Here is a space where I voice my own personal thoughts/observations on this thing we are all experiencing called “life”.
to having the honor of deeply and intimately knowing grief.
A life constant I have had since I knew I was a person, was a complete presence and awareness when experiencing and examining trauma/grief. Even writing the word makes me stutter in the sense that there is no real spoken word in our vocabulary that encompasses the void of loss and the impact of “adverse events”. I have used the word “lament” at times, but it does not have the visceral and internal register that the words “grief” and/or “trauma” incite in us. Nor, does the word encompass the graduations and gradients. In learning other languages, I have (via train-wreck trial & error) fully understood the value of context, tone and inflection……..But damn, for real, I have yet to find in AAVE (African-American Vernacular English), French, Spanish and now learning German….not a damn word that encompasses even SOME of this shit, y’all. It seems that only the languages that avoided/survived colonization have some kind of contextual expression.
Grief is defined by The Merriam-Webster Dictionary as:
Trauma is fully defined by the Merrier-Webster Dictionary as:
1a: an injury (such as a wound) to living tissue caused by an extrinsic agent
2: an agent, force, or mechanism that causes trauma
I have yet to find a word in the English language that describes the mental, physical and emotional nature of this word in unison.
I genuinely believe that we as Americans do not have a cultural norm of grief, or grieving for that matter. It explains my age-old visceral response to writing out the words. We treat death like ads in our YouTube streams, on demand television and radio services. We treat it like the spam in our inboxes and social media feeds. It is there, but I do not have to look at it. In my 38 years on this planet, I have come to understand that grief is not something you “get over”, “get through” or “move on from”. Grief is as our joy, sadness, fear, disgust and anger (five of the eight principal emotions, according to modern psychology) …a constant in the human experience and influenced by the human condition. The word emotion comes from the Latin term <emotus> which means to move out. Grief deserves the same allowance in externalization. The tears, and all the feels to move out of our bodies into all of the spaces we inhabit.
Modern psychology teaches grief in the theoretical approaches of Kubler-Ross’ Stages, Worden’s Tasks, Parkes' Phases, and Strobe & Schut’s Dual Process Model
Above are each of the theories in order listed.
While these postulations give beautiful illustrations via infographics to tackle in therapist’s chairs, they can still lead to stagnancy. Sadly, none of these models actually take the entirety of a human in regard to their humanity in account. While these models and theories are well defined within the acute occurrence of grief, we are left lacking beyond a prescribed “timeline” (usually determined by your race, cultural conditioning, socio-economic status, and capacity to actively grieve). These theories turn a very real experience, that is largely characterized by the incapacity to express its magnitude into common phrases such as “you will get through this”, “you won’t always feel this way”, “you will get over it eventually”, “they are in a better place”, etc……Dear “Toxic Positivity” bka “Hustle Culture” bka the “Capitalist Approach to Crisis” or as bell hooks put it “The Imperialist, White Supremacist, Capitalist, Patriarchy” is basically telling you to produce instead of process. A principle mechanism of colonialism/occupying oppression is to remove cultural norms, rights, and rituals that express the occupied groups’ identity. This is a part of the origins of emotional/mental suffocation of Black folx in this nation, and the African Diaspora worldwide.…….Waymint, that’s another blog post for another day. Lemme keep this “modern” for those still reading.
There has only been one phrase that I believe begins to encompass the realities of grief, which is that it comes in WAVES.
Grief: as a gentle as a shore wave, tempest upon the sea, or full on tsunami of destruction.
I would like to optimize that sentiment by expressing my personal belief that grief in itself, is a wave.
And given my understanding of physics, it exhibits all of the property of a mechanical wave. The one direction in which our bodies flow upon arrival is linear. We call it aging. Aging, from arrival to departure is the baseline and trajectory of humanity. This observation is first taken from the scientific use of EEG in the mapping of brain waves used in recording our reactions to stimuli, sleep states and various mental health conditions. Our bodies emit electrical energy in response to our internal and external existence within environments. The lows and the highs.
From watching starbursts to sleeping minds to seeing sentiments.
We have used fMRI technology to visualize actual locations in the brain responding to various test parameters. A parent’s gaze, noise distortion, a veteran experiencing PTSD. All waves have an amplitude, frequency and wavelength. Our eight primary emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, shame, disgust and interest) have all been documented using tools that record the energy emission of emotions. These primary emotions are taught that they are hard wired into our neural networks. Laughter, crying, yelling, avoidance and other behaviors can be tied to these primary emotions as the energetic dissipation of each of these waves being amplified through the input of experience. They are how we interact with the world as children, and how we process the world as adults. Five of these primary emotions were portrayed in the celebrated Disney-Pixar movie, Inside Out.
Sadness, Joy, Anger, Disgust & Fear are five of the recognized eight primary emotions.
What if we looked at grief/trauma as the NINTH primary emotion? There, with all of the other emotions to be observed, studied and accepted?
If grief is a wave and is present as all other primary emotions, our experience of grief is that of a part of the human condition and a natural part of aging. When we process anger our bodies experience temperature, perspiration and hormonal changes. Those whom have been forthwith concerning their grief have explained physical feelings of emptiness, depression, perspiration, tears beyond sadness, and shame around joyful memories in acute grief. In cases where a young one has departed, moral injustice with the transition, or the inability to continue a relationship or imagined future…. the grief is due to the cessation of a wave-interacting source in our presence. It is well documented that in our communities/homes we can develop synchronous circadian rhythms, eating habits/time, hormonal flux and even thought patterns. But in the long term of existence, I have yet to hear of anyone who has lost something/someone their soul treasured, and feel as if their lives return to a previous reality as if it were never gone/missing. Rainbow babies do not deliver families from the loss of a child. New jobs do not deliver us from the loss/trauma pain of the previous gainful employment. Food today, does not remove the grief of going hungry the day before. Estrangement from a loved one does not dissipate when something else grabs our attention. Society asks us to ignore/bury/quiet this pain. If we are taught that our grief is normal, and has the same trajectory as the rest of the waves from our other primary emotions, then the work becomes that of reflection, phase shift, and harmony. INTEGRATION.
Case and Point: Music.
The use of music in neurological rehabilitation and mental health has been phenomenally researched and documented. But more than primary literature can express, a song/note/chord can warp a person to a trauma that occurred simultaneously, or a memory shared by one who has departed from our life in some way. It is why exes avoid certain playlists, ambient sounds waft through elevators, and ASMR videos are exponentially viewed. The sound waves resonate with one or more of our principal emotions, and our bodies respond accordingly. In the matter of grief, if we randomly come across the music we listened to with our departed and loved, photos, stories, landmarks…. the joyful or shameful memory resonates the grief and our emotional response amplifies. Same with any of our other emotions. There is a reason that spirituals and cherished chords are sang at our homegoing celebrations. The vibrational wavelengths of the songs of our ancestors sing resonant harmonies to the current and historical grief we feel as we bury another body not completely free in living, but free in being liberated from an oppressed body. We magnify the call for justice and liberation.
The Burial of Nigerian Actress, Mojisola Olaiya….in Lagos.
A phenomenal film on homegoings and the sonic necessities.
Please click on this image for a phenomenal article, in grief and liberation.
These primary emotional waves and their properties are influenced by water, food, sex, shelter and clothing. But, the most influential input is that of the rest of our human community. Each of the listed influences are needs. Including music, these all have been a part of our basic functioning as human beings on Earth. The reason why grief is not taught as a part of the human experience, is that we live in a country, and a period of time where we are valued by our output, not our existence. This is the essence of colonization and capitalism. The focus on output gives us a numerical range of existence to maximized results until we plateau at old age/a different ability/become obsolete/no longer transmitting waveforms. And the term of “regression” in grief does not acknowledge the layers of human interaction. A person does not become less grieved over time. That individual learns to pair emotions with inverse wave frequencies in order to respond within personal limits, within what society deems “acceptable”. Over time the grief wave seems to attenuate (reduces) because we are conditioned to bury the wave. And it is buried until another resonant stimulus (trigger) causes our bodies to remember. Tremors are echoes of tectonic plates shifting. Waveforms on the crust of the Earth that put cracks in our foundations. And, resonant waves can not only amplify, they can also destroy. This is the crippling/pausing/gripping part of a trigger. I believe this is why the term “traumatic grief” is misleading. All grief is caused by a trauma, and all trauma has grief. And trauma impacts all of our senses, and is imprinted in the body. In the case of physical death upon which other tragedies may lie, I believe a better term is compounded grief. In those cases, different modalities such as water, music, food, sex, shelter, clothing, exploration of sensorial processing in security and safety are paramount. They allow us to sift through the layers of emotions. They allow phase shifts. Phase shifts allow grief waves to attenuate naturally without oppression.
Everyone loves talking about this damn pyramid……
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
But, what pre-colonial civilization did not understand this concept before Maslow as a person ever existed?
take a look.
From Peru to China, there was an ancient memo that colonialism missed, on purpose. TOOK FROM US ON PURPOSE.
each site was sacred in remembrance of life and the ritual of love, grief & Memorial in community.
Ritual wave ATTENUATION.
To normalize Grief, is to reclaim and decolonize.
Decolonial/Ancient theory and ritual are also is solidified in the case of weathering and generational trauma. The term weathering is defined as a perpetual stimulus causing the dissolution of or callusing of an object. Black mothers are dying because not only is the American Healthcare system (bka Medical Industrial Complex) inherently biased against Black pain & suffering, but also ignores the mechanical waves of 400+ years of systematic assassination, burial and forced attenuation of Black joy, Black advancement, and essentially Black liberation. Chronic hypertension, hereditary high cholesterol, diabetes, fibroids, cysts, and other manifestations of stress are manifestations of forced/buried grief. And the exploitation of Black death and pain are amplifying grief with no room to release any of it. No room to align it with our other aspects of existence and culture. No room to rectify abduction, rape, forced childbirth, child marriage, torture, starvation, appropriation, commoditization/exploitation of our bodies + culture, and the laundry list of human rights violations the ancestors of who built this country endured. And, this list HAS NOT been placed on the “DO NOT ADD TO” memo… Part of my frustration as a woman of the African Diaspora, is the inability of our societies to acknowledge, honor, revere, compensate, and repair the centuries of being unable to express our humanity……despite of a chronicled legacy of oppressed, un-permitted grief laden with the worst manifestations of trauma inflicted by White Supremacy, then and NOW. The expectation that black women should continue to carry quietly the lies of this country, while there is a generation of people still on the planet that remember a post-Emancipation Proclamation + Pre-Civil Rights Movement America. That there are still Indigenous/First Nations/Native American/American Indian peoples who are fighting for the government to honor the treaties that made so many promises of dignity AND designation. There is not a single bestselling book on death and dying that was not was bound and soaked in the crude oil of White Privilege. Not a single one acknowledging the ether of Black suffering and grief permeating the lies of a “dignified death”. Social media is lacking the daring, heart-exposing honesty of Mamie Till. My kin are being publicly lynched and exploited for political, philanthropic, and pop cultural gain. Hashtags are not equitable to freedom. Laws are not leading to justice. But folx with privilege + power love hanging out in tipis, tents, traveling to our ancestral sites on holiday, taking pictures of the people living amidst exploitation...
If grief is taught as a wave + a truth + a mainstay, then the guise of productivity despite pain and impermanence is lifted. The decolonization process must included the colonized AND colonizer.
To be honest about grief means to look for what sustains us. To be honest that the pursuits of abundance and acquisition are not biologically, NOR mentally aligned with humanity as individuals, nor as a whole species. Grief and trauma are that which reminds us of a very real body housing a real, but intangible mind. They are what allow for us to be enough as we are, in order to resonate and fully experience our entire emotional range. Grief is one side of the indicator that we are human. Production means that there is a source from which a thing is produced. How can we be asked to perpetually produce when grief/trauma creates such a huge impact? A void? A shift? To not be productive is implied that you are without life, without purpose. But the purpose of a tree is to grow in the forest, exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide and a food source for wildlife. To propagate new trees in accordance with environment to sustain its species, and its interconnected purpose. The Industrial Revolution took a sustenance-based organism (trees) being moderated by our species according to need, and evolved it into demand, to a product-based value. Centuries later, we are aware of the irreparable damage of choosing retail over respiration. And when there is a void in what is required to create a wooden giant, we are left to observe its’ potential dwarfed by lack. We have also done the same with human life. This country’s systems are built for production to the extreme of exploitation. Look around you, who is experiencing volumes of grief/trauma without justice, time off, estate planners, paid mental health professionals, advocates, legal aid, within food apartheid, no bereavement leave? Acquisition allows the privileged room to grieve, at the expense of those who produced the rafters that support their space. Allows them to display lies of love without suffering…
I imagine a place. I imagine a space where Black grief is explored by our bodies and minds in safety. Away from the voyeuristic gaze of the oppressor’s ancestors. A space where all of the modalities of processing from our ingenious ways of survival in the now, all the way back to the original echoes of our ancestors are available to us. Where our rage can meet our relief, where the systematic dams of being considered less than human are chipped away with the power of full emotional expression. I imagine a fully decolonized space for Black bodies to dip alchemic hands of longing into deep pools of collectively sobbed tears. And with golden relief glistening on our limbs, we create mesh-works to save each other from drowning in this mess of this thing called “life”. A return to our indigenous essences.
I am asking you to right now, look into yourself and stare at your grief wave. Look at it in regard to your other eight primary emotions. Where can you resonate? Are any of your other emotions amplified, attenuated, stagnant? I challenge you to find a song, sound, book, smell, activity that amplifies your grief. And when you find it, I challenge you to close your eyes, and sit into it. Allow it to rise and fall in its period. When you feel that you have explored its entirety, open your eyes and record/write what you experienced. If you feel implored to share, reach out.