“Your place is empty”
By now, we have all heard of the term “bid”, yes? As in, making a bid for connection in a relationship, which is a key concept in the Gottman Method in couples therapy. Between two people, a bid is an outreached hand, in metaphor or in actuality. It is an attempt at engaging and the trick there is to turn toward the bid rather than away. If we think about our relationship with the different parts of ourselves, we may come to find that these parts are also expressing bids for attention, our feelings asking us to pay them attention, to look at them.
Accepting a bid from grief can be tricky. Many of us (accurately) feel that, if we respond to our grief and turn fully toward it while we are at our jobs, or driving down the highway, or in the middle of a conversation with someone, that we’re going to put something important at risk. Add on the fact that we live in a society that could stand to build up its emotional literacy, in which we are frequently told feelings are not welcome, not tolerable.
It is true: there is a place and time. Yet, grief is one that can often be told, “Not yet” all too often, and not returned to. Provided the time and the place are right enough, what would it look like to accept this bid more often?
For me, saying yes to the presence of grief feels like…
- sinking into a deep couch
- getting a hug from someone on a rough day. you want to say “No, no, if you hug me I’ll cry,” but you know you need it
- that song you listen to when you want to hurt your own feelings
- being honest
- letting out an exhale that’s been held longer than you can remember
- delving into letters, pictures, books, music and gifts from loved ones passed
- drinking a cup of pu-erh tea—warm, ancient, earthy, bizarre
- buying the whole inventory of your person’s favorite flower from the grocery store and filling your house with them
- sending the text
- rolling the window down in the car on a long drive, even though it raises goosebumps on your skin
If it feels inviting, write yours. Or create an image for it. Saying yes to the presence of grief feels like…
Library
My latest grief-read was Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer, which I recommend, with the warning that it may hit a particular nerve for folks who have lost a loved one to femicide, or anyone who has survived domestic violence. This story traces the author’s reclamation of a case left to fade into oblivion—the murder of her sister by an ex-boyfriend 30 years prior. Technically true crime, it feels much bigger than that. Liliana speaks for herself, as the author generously shares from what she calls an “affective archive”, meaning Liliana’s own notes and personal journals.
Opposing true crime’s reputation of erasing the victim, Liliana is real and full and relatable and tangible. Anyone socialized as a woman has heard in some way, shape, or form that harm can be prevented by being “smart”, staying in the right place at the right time with the right company, right clothes, right behavior, etc. CRG makes a mockery of the idea that the blame for a woman’s murder rests with her. Reading this reminded me what it was like to exist in the mind of a 20-year-old, when the world is just a gigantic mouth gaping with possibility, and I, too, mourned the fact that all the potential that existed within Liliana’s future did not get to be realized. The duet of CRG’s rich, luminous, and sharp prose is at once gorgeous and heartbreaking. This is a work of collaboration beyond death.
Justice, in itself, is a complicated subject and it is clear by the end of this book that the author likely did not get (or may never get) what she initially sought out in writing this—at least not for Liliana, but it does shed light on a history of widespread violence against the women of Mexico. For me, by the end, justice no longer felt like the point. The point was to get to know Liliana as a person, to see her mirrored in the people who love her, to be inspired by the way she lived and the messages she still hands down: we are all archivists of ourselves.
“Living in grief is this: never being alone. Invisible but evident in many ways, the presence of the dead accompanies us in the tiny interstices of the days. Over the shoulder, inside the folds of our voice, within the echo of each step. Above the windows, on the edge of the horizon, among the shadows of the trees. They are always there, and here, with and inside us, shrouding us with their warmth, protecting us from the open. This is our waking work: acknowledging their presence, saying yes to that presence. There are always other eyes seeing what I see, and imagining that other angle, imagining what these senses that are not mine could make out through my own senses is, all things considered, the best definition of love I know”.
— Excerpt from Liliana’s Invincible Summer
