I’ve been gone from the space but not due to want or need. I’ve been gone because I’m writing a book and need to finish said book by the end of the year. I think writers call it being “on a deadline.”
It’s going well. This past weekend, my co-writer, Jon Thompson, and I hunkered down in The Shack and poured over notes, chapters, and scribbles, and we tightened up our plan.
It’s a book of non-fiction writing. It hasn’t been announced by the publisher yet so, I won’t say too much here, but my agent and editors tell us it’s an important and timely book, its original and irreverent, and its journalism done with heart.
Here are some writing scribbles on grief that may or may not find their way into the book, but it’s part of what I was working on this weekend. I’m not saying it’s good writing, and it has not been edited. LOL.
ON GRIEF
Grief is unexpressed love.
When grief hits you, you wish you could say I love you one more time to your loved one. That’s what makes grief hard to move through, you’ll never have that chance again.
Being in a state of grief is akin to being lost in the bush. It is blinding and overwhelming. It is cold and terrifying. It is hopeless and helpless.
When it comes, grief doesn’t find you in a slow and measured way. Grief collides with your life voilently and instantly, knocking you off your path and into chaos.
If you don’t find a way to move through grief in a good way, it becomes a poison, a cancer, a sickness.
If you succumb to it it becomes an addiction.
Grief is a miserable prick that reminds you everyday that you’re fucked up.
Grief is a bully.
Grief is the dark shadow of night that you’re afraid of. At the end of each day, it becomes night, and night brings shadows. Rather than enjoy the sunshine of the day, you obsess over night and you wait for it to fall because grief has you in its grip.
Not having the chance to hold that person, to smell that person, to hear their laugh means you run the movie of that person through your mind.
Remember this time or that?
The mundane and trivial will find you, because it was the mundane and trivial parts of life that are the glue, they happen everyday, you don’t even pay attention to them because this things are always present.
Its the way Kookum sipped her coffee.
Its hearing their footsteps as they entered a room.
Its the absence of their laughter because when they laughed they could light up a room.
We hold onto our loved ones tightly on this earthwalk, not because we’re desperate and feel alone, but because this earthwalk is better with your loved ones beside you. The subtle and profound impact we have on each other in life life is something special that is hard to put into words, and that’s okay.
The sharing of spirit is one of lifes most essential experiences, it is also one of lifes most trivial. Spirit. For most, hearing people talk about spirit makes them want to light the sage and insert new-aged hippy dippy dummy prose here.
But for me as an Anishinaabe person, I’m told by our Elders that’s all life is meant to be, a sharing of spirit.
I can get down with this idea.
When I die, no one will remember my sneaker collection or the number of baseball caps I wore, but they’ll remember the way my presense, my sharing of good heart and mind, impacted them.
This impact happens through a sharing of spirit.
That’s as good as life can be. The sharing of a laugh, a teaching, a song.
The sharing of spirit is subtle. It’s quiet. It’s comfortable. It’s love. It’s a hug without embrace. It’s a feeling that everything is okay, everything will be okay, as long as these moments continue.
That’s why sudden death is so devestating.
And this is what devestates me in the Thunder Bay Story.
A Return To Writing Here
There will be more dispatches from The Shack soon. You’ll get a paragraph or a page or two that may or may not see the light of day in the book, but, they will be words nonetheless.
I’m picking up the writing here again now that I’m back on track with the book writing.
You’ll see the podcast return here.
You’ll get more frequent posts in your email.
Thanks for sticking with me here. Please do me a favour and share this with a few friends and family. It’s encouraging when I get a few new subscribers each week, it makes me keep going and it makes me proud when people find these words helpful.
More soon.
You nailed it…. grief. My son’s death… pain so intense I thought I was going to pass out. Then, suddenly, a burst of hot fluid energy through my heart, a feeling of love that almost addicted me to the pain that preceded it. So many more words I could say… but you have said them for me.
Thank you.
The splender of making it past 40, my friend... here we are, emptying our pockets of grief, making room for ourselves. Miigwech for sharing bits of the journey.