On allowing grief to break you, then turn you into something better
Grieving my daughter and mother, and using pain to make the world a slightly better place.
A quick note: This is a bonus piece in honor of my daughter. I know many of you live with grief, and you’ve always told me that these pieces help. There will be a regular newsletter later today. This also needs a ton of trigger warnings. If you’re in a vulnerable place with grief, it might not be the right read—or it could be exactly what you need. Be gentle with yourselves as you read.
Today is the anniversary of my baby daughter’s death. Today is the day that my Ember Lucy became ashes.
Today, as the grief sweeps over me, I will inevitably hew to the only advice that’s ever given me a glimmer of hope in grief.
“Offer it up.”
It’s the advice my mother always offered me for dealing with suffering. Offer it up as a sacrifice, as a chance to be cracked open, made better, and made whole—but different—again.
Every year, on the anniversary of my daughter’s death, I vow not to let the darkness in. But it tiptoes in early in the day. And then despite my best efforts, it steadily overtakes me, till I can no longer function, be positive, or even get up off the floor.
Four years ago today, we said goodbye to my daughter. She has now been dead for 1,460 days more than she was alive. The reverberations of my daughter’s death shook so hard that they eventually took my mother, too.
A week later, I awoke to a call from my mom’s partner. She had taken a catastrophic fall. She spent the next week in the hospital, as we had conversations about “goals of care” and “end of life decisions.” She pulled through, but she was never the same. She died one day before the anniversary of my daughter’s death, while I was pregnant with my third daughter.
All of this unfolded in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, as a million Americans lost their lives, and as people took to the streets demanding an end to violence and brutality, only to see powerful institutions repeatedly beat back all the progress so many of us worked so hard to realize.
It’s been a dark few years—for many of us, and I guess maybe for all of us.
Grief is as painful and ugly and bottomless as people fear it might be. It’s lonelier than you might realize, too. People judge you for your grief. They judge you for making your grief public. The experience so many of us have of this most fundamental of emotions is that we are doing it wrong.
Our culture loves to spin lies about grief. That it’s a process. But there’s no process. There’s no end point. There’s no other side. There’s just who you were before, and who you become after.
Grief, as I have written many times before, is love’s last offering. It is a painful gift that reminds us of who or what was once here, but no longer is.
When we turn away from it, we turn away from love. As love’s reflection, it must periodically reflect the intensity of the love it has replaced.
So I will not turn away from my grief. And in so doing, I have learned not to turn away from anyone else’s either.
At 11:00 PM on a Thursday in 2020, as I sat next to my mother’s hospital bed, I decided to heed her lifelong advice and offer up my suffering.
“Please,” I pleaded to whatever universal force exerts its power over human affairs (even if it’s just our own consciousness), “Don’t allow me to ignore all of this suffering. Please use it to make me better.”
Our culture is terrified of grief, because acknowledging its reality, its pervasiveness, its depth, forces us to acknowledge that grief awaits us all—as does death.
So we hide from the darkness. But there’s no hiding from the dark. It’s everywhere. You can’t chase out the darkness. You can only shine a light.
This has been my imperfect solution to my own bottomless grief. To offer it up. To try to shine a light from my own darkness into someone else’s.
I cannot ease my own pain, but I can use it as a catalyst to make life better for as many other people as possible. And if you, like me, are dealing with bottomless grief, I want you to know that this is the only way I have found to cope. To make the grief mean something. To make the life lost count for something.
For four years now, I have honored the legacies of my daughter and mother every December by raising money for suffering people. Our family has raised more than $50,000 for individuals and charities. We’ve funded Christmas gifts for hundreds of people, helped people access housing, medical care, and so much more.
The challenge, though, is this:
To offer up your suffering means you must be willing to continue to experience it.
To allow grief to make you better, you must be willing to fully experience it, not hide from it. Grief is like a baptism—or, perhaps, a purifying fire that offers you a chance to feel more deeply and serve others.
This will be the legacy of my Ember, and of Cheri, my mother. Not hiding from grief, not pretending their loss doesn’t matter.
I will forever embrace their loss. Because in offering up my suffering, perhaps I can smooth over my rough edges and become something better.
On this Ember Day—the birthday of my baby who never got to live a life, of my daughter named for the fire and for the light—I remind myself that suffering is everywhere, and that approaching everyone as if they are grieving is always the way. Gentleness wins.
Today is the darkest day of the year. The light begins easing back in tomorrow. But the darkness, too, will come back again and again. Today, I’ll allow the darkness to settle in so that I can be reminded of how much the world needs light.
Beautiful share. thank you
Thank you so much, Zawn for all you do. I would love to give you a big hug. These pieces are so so meaningful. Thank you for writing about grief.