I often think does this word I am using hold the meaning I intend? Sometimes, in conversations with Waylan, we find ourselves repeating words. I’ll listen to him — my preschooler — try to fumble a phrase out of their mouth, I’ll try to make sense of it, especially if it’s new. I’m not always right. He meant something different. Most of the time it’s not that he can’t say a word, it’s that the word and the urgency and the feelings around the word means something different to him than it does to me. Already at his young age his words become charged with emotion and while listening to the words, sometimes I miss the affect.
I often think about the phrases we repeat. Because Henry — my kindergartener — is in speech therapy, there are certain words we focus on repeating. Once a week, he brings home a crisp piece of paper in his yellow folder with a list of words under stick drawings. He lays it on the counter so when the words come up in conversation, I can pay attention; so that I can watch the formation of his mouth as he pronounces straw or just or check or shoe, his face contorting a bit in order to make it happen using the “right” muscles.
I often think about the way words disintegrate. What I find after some time is the words and phrases we practice begin to fall apart in my own mouth. Like a shoe is no longer a shoe but a drifting sound that has lost all meaning. It’s been reduced to phonics, an s floating away from an h flying away from an o. The e’s are silent so often I’m not sure if they are weak or powerful. (The absence —the silence — of words is for another time.)
I often think about the word grief. How its meaning moves, depending on who you ask. A word like grief is repeated. Our world is grieving and the cloak lies different on every individual. A word like grief can feel expansive — it is after all, full of possibilities. But it can also feel constricting.
It’s been used so repetitively in my head, in my writing, in my perspective that it has been reduced to the letters that carry it. Big lines and little curves falling apart. It’s a word that used to be so intense to me, it held so much and perhaps in spite of that, it’s been reduced to nothingness. Sometimes, reduced to it is what it is. Sometimes, I’m resigned to grief.
This one word cannot possibly hold the full experience of aftermath.
But no one word can. Culturally, we utilize grief as a mass generalization but the nuance of each human becomes so specific, our feelings and behaviors and relationships so contextualized that grief cannot be generalized. It’s particular.
And to make this word the expansive word it can be, the word that is full of possibilities and suppressed in darkness, I must talk about it. I must feel about it. I didn’t care to understand grief before I stood in it. I was illiterate. I could barely speak the language of emotion.
Week to week, as I watch Henry’s lower muscles of his face and tongue work tirelessly to form new, challenging sounds, I think about how he communicated before. Before he knew his speech was altered. Henry doesn’t have an obvious speech issue. He’s six and he is understood by anyone he talks with but in his experience of learning to speak, he began to overcompensate with the high face muscles, weakening his jaw. I didn’t realize how his mouth barely moved.
If grief is a loss, then isn’t grief something that is happening all the time to every single one of us? Doesn’t growth itself require the ability to grieve?
And if that’s true (which I believe it is), grief works tirelessly in our unconscious trying to be seen, trying to communicate. Because grief is so much more than one word. Grief meanders, it ruminates, it’s anxious, it’s secure, it explodes, implodes, ebbs and flows, it’s impressive, stimulating, agony, longing, breaking, transforming. It’s protection, depression, endurance, passive and active, provocative, enraged, spiraling, revolting, resistant, psychotic, delusional, ambitious, painful, tender, mystic, vengeful, aggressive, caring. It’s thought about even when it’s not thought about. Grief stays. It’s a quality, a posture. Coming into this world, we are inextricably tied to grief.
So why did I enter the shock of grief illiterate? Why, when learning to speak the language of grief, did I not have the words to express?
I wasn’t prepared for what was going to happen. I came out of an unconscious sleep in the middle of the night to a phone call that would transform every instinct I had about the world. I had made plans based on steadiness. I rented the apartment and cleaned the floors of a new home. I researched flights for my family to come when my baby was born.
One of the most challenging aspects of the last 2,300 days was (and is) being met with the inability to talk about the experience with others. Not because the desire is not there (on either side), but the muscles are not there (on either side). My mouth didn’t know how to form the words that encompassed the experience, and neither did anyone else. No question could bring feeling to my mouth, which barely moved. Silence became comfortable, even if not healthy.
We don’t know how to talk about grief. We don’t know how to make room for the intensity with each other. If we grieve for a long period of time (a lifetime), we are bombarded with messages to get over it. We are prolonged or dis-ordered when really we may be having a human reaction to a human experience.
Like Henry, I’m can use my mouth now. Use my pen. I’ve practiced and honed in and listened to myself. I wonder where this intrinsic conviction stemmed from, the motivation to educate myself on the language of pain. I don’t have an answer to that. What I do know is grief requires the attention of speech. It expands the meaning of one singular word. Speech evolves thinking, it evolves feeling. Grief requires a witness beyond yourself. It requires a community that listens.
I often think “does this word I am using hold the meaning I intend?” to the audience that listens. Perhaps, the irony is it doesn’t. Perhaps grief to you doesn’t disintegrate or reduce or contract or expand. Perhaps the irony is grief is as particular to you as it is to me. Perhaps that’s why we need to speak.
PS: one day I’ll have better acoustics to record. But it’s important to speak these out loud and offer good enough.
Photo by Egor Yakushkin on Unsplash
Gorgeous writing, Alex, from a perspective I’ve not yet read.
Loved this take on examining the word itself - “grief” - contrasting the depth of its meaning and the derivatives of its meaning to one’s own experience - and as well, the word’s lightness of being as just a word - fluttering off our tongues as normal, everyday, an expected thing - a matter of fact - “it is what it is” - she shows up for everyone.
And - you’re so right - we don’t speak it as we should, as we need to, as we want to - I think we fall silent because we fall afraid - afraid it’s too big, too much - it feels chest-heavy and unbearable to speak aloud, restrictive, hard to breathe - or - we feel shamed or diseased because it’s been living with us “too long.”
But, as your writing nudges, we do need to speak it. Holding it in is more painful than letting it out; holding it in creates loneliness and disconnect, holding it in denies us this fragile, yet grace-filled human experience with one another.
This is truly a beautiful piece of writing, both figuratively and literally. You are a writer, Alexandra Kate. Grief will never be your visitor but will remain a word, albeit unwanted, that I believe will grace all your writing. Grief knows she’s in gentle, articulate, intentional, honest, and compassionate hands with you.
Keep speaking. Her story. Your story. ❤️
Absolutely beautiful, Alex.