Grief Games

on grief visits and the games we play

The wonderful thing about my newsletter is that it’s mood-based. The horrible thing about my newsletter is that it’s mood-based.

It’s the aftermath of the full moon week and my heart has been through the wringer. If this means nothing to you, you’re not affected by moon cycles and I am soooo happy for you. What is it like being God’s favorite?

I have been sitting with my grief. It crept up on me while I was busy trying to fill every empty space in my home with inconsequential paraphernalia. I forgot grief is a hurricane. It will flood you when you least expect it, and it takes with it everything. The fake plastic smiles, the confetti, the very real heart you left under a forgotten sweater.

How does one live in parallel with a genocide? How do you comfort your way out of the collective grief experienced by watching governments selfishly trade human lives for profit? for power? for some form of misplaced ideology of land ownership?

The land has always owned us, never the other way around. It is why we care for it, it’s why people will die for it. I have no answers this week. No advice, no fun little exercise on ways to sit with grief. I am merely here, sitting with it.

There’s this thing I do with grief, a game we play when he comes along for a visit. We hold hands while throwing stories of regret and sad anecdotes at each other. Round and round we go until we’re slumped at the bottom of the grief spiral. The winner sobs the loudest in the most inappropriate places.

Then I numb it all out with silly party tricks like blasting music so loud I drown out the cries in my head, or some riveting story in any world as long as it isn’t this one. I escape inside pixels, pretend this is all it is, and tell myself there is no way out. I marinate in my own devastation until I lose faith in everything. At the end of it, I barely recognize who gets left behind.

But there is always hope. A hand reaches into the murky waters and pulls me out. Sometimes it’s someone I love, sometimes a stranger with a kind gesture that renews my faith. But always a hand to pull you out.

If you are sitting in quiet grief, I hope you take the hand trying to pull you out.

To a week of healing or sitting with grief,

Dhan xx