four.
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.
Late blooming. For a long time I thought the slow-growing flower was a cautionary tale: linger too long in indulgence or indecision, forfeit your time in the sun.
Grief has taught, and continues to teach me that growing in your own time is not a detriment but a due course. Grow how and as long as you need. Bloom when you must and as long as you can. Start again. Grief waters all things: roots, hopes, losses, and blooms.
I feel the emotional equivalent of rug burn. I see life start-and-stop in my childhood home. I smell something familiar and nameless. I try to pin it down but fail. I hear the fatigue in my auntie’s voice when I ask how I can help. I taste summer cherries. I grieve a lot, a little, and not at all. I grieve in mistakes.
FEEL - Big Bird Learns About Death
Simple lessons about big life things. Perhaps too saccharine for some, for me it’s a friendly reintroduction to and reduction of death as an idea, not a reality.
SEE - Good Sign Offs
For writer’s block and to offset your habitual salute. My favorite: “in four wheel drive.”
SMELL - Volatile by Cildo Meireles
We often associate scent with memory and the past, but it can be a harbinger of things to come. Artist, Cildo Meireles, uses an artificial gas scent to induce fear. The candle in distance makes danger feels close. And the question of “to be, or not to be” hangs in the air.
HEAR - Close to You
Teenage angst wrote off the power of communal singing (a terrible mistake)! Cue the happy tears.
TASTE - Pasta Grannies
Happy mistakes make for good recipes and great family secrets. These grannies serve great pasta and even better kitchen camaraderie.
GRIEF - Fire and Ice
Medicine for a grief’s questions and absences. This thaws the colder, harder aspects of remembering. Read on.
