It has been 21 days since my Evelyn moved on, and the world has already relentlessly seeped in to smooth away her footprints, like waves peevishly refill one’s jarring and unwelcome steps on an otherwise placid and unmarred beach.
I have had so many catastrophic losses since the day my friend Kirsten died, and although there is no option to not simply wake up every day and cope, I still don’t know how to do it. I spent the first week after Evelyn’s death in acute shock, unable to eat, sleep or breathe normally. Then because I felt guilty for being frozen in grief, I started forcing myself to try to do simple tasks such as laundry and grocery shopping. I started eating meals again, despite having no appetite. As I did these things, I was met with approval for trying to do normal things.
I was already feeling like I was being dramatic, like I don’t deserve to be grieving so acutely and viscerally. Like there was something vaguely selfish and vulgar about letting myself feel each pore bleed, letting myself lie in bed without moving for hours, in spending every second casting my energy out into the universe trying to feel her energy somewhere close as I have always been able to. Being praised for not doing that felt like a subtle chastisement for my unseemly open grief.
As I was preparing to return to work this week, people said “It will be good for you to
have the distraction of work.”
Our culture prefers grief to be contained, pleasantly organized, and tucked away out of sight when inconvenient. If your job deems the person who has died to be sufficiently important to you based on actuarial tables, you can get up to five days off to arrange and attend the funeral, and pick up the pieces of your life so you can get back to work on day six. If your dead person is less important from a business point of view, you may get only one day. If the person doesn’t show up on the Approved Dead Persons HR chart, well then you can grieve on your own time provided you have saved up enough vacation days. You are not permitted to vacation in the grief of the loss of someone you loved on company time. Our society prefers you do not linger in the uncomfortable agony of your grief where other people might see and feel uneasy. Ideally you should just get over it, but if you must grieve, it should be on your own time in your own house, alone.
Had I been born in Victorian times, I would have been expected to wear black mourning clothes for at least 18 months, and only after two years would I be allowed to wear a cautiously happier lavender. The Victorian world wanted to see grief, and it would have been deemed scandalous to return to society a scant three weeks later dressed in normal clothing and picking up my responsibilities as though nothing had happened.
Many cultures have death traditions that involve many days and weeks of singing, mourning, ceremonies to help the dead transition to their next plane, and to help the family and community grieve. These involve special clothing, drumming, and rituals, and then become future traditions of remembrance where the dead are honored and held close to the family. Some cultures even bring their dead out for special occasions, believing that those loved ones are still very much a part of the family and daily life.
Right before Evelyn died, I sent her a documentary of a Black woman in Georgia who sang a song taught to her by her mother, with words neither woman understood. Researchers traced that song back to the Mende language in Sierra Leone, and through painstaking effort found a woman in a small village who sang the song back to them. The song was a funeral song, sung by the women of this small village, and the woman who recognized the song told them that her grandmother taught the song to her. She said her grandmother told her that someday someone will come back to the village singing this song, and she will know then that that person is family. This song connected a descendant of slavery all the way back to the village from whence her family came, and to the woman who was kidnapped from that village hundreds of years ago. In the documentary, the woman from Georgia traveled to Sierra Leone and the women of the village sang the song and performed the ritual for her, while she sang along. I talked to Evelyn about how profound this was to me — that this song of mourning was sung in grief by the stolen ancestor and passed down through generations in vocal reverence for grief understood even when the actual meaning of the words were long forgotten.
I wish I had a funeral song that my village knew and understood. I wish I had a village who all sing the song with me and stop everyday life so we can take the time Evelyn’s death and our grief deserves and requires, but I don’t. I don’t have a funeral song to sing and I don’t have a hair-cutting ritual that shows an outward sign of my inward misery, to grow back slowly over time to outwardly mark the glacial pace of my grieving. I don’t have a societal expectation to stay out of the public’s eye and permission to look somber and wear black for years. I don’t have a ritual where my voice joins everyone else’s to help her know where she is and where we are, and to affirm that we are all still connected to her. I cannot rend my garments and wear sackcloth and ashes.
Instead I must go to work and attend meetings and smile so society is not made uncomfortable by my grief. But I am not distracted. I have been holding my breath, for I am walking through air that ripples differently and will forever more because she is not in it to diffuse the concentric circles that have always led from the movements of my living to the movements of hers.
Mende funeral song: “Everyone come together, let us work hard, the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be at peace at once. Sudden death commands everyone’s attention like a distant drum beat.”
Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton.