Melisa Ferati
In August, I lost a childhood friend and an uncle within the same week. The news of the two happened within four days of each other. It turned out that my friend had actually passed almost 3 weeks earlier, but my friends from back home wanted to wait until we were together to tell me – we spent the night comforting each other, recharging, reminiscing; but they left at 3 am and I was left to reconcile with the contradiction of loss an hour and a half away from everyone back home. Several days later, the Saturday evening I found out about my uncle, a lover was over and we spoke shortly about the thread of grief I found so swiftly weaving itself into every decision of mine. Over the time I was seeing this person, I spoke with them at long about different kinds of shared mourning – the grieving of fragmented community, of childhood deprivation, of lost potential. In that moment, I couldn’t help but to lament and their eyes betrayed an unexpected indifference. I felt the impulse to privatize my pain. An expiring tryst, they stayed over for 5 hours that night, “too tired to sleep over”; leaving after a quick spat and shared smoke. A recurring theme, I wondered just what was it about the acknowledgement of grief that created distance between people? I opened up my phone to see the news – just earlier that same night, I had lit a candle at my altar in prayer with both my friend’s passing and uncle’s declining health in mind, calling for safe passage and relief from pain – my mother’s text revealed that it was right around the time I set it that he passed.
There quickly arose the acute awareness of the irreversible effects of my family’s displacement halfway across the globe due to the Balkan War, of the loss of childhood, of the illusion of safety brought on by dreaming, in looking to a hypothetical future. I didn’t know what to do with myself, but I could at least light a fucking candle. In the Victorian era, grieving was comprised of layered rituals. Clothing was particularly integral to their practice. Children would wear black for a year. A widow would be expected to actively grieve for two years, wearing black for the first 18 months and introducing gray and lavender in the final 6. Manuals on how to dress based on who it was you had lost were the norm, and some clothing shops exclusively made their money from selling outfits to mourn in, speaking volumes about their take on the etiquette of loss. Myself growing up Bosnian Muslim, the tradition was for men to handle and attend the burial while the women and children gather at the home of those grieving. After, when everyone had arrived, we’d all pray together en masse, led by an Imam. Every person in the community would bring food to take the responsibility off those mourning and continue to do so in the following weeks so that no meal would be missed. People of varying backgrounds surrect altars and memorials in honor of those who’ve passed. My own altar now consists of a candle (never blown out, always left to burn to the end), water, rose water, rotating spirits (usually vodka), incense, varying herbs, money, 3 cigarettes (from my aforementioned inamorata), and other personal affects.
I ended up not eating for two weeks, on and off a bender, having wild dreams through broken sleep that I’m sure were my subconscious trying to make sense of anything I was internalizing. I pushed myself to be transparent about the reason for my shift in demeanor with the people I connected with most regularly but was generally met with nervous looks and empty, though well-meaning sentiments. The people I love know I’m not one to ask for help. Offers along the lines of “reach out if you need me” and “let me know how you’re doing” echoed across the board – and I knew we all knew I wouldn’t. Was it really too much to send a quick text? If I was the one everyone came to in a crisis? If I was always deemed “capable” of handling whatever came my way? If I now couldn’t bring myself to eat, how was I supposed to muster up enough in me to call someone and say, “can you just sit with me while I’m falling apart?” It didn’t seem worth it. No, with that, there would be the distraction of the guilt of feeling like a burden. With everyone so constantly burnt out navigating the ongoing pandemic and the government’s failure to adequately address it, grinding to survive, and on top of it all grappling with varying personal tragedies, “space” becomes Western culture’s currency of loss.
With the learned apathy of late capitalism, the isolationist attitude developed in the U.S towards grieving has likened the inner process to that which falls under the branches of “productivity culture” – compartmentalizing everything that happens and finding a way to stomach it, somehow using it as fuel and keeping on in the perpetual grind. Particularly in the case of living low income, taking time to stop and process the trauma of loss runs the risk of threatening your ability to maintain your basic needs. It seems then that in this context, the provision of space is an attempt to at least afford you some of that time – though really, what you need is a village. If everyone is at capacity and forced to swallow their own pain in order to keep up with the financial demands of the modern day, this space serves as temporary absolution from social expectation; and you are at least left with a little time to fall apart. Through the 2010s to now, I noticed the new default response to grief boiling down to a state of privatization followed by an overlapping romanticization. The grief becomes a thing assigned to you; something you manage while alone. It belongs to you exclusively. It becomes a part of your identity. Vi Khi Nao reflects this sentiment in her book Fish in Exile:
“You want pain to coexist with you after death. You think how painful it would be if your pain were taken from you. And in this imaginative state, you feel it’s absolutely too wonderful. After all, it’s the kind of pain you like. The pain that you feel can truly exist with you. You feel this is the proper place to be.”
Owning your pain, you develop this fluctuating attachment to it; it becomes a badge, a coat, a wall. Grief then becomes a pathway to the self-help pipeline or varying escapist habits marketed to us as we are subjected to moving in downloads with the unnatural pace of the digital age; evident from the renaissance of disordered eating culture to normalized substance abuse (i.e social alcoholism). America’s economic agenda relies on nostalgia, emotionally binding us to brands by establishing sentimental value or “a place at our dinner table”; keeping us bound in a suspended state of looking back at what was. If nostalgia is a product, grief is a tool. It carves into the weary working class and the well-off alike. It is a naturally occurring resource, and stranger to none. The era of the sad girl reigns supreme. Grief has as many faces as a Saturnian mold that remains malleable, constantly subject to the manipulation of its expression. Grief is a reflection of love lost, and love does not exist in isolation. To reject the isolationist model of grief and collectively, purposefully shift back to the natural state of working through loss as a communal process as much as an internal experience is a form of political resistance in and of itself. Hand in loving hand.
