Siri, Teach Me How To Grieve

The subtle and not-so-subtle-ways we learn how to process everything we're losing

I woke up sad. I have been waking up sad. My conscious brain needed a reason, an excuse to slip outside of my body, dying to rationalize the inescapable. There was an attempt to purge in someway the red and blue and crimson tones taking shape in me. The feelings spanned the color chart, the one doctors use their index fingers to figure where on the scale of depression we’re landing. No answer is ever really good enough. There is a lot to be sad about. We are all sad, some more than others. But the sadness is persistent, gnawing at us for the long haul. More simply put, the causation is everywhere—glimpses of glimmer preceding atrocities on our screens, gardens of petunias followed by an immolation sighting, the sweat of a summer sinking its teeth into block party skin met with the dreary caregiver slouch of a guardian too old to know what an amputation means. We go, we leave, we embarrass each other on our shirt sleeves, the snot trees stay still and fall, we find a season to hold onto, one foot in front of the next, the direness of the ending burning a salient hole in our chest. We are all existing within the chasm of sorrow, its grip shaping us into an unknown something or other we have yet to put language to.

No one teaches you how to grieve. It lives like a mystery, a play for a room full of spirits beckoning us to go on with a show we know nothing about. It comes in waves, washing away the knowing. The grief sits atop of you, weighted with memory, making a new you in the process. The grief is taught in the watching-your mother heaving herself onto casket, parting the death sideways, the sew in she sat for hours of secret spy Nigerian weddings on Tubi for, Black skin made cherry bronze from the curious chemistry of tears and blush, cries become wails, the sea around the eyes could buoy a crowd of whales of she wanted it to, if she persisted long enough to bear it. Grief is an animal uncaged in our bodies, grooming us early for loss. The whispered wants of a disassociated lover turned partner turned room share conspirator. You two, lifers together, taking whatever time is left with grains of sea salt. It tastes like chalky tally marks, you go in one way and they in another, secrets snuck in group chats and open mics, both of us/each of us, eating ourselves raw. The only reason you know they are hungover now is because their replacement body got there first, you being a spectator in the reservoir. The loss seeds itself in us. We channel it in the ways we avoid eye contact, taking turns avoiding the mirrors. You wonder where all your things went, the itemized checklist of what once was—a laugh, a long hug longer than what was expected, hand graze, a shoulder touch, a vacation planned, all the tender stuck in a vacuum, void of any of the sky and sun and warmth you remember.

Because no one has taught you, held your hand for it, you model it for yourself. You puncture wounds all on your own, digging through the resin of leftover silence, the bareness of the spaces once full, now sound like harsh echoes of a never-coming-back kind of thing you deal with. You absorb it, the “it” feeling like malnourishment, a starving stripping you away, slowly, a carving cutting deep enough to expose the vulnerable insides. The tendency is to tuck ourselves away. Close the shutters. We become ghosts too, sentences and thoughts apparitions, mouthing the sounds makes it all too real. Everything is an interruption. You wait for the ringing to die down. All the noise around you confiscated, the pieces of what no longer is broken out into the stratosphere, the remains left a mere luxury, scattered about the rooms of the world where the falling is stored. Your girlfriend dad dog job friendship art aunty bachelorhood senior year, all ashes, levitating. The clouds have them now. Mourning becomes precipitation.

Do you grind your teeth during your nightmares like I do? It’s hard to explain the clenched jaw the morning after, headache residue turns your brain into a dorm room closet, stuffed with a collection of what has still yet to be said out loud. I do theater mouth muscle stretches I learned in high school during freshman and sophomore year voice and diction class with Ms.. Nagle in the basement of the building. They work for a time but don’t stop the internal flickering and fluttering of my right eye, more than likely stress-induced. I am not a doctor but I am pretty good at diagnosing myself, mainly because I grew up having to diagnose everyone else, having to know everyone’s individual suffering to mitigate mine. It becomes a ritual, learning how to life and also let things die, including yourself, over and over. But the clenching doesn’t stop. The breathing gets shallower. I walk my dog and the sun bathes me and all the while I ask if anyone can love me in this state like I love myself. Barely, maybe? The sinus pressure sticks around, too. Melancholy is in my throat, planting itself, growing outward and sprouting into beads of heartache. It can feel overwhelming. It startles you. You (I) don’t easily succumb. You (I) fight it open-handed instead. You (I) always lose. Partially because you (I) are trying to make sense of the existing intangibles floating around you (me.) I grew up in a home where so much in the home, my feelings included, felt like they had no place to go. I have a new home, an adult home, where everything has a place except for me. And that kind of grief will break you into centimeters, minute pieces of self just stars in the ether or whatever Lil Yachty said. Someone this morning in the work cafeteria asked me how I was doing across from at the yogurt station and I was nimble enough to cycle past sad and choose the more operational tired. Tires has layers too but sadness is a nervous system conundrum for the casual workplace chatter everyone is more comfortable with. I’m also projecting. There could have been space held for what the sadness was but have the capacity for someone else’s sorrow when we can barely shoulder our own? We’re all hanging on by very loose threads. Who knows, maybe we would have unpacked all of that over turkey sausage links, eggs and zucchini, strawberry yogurt and grapefruit juice. Perhaps that precious moment was squandered by my own inability to see outside of myself.

Grief will make you question if you are worthy of the love you are asking for, if you even know what love is. Your child yells at you, your debt accrues, your mother ages, the weather changes, everything transitions. Your body is a container, a holder of currents real and imagined, a sea of silk, soot, and soil, the remembrances of the comings and goings of the land, your connection to its rhythms, and the god in it all. Dying is a reflex, all things considered. It is a response to the hierarchy of nature. My phone grieves, the scrolling a doomsday device lodged in my throat, my fingers triggering the results again and again. This kind of grief is not natural, but cyclical. This is man-made, detonating dreams on site. Our children will age and leave, partners too will disappear into a foggy mist; despair will expand in our lungs like a chokehold made real, spreading into all the parts of self we learn to loathe. It all comes down to the stinging singe of a moment lost, a time forgotten, a dimly lit fondness we pull the curtains back for. The sun screeches to a halt, clocks ticking the hours like heartbeats, we belong to the never-ending saga of the waves of our emotions. Nothing of this is linear, no one leaves unscathed. The best anyone can do is hoist the hands of our ailing high enough to reach an ancestor’s holy, beating the drums of heaven that the elders told us only came after the dawn. We laugh, we toast, we sob and catch ourselves tripping, point to the camera click and hope that we live for one more tomorrow, to eventually grieve again.