Mourning pages: June 11th
How mourning works in tandem
I’ve kept a daily morning pages practices every single day since my daughter Ruby passed away at just two years old. It is a practice that has allowed me to transform my grief from something that could consume me into something that drives me. It has allowed me to live bravely in the sadness I feel. Many of us are grieving something or someone, and we need an outlet to feel it. In these letters, I share my own morning/mourning pages with you, and give you a prompt to start your own. This letter is for paid subscribers only. My Sunday letter remains free for all.
I’ve been reflecting recently on how grief gets shared, because usually, when a person dies, more than one person is affected by that loss. In our situation, the most intense loss is felt by me and my husband Steve, and yet our mourning processes look different. He even said one day that his own mourning process looks different day-to-day, sometimes even by the hour. Beyond us, there is our family, there are our friends, there are the many, many medical professionals both within hospitals and our local community still reeling from the loss of Ruby. There are people who never got the chance to meet her, but who feel they know her through my writing - they mourn her too.
In our closer circle, I’ve been observing how these different currents of mourning intertwine, and sometimes collide. Grief is better shared, but doing so is not easy, because sharing grief requires you to witness the raw pain of another to a point in which you may not have yet been able to witness it in yourself. Sometimes it can be quite a rude awakening, and everyone’s capacity is different, and constantly shifting with the tides and the times. There is no concrete guide or road map for navigating mourning in tandem, but I have reflected on it in today’s mourning pages anyway.
Thursday, June 11 (an excerpt)
Whose grief matters more? Whose grief gets more space and when? How is it that some people’s mourning works together like a perfectly synchronised swim in the lake of sadness that she left behind, whilst others create a storm that takes days to recover from? There is no language of mourning - I never learned one and yet here I am speaking it somewhat fluently. Steve’s language for it is different and yet we mostly understand each other, because her love ran much deeper than language. Love doesn’t have one language, so neither does grief, and you can speak your mourning in whatever dialect feels native to your sorrow. Even if people seem not to understand you, they do really.
Grief and mourning are not as alien as we think they are. They are not nice, or pretty, or algorithmically profitable, but they are important and they are often the social glue that we fail to acknowledge. Grief can be about more than death, and less. Grief about lesser things can feel like a source of shame, but it really isn’t. It is the truth. We all grieve and we all need to mourn those feelings; put them through the wash of our collective tears, air them out, not because they are dirty but because they need oxygen. We share oxygen with the trees - the same ones on which we attach the laundry lines of our sorrow, and the trees have mourned for much longer than we have. We could learn a thing or two from trees.
There is a phrase the researchers use for what happens when a single death sends its loss outward through a whole web of people, each grieving differently, each on their own clock. They call it the family grief system, and the term comes largely from the work of Froma Walsh and Monica McGoldrick, who spent decades studying how families move through loss together. Their central finding is one that comforts me, because it shapes what I had been feeling without being able to find the language for it; that grief is never really an individual event, even when it feels most isolating. It moves through a system, and the system is made of relationships, and each relationship metabolises the loss at its own pace and in its own register. What looks like collision is often just two different metabolic rates meeting in the same systemic interchange.
This is what makes shared grief so hard, and it is worth being honest about the difficulty rather than just romanticising the togetherness. The bereavement researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut developed what they call the dual process model of grief, and the part of it that has resonated with me is the idea of oscillation. They found that healthy mourning is not a steady state but one that swings; people move back and forth between confronting the loss and stepping away from it so as to attend to the business of living, and crucially, they do not swing in unison. One person can be deep in the confrontation of it on the very afternoon their partner needs to step away and mow the lawn and feel normal for an hour. Neither is wrong. They are simply oscillating out of phase, and when two people who love each other are oscillating out of phase, it can feel like abandonment when it is really just a rhythm.
Steve mourning differently to me, and even to himself depending on the hour, is not an error in our shared grief. It is the dual process in motion, the natural swing of a person doing exactly what mourning requires, which is to approach and retreat, approach and retreat, because no one can stand in the full glare of it all the time and survive. We are not always going to be in the same place at the same moment, and I have had to learn that his stepping away is not a lesser love, any more than my staying in it is a greater one. We are both just moving through the same water at our own speed.
The anthropologists have known for a long time what our death-avoidant culture keeps forgetting; that mourning has almost always been a communal act, and that the privatising of grief is a relatively recent and largely Western invention. Barbara Rosenblatt’s cross-cultural studies of grief found enormous variation in how mourning is expressed across societies, but one near-constant: that it is done together, witnessed, held inside ritual and community rather than carried alone behind a closed door. The idea that grief is a private matter to be managed discreetly and got over efficiently would have been unintelligible to most humans across most of history. This new, modern and isolated approach is the anomaly, expecting us to take the most communal experience there is and asking people to do it by themselves, quickly, and then return to work, never to be mentioned again. There is no opportunity for mourning in that flawed equation.
When different currents of mourning intertwine and sometimes collide, what is actually happening is the re-emergence of something older and truer than the privatised version we were sold; the messy, difficult, irreplaceable work of grieving in company. The collisions are not mistakes or failures in shared grief, but the price of it, and they are worth paying, because the alternative is the carried grief of the closed door, and we already know where that leads.
There is a deep wisdom in turning toward the trees for inspiration, like I mentioned in my own pages. We now know, through the work of forest ecologists like Suzanne Simard, that trees are not the solitary individuals we took them for. Beneath the soil they are connected through vast fungal networks, the mycorrhizal threads that scientists have taken to calling the wood wide web, and through these networks they share resources, send warnings, and sustain one another. A dying tree will pass its remaining carbon out through the network to its neighbours before it goes. The mother trees, the oldest and largest, feed the seedlings growing in their shade. That is their own mourning; if right use of grief is the passing of what you have left to those who remain, and they do it underground, through connection, invisibly, in a language that requires no words.
This is the model, I am inspired by. Not the lone tree standing stoic against the storm, which is the image our culture loves and which kills people, but the forest, holding its losses collectively, moving its resources toward wherever the need is greatest, understanding without language that no single tree survives alone. The laundry lines of our sorrow are strung between living things that are themselves connected far below the surface, that have been practising grief as a communal act for longer than we have existed, and that have never once been asked to get over it efficiently.
Love does not have one language, and so neither does grief. Steve speaks his dialect and I speak mine, and the medical professionals who cared for Ruby speak theirs, and the readers who never met her but feel they knew her speak another, and our whole extended family speaks a dozen more between them. None of these is the ‘correct’ one. They are all just sorrow, finding the shape that fits the mouth it comes from. The work is not to translate everyone’s into a single language, which cannot be done and should not be attempted, but to trust that underneath those different dialects, the same thing is being said - the same root system is being fed, the same impossible truth is being spoken: that someone or something mattered, that they are gone, and that we are still here, sharing the oxygen of the memory, holding each other up.
✦ This week’s mourning page
This week, turn your attention to the others who are grieving alongside you, because almost no loss is grieved alone, even when it feels that way.
Find your few minutes and somewhere to sit. Write about someone else who is mourning the same loss you are, or a loss adjacent to yours, and who is doing it differently. Maybe it’s the partner who goes quiet when you need to talk, or the relative who organises and cooks and who cannot sit still long enough to cry, or the friend who seems, infuriatingly, to be coping, or the one who fell apart in a way that made you have to hold them when you had nothing left.
Write what their mourning looks like from the outside. Then, if you can, write what it might look like from the inside; get to their grief. This is not to excuse or resolve, but simply to consider that they too are oscillating, approaching and retreating, speaking their own dialect of the same sorrow.
And finally, write a sentence that gives them permission to grieve differently from you. You do not have to send it or even mean it completely yet. You only have to see whether you can find it, because in finding it you loosen the one knot in shared grief that tightens hardest; the belief that there is a right way to do this, and that someone in the room is getting it wrong.
The subscriber chat is open, as always. We are a small forest here, connected under the surface, and you are welcome to share whatever you like.
