After losing her husband of almost 40 years to a sudden heart attack, the late American author Joan Didion wrote, “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” If you have lost a loved one, you are well acquainted with that moment – that split second when everything that has happened or will happen is ruthlessly ripped into two categories: before and after.
The ordinary instant marks the first step on that interminable journey we call grief: a dense mass of emotions, behaviours and symptoms universally acknowledged as the most appropriate response to death. Across cultures, bereavement and its bearers are bestowed a dignity that anticipates and makes space for misplaced anger, bone-deep exhaustion or self-imposed isolation because collectively, we are attuned to the implications of neglecting grief of that depth. There is an understanding that those experiencing grief need something concrete to reach for as the ground beneath them shifts and crumbles away in that ordinary instant. So, we attend funerals, we organise who will bring what to the nine night, and we sit shiva. To honour the lives of those gone and to meaningfully hold the grief of those left behind.
Life, arguably now more than ever, demands that we tussle with one grief cycle after another. Every day, we experience “tiny griefs”: the ending of a friendship, moving away from your community or being made redundant – the regular heartbreaks one is expected to shake off and quickly adapt to. On the other side of that spectrum is the kind of grief that crashes into you in waves so deep and frenzied they threaten to pull you to its depths, fill your lungs and drown you. Most people associate that depth of grief with death, without realising that those who have been victimised by violence are also fighting to keep themselves from going under.
Although acts of interpersonal and state violence elicit a similar kind of grief, those who have endured it are often denied the dignity granted to those experiencing bereavement. Often, those who have experienced violence are either dismissed or pathologised. But, if the trauma of losing someone to death calls for acknowledgement, ritual and community, surely it stands to reason that the loss of self that comes from physical, sexual or psychological violence would require the same. Whether it is a singular incident or over a sustained period, there is much to grieve when the chasm of violence rips through your universe in that ordinary instant: the small things you once did that only reinforce this new reality, the burden of stigmatisation that compounds the initial trauma; and who you could have been before you were brutally interrupted. And yet, there is a deficit of places to put that kind of grief.
In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller writes, “Grief becomes problematic when the conditions needed to help us work with grief are absent.” So, when you consider that 1 in 4 women in the UK have experienced intimate partner violence, or that 122 million people worldwide are forcibly displaced due to persecution or war, the scale of the issue and the profound chasms within our social structures become more apparent. Even after the illness, death, loneliness and state mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, or the constant live-stream of multiple genocides directly to our phones, our persistent dismissal of the profound effects of grief still leaves too many of us flailing alone in the abyss or unleashing our rage on those who get close enough.
Recently, we have been discussing grief a lot within the Level Up team, particularly its impact on our movement spaces. We know that attending to our grief is part of our work, but amidst all the chaos, it is hard to prioritise.
So, what do we do with our grief? We can start by acknowledging that more of us are holding grief caused by violence than we realise and taking its effects seriously. By understanding that, like bereavement, the grief from directly experiencing violence, or even bearing witness to it, needs attention, community and time; and developing the structures that will enable us to carry out that work meaningfully and compassionately. Like the Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso, highlighted by Camille Sapara Barton in Tending Grief, who see grief practices as vital for the community’s health, particularly their mandatory monthly grief rituals, as “they believe that unaddressed grief becomes harm that impacts the community.”
We can lean into community by seeking out the people and spaces that are already doing the work to help people move through their grief. In the UK, Healing Justice London, an organisation dedicated to supporting community-led health and healing, nurtures gentle but rigorous spaces and practices built “upon social, disability and health justice, somatics, embodiment and trauma-informed practice.”
Finally, we can continue to resist. Protests, rallies and vigils are manifestations of our collective grief that offer opportunities to work through our pain by chanting, singing and dancing while calling for social justice.
Every year, led by Black and Global Majority women, thousands of women gather for the Million Women Rise march to end male violence against women and girls, and the annual vigil to remember women affected by male violence; in October, UFFC hold an annual march for those affected by death in police custody, prisons and secure mental health units; and there are ongoing opportunities to continue to rally in solidarity with Palestine and Sudan.
Talking about grief in this way and accepting it as an inevitable part of the human experience may seem depressing, but it also allows us the opportunity to prepare. If we can agree that we are all likely to experience grief – tiny to life-changing – then it is easier to see the importance of normalising grief as a recurring process to attend to rather than a binary one-off feeling that needs to be buried; and building structures and practices, within our movement spaces and wider society, that integrate grief work into our day-to-day lives, and move us through the grief that arrives in those ordinary instants.
Are you carrying grief? What does it feel like for you? If anything came up as you read this, you can share using the form below:
