Grief is a Feral God Caged

*CW: Death & Dying*

When I lost my grandmother in 2019, my whole world went seismic and a deep fault line split the life I had known and the one that was to be mine moving forward. The aftershocks lasted for a couple years, shattering my family, my homelife, and entire belief systems I’d built much of my personality around. It seems strange for one person to have been so impactful, to have been the very marrow strengthening the bones of our bloodline, the loss like cracks in a foundation that would soon have the whole house disappearing into a sinkhole.

Grandma & my baby mother

Initially, it was just practical things that wanted my attention. My mom wanting me to attend the funeral when I was states away and chronically ill. The guilt trips and the projection games that acted as patchings of cement in the cracks of the foundation that was quickly giving way under all of us. I was so willing to fall through the earth, plummet deep into the underworld, rest there with eyes closed to the world as worms weaved through my being—but everyone screamed for me to wake up; wake up and see, see what I was missing, what I was doing being so self-absorbed.

I wanted to be reborn and this tomb felt family-sized. It felt like a giant Cadillac we could all pile into. “Here, come on, this is the way out!” I thought; out of what, I have no idea. There was an invitation here and it wasn’t to the funeral for the living. It was to be buried with our dead so we might know what it feels like to surrender that deeply into something so fearsome, so embracing, so alive.

I declined to come to the funeral. I grieved privately in dream. But it felt unfinished in waking life. My own death renewal kept getting aborted. Somehow life had become very life or death but in a way that didn’t allow for rebirth. There was no space, no moment to prepare the funeral pyre to who I had been; so I carried her around, drug the corpse of my life with me, and she was bleeding me dry.

It was a matter of survival at this point, but there was no way I wanted to surrender to the coming tide that asked to drag me out to sea. Was it here for her or for me? Everyone around me seemed like a walking corpse and the phantasm of life was eerie. Family members were suddenly stripped of life. Did we make a mistake? Did we not bury ourselves when we should have, did we not ritualize this end properly? Why was our very life being taken, unbidden, leaving us living husks of who we were?

It was that year that another death came, but abrupt, cruel, violent. This wasn’t the death of an elder, sick from cancer. He was a brother to me, but not by blood. Not even by family, it would be. But he was as close as anyone had been, maybe more. This death had no funeral, no visitation. Barely a word. I grieved through dream again, alone.

I felt like my life was so hungry for death, but would only taste it on the breeze of awareness, never being fully bathed in its aroma, never full-bellied on its nourishment. Grief welled up inside me, tightened my heart like a vice, and pulled me under.

But I’d gasp for air, fight my way to the surface, push it away like a thing to observe, to study, to master. Never something to release and run wild with it by my side. There were always too many reasons not to; too many points of survival that had to be tended, and air to find for my lungs aching with the pain of it all. I couldn’t get a deep breath for the life of me.

These days I study death practice. I work with the underworld. I’ve studied and practiced chöd, I seek to know more of goeteia, dipped my toes in the aghora. But the mind only touches things with the ten foot pole of conceptual understanding and the body begs to be wrapped in cloth and entombed. It longs to experience the relational work of surrendering to the pain the living experience in loss. It doesn’t want you to glance upon it, it wants you to wrap it in your arms and pull it into your living heart.

We have caged a Feral God.

Grief has long been locked away, an animal on display for us to visit when we pay the entry fee, make our homages, and leave. We seek not to know it, live with it, learn its true name. We will refer to it in the Latin, practice our pronunciation, act as though we know it, feel it, understand it. But we do nothing to be in relationship to this thing so real in us that it is if we sever our own limb and call it gangrenous when it merely aches from being left in the cold.

My grandmother lives in that pain. She lives in the ache in the heart, the well of tears that arise when I think of her garden and the summers spent in her care. My grandmother lives in that hollow space that could be newly tilled and planted with life. My brother lives in the pain behind my eyes and the laughter that catches when I see something I know he’d find funny.

Cutting ourselves off from grief is saying we’d rather not know our loved ones as they are now. And I understand that longing, to never have to know them different than they were. But in my journey with death and the dead, I’ve found them to be much more than I ever could have known them in life, and in that I’m so happy to get to know them in death, too.

You don’t have to visit the graveyard to know haunted ground. Just walk the depths of your own being, know your dead still living within you. Tend the graves so that they might have rebirth in you. Plant flowers at the headstones. Let grief run free.

(In honor of my grandmother, who died within the week in 2019. Miss you dearly. <3)