ten.
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.
Pruning grief and memory. While mom was dying, as all of them were dying, I thought, how can I hold on to this? I must be the single-handed historian of these lives and deaths. It’s vital to not forget.
But over time, grief and remembering become less about retention and precision, and more about recognition. Things come and go as they like, maybe how they are meant to, and as needed. Like trees growing fat with spring’s thaw, thin with fall’s falling—again and again.
So I ask, “what I can I hold onto without losing hold of myself?”
The act of pruning at first seems a subtraction, but with faith and time, promotes healthy growth. Extracting sections that sap from the well being of the whole. Whatever I lose, as is the way with a tired human mind, I eventually forget or becomes fragmented and distant. And what remains, I trust to be essential.
After all, it’s less kind to the dead to remember them by their death. So I try to remember life.
I see a seed and imagine its tree. I smell chamomile flowers, dry, but ready for steeping. I taste the sour residue of coffee, and move it around in my mouth to keep my attention sharp. I hear the mechanical sounds of the kitchen. Neither whirring nor churning, white noise nor distracting. I feel caught in a repetition. I grieve not out of choice, but necessity. And, frankly, I’m not even a little grateful for it. Not today.
SEE - It is not so much that I miss you by Dorothea Grossman
SMELL - We Didn’t Know it was the Last Time
Last christmases, last photos, last goodbyes. “We often don’t get to know when it’s the last time.” A mother’s tender reflections on sudden loss and last’s. A true heart-grab.
TASTE - Love, Loss, and Kimchi by Michelle Zauner
This article predicates her book (if you haven’t read Crying in H Mart, do). It further mines the legacy of cooking and sharing meals. How people can be found again, in the head of a napa cabbage, or the remaking of a recipe.
HEAR - Light of a Clear Blue Morning (cover by Waxahatchee)
The album is equally heart aching and heart revving, but this song, originally by Dolly Parton, is one for what comes the second, week, month, or year after a heart breaks.
FEEL - Totém a film by Lila Avilés
Steady, unrelenting, quiet, and kind. I found myself captivated by the cinematography (how akin it is to Lucretia Martel’s), and wrecked by the intimate moments between the child protagonist and her father. Specifically, her waiting to see him and him not being physically able to or emotionally up for see her, him gifting her what he knows is her last present and she knowing that too but not knowing how that will change her life.
GRIEVE - The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
It takes a little while to know what inciting incident sets these characters on their summer sojourns, but there are glimmers (even with the remove of a narrator), that some part, piece, or person is missing from the tale. The relationship between grieving daughter and her gran is special, the illustrations are from the Moomin illustrators. It’s a special book to usher in the changing seasons.