Free to Grieve

Grief is probably the last emotion anyone wants to experience, think about, read about, or click on. I don’t love writing about it, most of all because I don’t want to presume anything about people’s experiences or diminish them through platitudes. But I’m also a person who has, does, and surely will continue to experience grief.

I’m not just talking about acute bereavement, which every human being will experience in some form, but also the ambient awareness of loss, impermanence, and change. Often, a sense of imminent catastrophe makes that awareness considerably more pronounced. Between climate change, natural disasters, the erosion of democracy, and the threat of civilization-ending technologies, there’s plenty to feed the feeling that something terrible is just around the corner.

I was watching Parmesan, a new stand-up special from the wonderful comedian Kate Berlant, in which she describes people going about their everyday lives with something in their eyes that seems to say, “Soon-ish.”

For me, middle age puts a certain perspective on things. This is a season when loss begins to figure more prominently. It’s off-putting to have this phase coincide with so much existential uncertainty. I suppose as a Cold War kid I’ve always lived with that on some level, but here we are with a cascade of catastrophes interlinking into polycrisis, accompanied by fear-based responses that may only serve to heighten their ill effects.

Grief is, in many ways, the vibe of our times, whether we’re experiencing personal sorrow or contemplating upheaval on a planetary scale. Anticipating loss without knowing what form it might take can be emotionally exhausting, to say the least. Nothing necessarily has to be happening to threaten or imperil us in the present. Merely the growing awareness of change and uncertainty can stir up the same fear-based responses associated with grief, even when the loss itself remains hypothetical.

Here’s what I’m learning about grief: there’s really no managing it. This is difficult for me because I’ve historically approached challenging emotions as problems to solve, regulate, analyze, explain away, or transcend. But grief doesn’t cooperate with that agenda. Even the well-meaning desire to accept grief can conceal an impulse to control it, as though acceptance were a technique for lessening or diverting the experience.

And grief rarely behaves so conveniently. Whether acute or anticipatory, it tends to arrive in waves that are beyond our ability to predict or control.

Actually, the distinction between allowing and controlling is my main point. If we’re able to recognize that control isn’t something we possess in any ultimate sense, particularly with regard to the coming and going of things, people, situations, and even ourselves, we may then recognize that there’s nothing to surrender. Control was never ours to begin with.

When we stop attempting to impose it, there’s nothing fighting against itself. We can remain present with experiences that may not offer any resolution, without the secret agenda of making them disappear. We can return to our own ground, center ourselves, and abide amid the changing tides of grief with an intimate, allowing presence.

This relinquishment is inseparable from the tenderness of self-compassion. When we give up the compulsion to escape or influence our experience, something in us relaxes. Grief may remain, but our relationship to it can change without having to force anything.

There’s a particular grace in recognizing that we don’t even have to be especially good at grieving. There’s no correct way to experience loss, and certainly no prescribed method for dealing with anticipatory grief or the sorrow we feel about what’s happening in the world.

Perhaps the most compassionate thing we can offer ourselves is permission to experience grief without making it another problem to solve. Not struggling against what is already there, but embracing it with tenderness. Not demanding that it be something other than itself, whatever form it takes.