U/B 31: When there are no words

For Macy

I’ve never been good at giving condolences. How can I possibly encompass the depth of my sorrow with an imperfect device like language?

Macy, the 17-yo daughter of my cousin, died in a car crash this week. There are no words and yet I feel I must find words.

All week, I’ve been seizing up, clenched with grief and sobbing over the loss of a young woman that I met only once. Perhaps this is proof of the relational field — the underlying energy that connects us all. I exist alongside my family, across hundreds of miles, through blood and love, motherhood, sisterhood, humanity. Their pain vibrates through me and I am open to it.

There’s a part of me that is ashamed. Why should I be so upset? It is not my grief to bare. But it keeps coming, like an unwanted houseguest wandering through the open doors of my soft heart. And my heart is very soft right now.

So I write today. The muses like to come in through tender hearts. Which is why you should never be ashamed for wanting to scream or wail or break things because that’s a muse urging you to express, to let it free into the world. It flits around the relational field, inviting each person to dance with it, to feel more strongly than they’ve ever felt before, because that is how the muse knows it is alive. And how we know we are alive.

Humans express. We cry, sing, write, dance, draw, play, and otherwise demonstrate our aliveness. If we dare risk it, we share that expression, a peek into our soul. Why? I think it has to do with being seen and heard. Everyone wants to belong somewhere, to be understood.

How can you be understood when you cannot find the words? Turn to the artists, the poets, musicians — those encouraged by the muses to not only express but take that risk, put it out into the world for others to recognize themselves in. Art is strange like that. It causes the universe to shift so that others feel seen by the art.

Being seen while you are hurting is incredibly vulnerable. Like when you’re barely holding it together and someone innocently asks How are you? and the tears start up again. It hurts to be seen but it is also healing. Like rubbing alcohol on an open wound, it cleanses as it burns.

This morning as I had no words, I sat and read poetry, cried and felt seen. I’ve included a few of the poems below.

My heart aches for Macy.

Love,

Kate

Shared joy is double joy; Shared sorrow is half a sorrow. — Swedish proverb

On Another’s Sorrow

Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow's share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?

Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no!  never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

And can He who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird's grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear --

And not sit beside the next,
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant's tear?

And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
Oh no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

He doth give his joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.

Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.

Oh He gives to us his joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled an gone
He doth sit by us and moan.

- William Blake¹

---

Time does not bring relief

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied   
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!   
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;   
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!  

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him. 

- Edna St. Vincent Mallay²

---

There's No Forgetting (Sonata)

Ask me where I have been
and I'll tell you: “Things keep on happening.”
I must talk of the rubble that darkens the stones;
of the river’s duration, destroying itself;
I know only the things that the birds have abandoned,
or the ocean behind me, or my sorrowing sister.
Why the distinctions of place? Why should day
follow day? Why must the blackness
of nighttime collect in our mouths? Why the dead?

If you question me: where have you come from, I must talk with things falling away,
artifacts tart to the taste,
great, cankering beasts, as often as not,
and my own inconsolable heart.

Those who cross over with us are no keepsakes,
nor the yellowing pigeon who sleeps in forgetfulness:
only the face with its tears,
the hands at our throats,
whatever the leafage dissevers:
the dark of an obsolete day,
a day that has tasted the grief in our blood. 

Here are violets, swallows —
all things that delight us, the delicate tallies
that show in the lengthening train
through which pleasure and transciency pass. 

Here let us halt, in the teeth of a barrier:
useless to gnaw on the husks that the silence assembles.
For I come without answers:
see: the dying are legion,
legion, the breakwaters breached by the red of the sun,
the headpieces knocking the ship’s side,
the hands closing over their kisses,
and legion the things I would give to oblivion.

- Pablo Neruda³

---

On words and humanity

However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows… We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it, we learn to be human.

- Hannah Arendt⁴

1. Blake, William. On Another’s Sorrow, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Another%27s_Sorrow

2. St. Vincent Mallay, Edna. Time does not bring relief. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46464/time-does-not-bring-relief-you-all-have-lied

3. Neruda, Pablo. There’s no forgetting. Translation: 1974, Ben Belitt

4. Arendt, Hannah. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7707672-however-much-we-are-affected-by-the-things-of-the