day twelve: grief
There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
-Leonard Cohen
This past year has opposites coming together in some ways. Shadow and light. Hope and fear. But despite opposites, many of us are feeling grief and loss of some kind. The loss of normal with no idea what the new normal will look like. The loss of a loved one or the simple loss of one’s routine.
The other day we spoke about moving closer to—rather than pulling away from—unfamiliar or painful feelings. Grief is one of them. In the western world, in particular, we shy away from grief, which robs us of an essential aspect of being human.
In 2015, I was asked by my friend actress/writer Fawzia Mirza to join her in making a documentary about Sabeen Mahmud, a world-renowned activist who was assassinated in Pakistan. At the time, I was already juggling full-time work and raising a son alone so it wasn’t the wisest undertaking, but something intangible propelled me to say yes. The short documentary took two years to complete, and in 2017, on the 2nd anniversary of Sabeen’s death, the film premiered at the Nashville International Film Festival.
Around that time, I received a Facebook message from Sabeen’s mother, Mahenaz, who hadn’t yet seen the film, wondering if I might find a way to screen it in London on what would’ve been Sabeen’s birthday. Tania, a Londoner who’d found our film project on a crowdsourcing site while going down a Twitter rabbit hole, had become an unexpected donor and found us a cinema at short notice.
The day before my flight to England, I got a text from Tania with a picture of a blazing building; she had just escaped a fire in her home, Grenfell Tower. Two days later, Mahenaz, Tania and I sat in a cafe in Marylebone, London over cups of tea. Here were two women—one who had watched her only daughter die in front of her and had a second bullet lodged in her own back and another woman who had just lost her home of forty-one years, all her belongings and 72 of her friends and neighbors in what was the most deadly fire in Britain in over 100 years.
I, too, had recently experienced great loss. Over a fourteen-month period from 2015-2017, I lost five close friends. Mahenaz, Tania and I laughed and wept and held each other. And as we did, something hit me: this moment was the reason I had made the film—so I could come together with these two women, who in the wake of unimaginable grief, still had the capacity for joy, profound connection and deep love. They had been expanded by their losses, not diminished by them. And if they could do it, I believed I could too. It was the start of treasured friendships.
In Japan there is an art of repairing broken pottery with gold called kintsukuroi. It’s based on the belief that brokenness can render us more beautiful. Our losses don’t make us lose value, instead they can embellish us. Grief can be a gift of gold if we let it.
This story was told with Tania and Mahenaz’s permission.
Reflective Journal Prompts
Mary Oliver wrote, Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift. What are some of the gifts that grief has given you? How has grief expanded you?
Periods like this one can resurrect earlier losses. Maybe you are grieving for something old or something current. What, if anything, do you find yourself grieving for now?
Discussion Prompts
Talk about an aspect of loss you’ve been feeling during this time. For children, ask them if they’re sad about anything.
Suggested Action
Notice in the course of your day, how people you’ve lost still make an impact. The human body is definitely finite but the human spirit might be infinite. Maybe it’s hearing a familiar song in a TV show that you sang with that person, a certain smell or flavor, or even a dream.
Further Reading
The World to Come: Navigating Grief During this Pandemic
That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief
My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me: A Memoir
Further Listening