there are no words

I learned this week is national grief awareness week. I feel I should have known this before. But like so many things I have learned in the past few weeks I came across it by chance, because grief has become one of the words I find myself putting into online searches these days. Searching through the words of strangers, because this is the way we do things these days, trying to find meaning in random connections, reflections, the red threads the Japanese explain create an invisible link to those who share our fate.

But ‘language’, as bell hooks reminds us, ‘is also a struggle’. Friends write to us ‘I have no words’. And we understand because we also have no words. The words do not exist. At least not in the English language. This is something for which no-one prepares themselves. Arabic has the word ‘thekla’ for a parent who has lost their child, Sanskrit the word, ‘viloma’, which means something that flies in the face of everything we consider the natural order of things. Although English has borrowed, loaned, stolen words from so many from other languages it seems we have not found the need to translate, adopt or create a word to describe this grief. And perhaps it is right that there are no words.

In other cultures, such as those of Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso, there are traditions and rituals where grief is shared, with the morning bread, alongside the evening meal, as part of the pattern of daily life. Islam creates a space of forty days where communities gather to cook, to eat, to mourn, to weep, to celebrate a life together. We need such rituals. We also desperately need ways to integrate grief into our every day lives. Sharing a photo today of the single red rose that grew on Jamie’s balcony I find myself smiling through my tears at the inordinate pride he felt at having finally managed to keep one plant alive.

As part of their project “This Grief Thing’ the theatre company Fevered Sleep have created an online shop to support the grief gatherings they run. There are teeshirts, postcards, tote bags with messages such as ‘Don’t Panic if a Cry’, ‘Let me be Sad’, ‘Grief = Love’, or simply ‘Hold me’. On this cold, grey winter morning, I feel drawn to the one that read ‘Grief is like the weather’. Because grief is indeed a shapeshifter. One moment it can feels as if you might drown in the unbearable darkness of the storm clouds overhead, at another you suddenly notice the flicker of sunlight that creates a rainbow. And, as with the weather, we are almost always caught unready, unprepared.

There are no words for any of this. And yet we desperately need them. We need to share our memories, to hear the names of our loved ones spoken out loud, we need to know they are not forgotten. Most of all we need to be with you and to feel you are able to be with us. Yes we might cry, we might be sad, we might even be angry but we also need to be held by you, to laugh with you, to find joy together.