Only Death Without Love is Permanent

The introduction to my grief workbook

The following is the introduction to a grief journal/workbook I have been working on! Read to the end to find out how you can get your hands on it x

There is no right or wrong way to grieve. There never has been and there never will be. Grief is huge and nebulous and can sit in the fissures of perfectly innocuous things. Grief changes and shifts and metabolizes and waxes and wanes. Your grief will not look like mine and neither of our grief will look like anyone else’s. But boy can that make grieving hard to figure out, hard to pin down. The way you grieve may feel like too much or not enough. And that is okay. It is okay if you don’t know if you’re doing this grief thing right. +

I really started my grief journey when my mom died by suicide in January of 2020. Before that, I had experienced losses - a good friend from my teenage years, my aunt, my grandma - but the grief that fundamentally reshaped me as a human being was the loss of my mother.

As an artist, and at that time an artist in their final semester of college meant to be devising their senior thesis art project, I found my refuge in art. I found myself processing huge catastrophic feelings and this huge catastrophic loss through painting and writing and sewing and engraving and crying and raging and listening to music and talking.

Especially talking.

And I'm so grateful to the people in my life who let me talk. Who heard me, who encouraged me, who didn’t shy away from hearing about all the things my mom gave me, all the things she left behind, all the memories that popped up in the most unexpected places.

After a couple years of grieving and remembering my mom loudly and unapologetically, I wrote a bit of advice for those who want to thoughtfully navigate conversations about deceased loved ones for people who have never had someone they love die, and I think it may be helpful for people in the throes of grief to hear too; to see the different ways grief can manifest, and so I want to reiterate it here.

Not every mention of our person is the saddest part of our day. Sometimes it is lighthearted when we say, “This was their favorite song!” “Oh they would have loved this.” “God I wish they could hear the conversation happening at the next table.” “I wish they were here.”

The mention of our person can be joyful, or melancholic, or of course, sad. It can be all of these things at once. But my advice for those without dead loved ones is to react to these sentiments as just another piece of the conversation. You don’t have to drop a 55-pound weight onto the conversation and stare at us in pity, or stare silently in a combination of confusion and discomfort and sadness. It’s okay. We know they’re dead. You acknowledging that in an equal state of nonchalantness will not shock us to death, it’s not tasteless or crude.

It’s a relief.

Our people are still parts of our lives, just like anything or anyone else, and having the space and comfort and safety to talk about our person is huge.

Always in these conversations, you can respond by asking to hear more, by mimicking our tone. If your friend laughs and says, “They would have loved this yellow pillow!” Take it as a chance to learn why! Did their person love yellow? Did they love kitschy throw pillows? Did they utterly despise throw pillows? Were they referencing a specific story?

If a friend sees someone who looks like their person and gets a little sad, you could try asking what reminded them of their person. Does it make them mostly sad to see someone who looks like their person? Did it make them a little happy too, even if for a moment?

Not every person likes these kinds of questions and not every person is ready for big conversations about their person. But the point is to open yourself up to the reality that many people want desperately to speak about the person they love so much, and are only waiting for someone to make it feel safe. The point is to respond in kind and be willing to not just listen but really hear them.

When we make a clay pot, the fingerprints do not disappear just because we are no longer touching it. The marks we make stay long after we are gone. Our hands and our compassion and our love and our gift giving and our tenacity and our support and our words live with people. When we see a pinch pot we don’t ignore the fingers that pressed the clay into shape, just like we cannot ignore the hands that pressed us into shape. It’s not fair to try to, and it’s not fair to expect anybody else to.

We want to talk about our deceased loved ones. We yearn to mention the people who have shaped us. Everybody has a person they’re waiting to talk about, or at least, someday you will. By learning how to have these conversations and by offering opportunities for people to reminisce, you are truly making an impact and fostering a safe environment for those around you to grieve in ways we, as a society, are not often offered.

Through all of this, it is paramount to mention that nobody is all good or all bad. Not every prompt in here is deep and heavy, but some are. Sometimes we fight with the people we love. We let each other down, we disappoint each other, we forget something important. Sometimes we hurt each other. The ways you hurt or were hurt by each other don’t die when they do - it’s okay to wrestle with the ways your person was imperfect. You are not a bad person for remembering them in the fullness of their humanity. You are not grieving wrong for still being mad about something you were mad about before they died. It’s okay to become upset about something you weren’t upset about before.

As Matt Haig tells us in ‘The Humans’, “Don’t worry about being angry. Worry when being angry becomes impossible. Because then you have been consumed.” To be human is to hurt and be hurt - this is true even of the kindest people. To grieve honestly may include that anger and despair. Let yourself go there. Let yourself feel anything that comes up. Let yourself remember things as they were. Give yourself permission to remember the human they were as the human you are - rife with contradictions and nuances. You are not required to focus on the bad only though, either. Approach the memories and feelings that come up with curiosity and gentleness. If you are afraid that stepping into the waters of painful memories will inevitably sweep you up and suck you down, remember that no feeling lasts forever. Your hurt will come and, if you give it the space it needs, it will go, too. I promise. This is a safe space to remember your person and the person they were, warts and all. Tread with care, take breaks, take deep breaths, you’re okay. You’re safe. I’m proud of you for sitting in your grief.

If your person is an internet friend you never met, or is someone you didn’t get to have a ton of experiences with, please know that the wording of these prompts can be malleable. If I ask you describe how you’ve change since you last saw each other, feel free to interpret that as the last time you interacted, and please know that I do not believe that your grief is any less if some of these prompts can not or do not apply to your relationship with the person you are grieving. If a prompt asks you to describe a gift they gave you, it does not have to be physical, and does not have to be something that they gave you knowingly.

If you can’t answer one of these prompts now or ever, don’t sweat it. If I didn’t give you enough space to explore a prompt, you’re not saying too much or feeling too much. Say as much as you want. If it’s the long story I want to hear all of it, just let me get comfy. Continue on a scrap of paper and tuck it in. Let this be messy. If you read a prompt and it sparks a train of thought going in a whole new direction, please, feel free to hop on that train. The prompts will always be here later if you want to answer it a new way next time. There’s no right way to do this.

If you find that you just can’t bear to read back some of the harder memories after you’ve written them down, don’t not write them down - instead, take a sharpie and black out lines and phrases at random. Leave a taste of what was there, but no one, maybe not even you, can decipher what was really there. Here’s an example of when I did just that over the hard memory of my dad finding my mom:

If doing these prompts isn’t healing, we’re missing the mark. Try another one or come back another time. Grief hurts, yes, but if the pain is unbearable, if there is no relief in the pain, then something isn’t right. Take a break. Come back to the hard questions when it doesn’t feel wrong anymore. Take a nap, have a coffee, eat a snack, go for a walk. Take a few days, then circle back. I don’t want this to hurt.

You may be grieving a loved one who is still alive - someone you’re estranged from, some who is incarcerated, someone from whom you’ve grown apart - these griefs, too, are very real, and I hope you will use the prompts here to reflect on your relationship with them, as well.

There are some prompts that ask for a bit of creativity - now, if you read that and groaned or tensed up from head to toe, be not afraid! While of course, I encourage you to respond to every prompt as it feels comfortable, I do also want to encourage you to try to let loose a little bit. If you’re not much of a let-loose kind of person, try to let just 1% loose, just one little muscle. Come at this with a bit of curious skepticism. I’ll even take hesitantly intrigued. Because I also have something for those (who believe they are) without creativity, or those who need help to rediscover their creative ability. It’s another exercise in prompts - something to whet your palette, so to speak.

What is creativity to you? The ability to perfectly render any idea that comes to mind? Photorealism? Inventing new concepts? To me, I think it is simply the desire to make and/or share something.

When did you stop believing you could create? Who told you to stop trying? (I know that’s a big ask. You don’t need to know the answer right now, we can circle back.) When was the last thing you remember making with joy or confidence? Scribbling with crayons? Coloring in a coloring book? Doodling in margins? Go back to that. Color like a child. Doodle for the child in you that was discouraged from creating. It doesn’t need to be a masterpiece. It doesn’t even have to be good. It just has to be. You can make art and hide it. You can make ugly art and throw it away. But make it. Treat your present self like you’d treat your five year old self - throughout this book, this goes for both your creative self and your grieving self. Give yourself the grace you’d give a child. Art doesn’t need to be good to matter. The feelings or events it helped you process make it matter. Taking the time to slow down and intentionally consider what your grief looks like, what texture it is, or how sharp or round it is - that matters far more than making it something you can frame on the wall. This is a safe space to explore ugly feelings with ugly collages and ugly drawings and ugly poems. No one needs to see this but you, so let yourself do whatever you want.

Some of these prompts may ask you to reflect on very small moments, or very specific moments and you may wonder what is the point? Why dwell? And if you have picked up this book and you are wondering this, thank you for letting your curiosity lead you here. I believe the point is to remember. To remember.

bell hook says in ‘All About Love: new visions’ that “In its deepest sense, grief is a burning of the heart, an intense heat that gives us solace and release. When we deny the full expression of our grief, it lays like a weight on our hearts, causing emotional pain and physical ailments. Grief is most often unrelenting when individuals are not reconciled to the reality of loss.” This book and its prompts are meant to aid you in the expression of your grief, to deny the denial of grief.

hooks also writes that the culture of death and dying and grief in the West is a culture that “would deny us the emotional alchemy of grief”. So often, we are expected to grieve quickly and quietly. We are expected not to dwell on the people in our lives who have died, we are expected not to bring them up in casual conversation. We live in a culture that demonized death to the point where any mention of it is uncouth, out of line, taboo. I want to challenge this. I want to open up a space to safely subvert the social expectations of death conversations. “We are taught to feel shame about grief that lingers. Like a stain on our clothes, it marks us as flawed, imperfect.” But the grief never really leaves us, does it?

I want you to grieve for as long as it takes. I want you to grieve as loudly as you need to. I want to hear you laugh while you tell a story about your person, or to cry while you talk about the things that were really, really hard to experience. Because those experiences, those moments, those people all shaped you and continue to shape you, even when they are gone. And to deny that is, I feel, a great robbery. bell hooks goes on to tell us that, essentially, only death without love is permanent. By talking about and remembering the loved ones we’ve lost, they live on. Grief is love. It is love that reverberates after the bell has stopped swinging.

All the writers say it, that “the possibility of pain is where love stems from.” (Matt Haig, ‘The Humans’) that “this is all of the unexpressed love, the grief that will remain with us” (Andrew Garfield). That “to be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.” Honoring and speaking on the grief you feel is an expression of love. It is to say, ’I love you so much that even in a world without you, you are here. You left a mark on me, you shaped me, and I can never forget that. I don’t want to forget that.’

Writing down, or thinking back on, or painting out even the smallest, most inconsequential moments in life or death may mean nothing, but sometimes those moments of nothing can fill an entire room, like silence. Unseen but tangible, pressing into the nooks and crannies of every space, ringing in your ears.

Take, for example, this moment from Ocean Vuong’s book, ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’,

“Three weeks after Trevor died a trio of tulips in an earthenware pot stopped me in the middle of my mind. I had woken abruptly and, still dazed from sleep, mistook the dawn light hitting the petals for the flowers emitting their own luminescence. I crawled to the glowing cups, thinking I was seeing admirable, my own burning bush. But when I got closer, my head blocked the rays and the tulips turned off. This also means nothing, I know. But some nothings change everything after them.”

Let yourself be changed by the nothings, you’re allowed. No one can stop you from seeing the beauty in things that don’t matter.

I shall leave you with two more quotes, from bell hooks and Ocean Vuong respectively. “It takes courage to befriend death,” and “I’m writing to reach you - even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.”

Even if every word you put down is further from your person, you are still reaching, arms outstretched, to meet them again. And in that reaching you are befriending death. Each time you turn toward your grief with an open heart and an open mind and open arms, you are inviting grief and death to sit with you. And that takes courage.

To be clear, you don’t need to be a writer or a poet. You don’t need to respond in an eloquent, or consecutive, or chronological way. You don't have to have all of the right words, it doesn’t even have to make sense to anyone besides you. This is just a tool to help you remember, to let you write all the things that may feel too taboo to say.

If you’ve been waiting for someone to ask you about your person, allow me to do the honors.

What is your person’s name?

I am aiming for proper publication of this resource, but in the meantime am offering a PDF of this work in progress resource at a sliding scale price on my ko-fi. It’s more important for me to get this into people’s hands than to wait until it’s published to do so. And any feedback is very valuable!

Find it here: https://ko-fi.com/s/2e4867a0d9

Love, Alekz