you will wonder what this other life would have been like, and if who your birth parents are has influence your life in some unseen way. 

 

Grief Words

 

Writing the Shadows

            We need the words. How are we going to talk about grief without the words?

 

It’s difficult to talk about grief when the language we know comes from the back of a cereal box. We stumble around, find a few words that seem to fit, find other words that fit better, and our vocabulary begins to expand.

 

The Sloth and Avocado

 Jill Christman’s new book, If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays, is about her life—being raped, falling in love, grief, PTSD, the struggle to recover herself and her sexuality, falling in love again, miscarriage, becoming a mother and trying to protect her children from every imaginable harm, with them telling her to let them be kids and learn how to gauge the risks they take on their own. Just like she did.

 

Is Grief a Room or the House?

             What is the most devastating loss we can experience? Is it the death of a parent, spouse or partner, child, pet, or best friend? Or is it the loss of a marriage, the destruction of a wilderness, belief in our self-worth, or trust that our society will do the right thing? 

 

One of Suzanne Roberts’s friends said that ‘grief used to be one room in the house, but after their son died, grief was the only room.’

 

Possessions Left Behind

 

            After a loved one’s death, we have to decide what to do with their possessions. Although there are some things that we wish they would have taken with them, many of their possessions have stories and emotions attached—their favorite coffee cup with the slight chip, the tools they used for their hobbies, the scent in their clothes, and their ashes.

 

            After Ev died, I wanted to keep everything, and I mean everything, even her handwritten notes on containers in the freezer identifying food, and the to-do list on the board, with smiley faces indicating her preference for which tasks we should tackle next. I didn’t want to lose anything that reminded me of part of her personality, laughter, or sense of style. As the survivor, I became the gatekeeper of her life. 

 

Riding Shotgun With Grief

Exploring Your Grief

Many of us go into nature to unwind and be refreshed. Some of us go into the wilderness to work our way through a problem that befuddles us at home. Yet when we try to talk to others about what we are discovering in nature, or how our experiences there are transforming us, we find it hard to express this in words.