five.
five.
This newsletter is here to connect you to your five senses and your grief at times when life and death make no sense. Consider it an imperfect “grounding exercise” for the month.
I can’t run. I don’t run. At least that’s been my story, figuratively and literally, for years.
I don’t run from hard things, emotions, or events. I don’t run short or long distances. I spent most of high school hiding behind the track’s pole vaulting mat to avoid running the perfunctory mile (true story).
I just don’t get running: the mechanics, the linear, unrelenting clock-reliance, the competition. I don’t like to be alone.
But. I ran when my mother died. I sprinted, past grief, fast as I could. And now, ten years later, I’m running the New York marathon.
As I run eight, ten, twelve miles, building time and distance from where I started at “I can’t, I don’t,” I reconsider my other reflexive limits. The common denominator: fear and loss avoidance.
So what am I running from? The more I run, the question becomes what am I running for? To whom? With?
Oddly, unexpectedly, the farther I run, the less I feel alone.
I see an old picture of a girl that doesn’t know what life is coming. I smell salt and sunscreen and sweet. I taste them, too. I hear the nearby swish of cars passing. I grieve randomly, sometimes with joy, sometimes in a single sob.
FEEL - Come and Take My Hand
Gentle, staunch, sweet and beautiful, Miyazaki reminiscent, too. A gentle song for heavier days.
SEE - Balloonfest
1.5 million balloons take to the sky. What’s at first chaotic and funny turns sublime in a way I can only describe as “celebratory specters”.
SMELL - Madlibs
Madlibs are transcendent. Promise. My friend and I ripped through a packet during her chemo and the unsophisticated trickery had us crying and laughing, forgetting where we were and what we were doing, too busy being kids.
HEAR - The Sound of Grief
Music as grief’s great teacher. EMDR. Therapy. Schnipper mentions Bill Callahan. “Too Many Birds” was unremarkable to me at first listen, before mom died. Afterwards, extraordinary If things happen when we are ready for them, then music does, too. It happens, explains, becomes a landmark, and navigation.
TASTE - A Dying Tongue
“Beauty is something to be eaten: it is a food.” Sarah Bernstein writes about her exclusion from language, specifically the excruciating failure to engage in mundane conversation — buying groceries. Something about it, reminded me of grief. Grief being its own province with a dying language.
GRIEF - Grave Goods
A grandmother’s story told by her granddaughter and the things she left behind.
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