Thank you to Rachel for your above piece, “Loss as a Gateway to Compassion” — this reflection is prompted by and written in response to your words.

As I write this, I’m about two months into the most significant and all encompassing grief journey of my life. My beloved mother passed away at the beginning of April — a fact that still feels completely impossible, no matter how many times I share it.

I’m new to the experience of this level of grief, so I won’t pretend to have particular wisdom on it. But I can say that so far, this has been the most embodied experience of my life. I’ve never felt more completely in my body than in the moment I learned my mother would soon be leaving hers, and every day since is teaching me more and more about how to care for and love my full, embodied self.

My family had a precious almost week between my mom’s stroke and her death, during which we knew that she was dying and that the most we could do for her was to sit by her bedside and surround her with our presence and love. Every inch of my body hurt that week, and I found myself uninterested in numbing the pain — feeling it made this unfathomable thing that was happening more real, somehow. The pain was as appropriate and warranted as my sobs and panic attack I had by her bedside, each one a physical expression of my complete love for her, and how very much I wanted things to be different.

I could barely eat for that entire week, as if my love for her was taking up too much of my being for there to be room for anything else. I’ve regained my appetite in the time since, but it often feels like my body chemistry has been changed by this loss. My mom loved cooking nourishing, vegetarian meals, and these days, any food that’s even slightly less healthy than what she would make doesn’t sit well anymore (and food that does remind me of her feels even better than it did before).

As I’ve waded into grief, I’ve found that it’s impossible to describe without some level of contradiction. I never experience it as just one feeling: for me, pain and sadness have been woven so tightly together with love and gratitude, there is no

separating them out. Noticing and naming where I’m experiencing each of these feelings physically, in my body, has become a necessary and almost constant practice for me just to move through the overwhelm.

The pain and heaviness usually shows up in my back and my limbs, building up as tension in moments when I feel the wrongness of a world without my mother’s physical presence. But that pain is always coupled with a feeling of warmth and protection wrapping around my heart: what I understand as her presence and love as it’s with me now.

I do feel that warmth around my heart as my mother’s spirit, with me now as she is with all that she loved in life — and I try to simply rest in that feeling as much as I can, and to ignore the nagging pull of my mind when it doubts the ‘realness’ of what I’m feeling. It is easy to doubt, because our minds can’t ever fully make sense of even our deepest spiritual truths; they can simply be experienced, known at the level of the body, and disembodied Western culture has taught so many of us to mistrust what is felt.

Through the heartbreak and exhaustion of feeling so much all of the time, in grief, I’ve also found myself more able to appreciate the everyday pleasures of simply being in a body. When I feel the sun on my skin and smell the spring flowers coming alive in my mother’s garden, each of those sensations feels like a huge gift, anchoring me to my love of this life. There’s no more room for me to take for granted the miracle of physical presence on earth while I’m this close to the otherworld of death.

Loving my physical body, caring for it through its overwhelm and pain, also feels like the most important, everyday way to honor my mother. She cared for me, for my body, so completely in life — caring for myself with that level of love is perhaps the most simple and most significant way for me to carry on her legacy.

If you are on your own grief journey — whether from a recent loss or one still carried close from many years ago — I hope that some of these words have landed gently in your body, either as a mirror or comparison point for your embodied experience. There is no one right way to feel or live with grief; each of our experiences plays out within our unique, messy, infinitely complex bodies, and I think the most important thing may be to simply be with what our bodies are feeling. I hope that’s true, anyway — being with all my body is feeling has been my way of making it through so far, so I’m holding on to it and trying hard to understand it as sacred. Our bodies are sacred, without a doubt, so all their experiences of love and grief must also surely be so.

Though the COVID-19 pandemic truly started months earlier, March 2020 was the month when its life-changing realities hit many of us in the US and other Western countries. In those early weeks of stay-at-home orders and new health and safety protocols, few of us could have imagined just how long and devastating this pandemic would become. There have been over 2 million recorded deaths from COVID-19 worldwide — with over 500,000 deaths in the US alone — and, as enormous as those numbers are, they fail to capture the full scope of loss that this year and the governmental mismanagement of the pandemic have brought. COVID has highlighted and exacerbated every one of the deep inequities in our society, and as those of you who are currently incarcerated know well, it has made our already-deadly prisons into places of even more violence and pain.

As we reach this one year mark of the pandemic as its been experienced in the West, it’s hugely important for us all to acknowledge the collective and individual loss we have experienced. Acknowledging and tending to our grief expands our capacity to hold it, allowing us more room to also hold the joy, resilience, and hope that may exist alongside that grief.

Below is an outline of a simple ritual for acknowledging and honoring the grief of this year of pandemic, as well as the gifts that this year may have brought. I believe that grief and gifts are inseparable — the losses we experience shape us, and we can honor them by making meaning from all they have taught us. Feel free to adapt or expand this ritual in any way that makes sense to you.

A prayer for grief & gifts

If you are able, I invite you to begin this ritual by gathering a pen and two pieces of paper, and finding a quiet spot to sit or lie down. Take a moment to breathe deeply, in and out, until you feel settled and calm in your body. You may then choose to light a chalice if that practice is available to you, or to sing or chant — whatever allows you to mark this time as sacred.

Then, call to mind all that has brought grief in the past year. As a list or in sentences, write down whatever comes to the surface. You may be grieving loved ones lost in the past year, or the continued absence of in-person community, or the loss of the sense of security you felt before the pandemic. Try not to filter what you’re feeling or compare your losses to that of others — all grief is holy and deserves to be honored.

Whenever you feel ready, turn your attention to the gifts or lessons of the past year. Perhaps this year has taught you to slow down, and listen more closely to the needs of your body. Or maybe you have learned more about your capacity for resilience, that you’re able to survive through heartbreak. Again, try not to filter what arises when writing down the gifts of this year — no matter how short or long your list of gifts is, each one deserves your attention.

Next, turn toward the year ahead. What do you hope to leave behind you from this year of pandemic? What do you hope to bring forward with you? Write down whatever rises to the surface, whether or not it is completely within your control.

When you have answered all of the prompts fully, go back through your answers and highlight or underline words that stand out the most. On a new piece of paper, use the format below (or your own version of it) to turn your words into a prayer or spell. Once you are done, read your prayer out loud. Then, fold the paper that has this prayer written on it and place it under your bed or beside your pillow. These words will now be with you as a loving companion in the coming year, a reminder of all that has been lost and all that has been gained, and the choices you are making about what to carry forward.

After a year of pandemic, I honor the heartbreak that I am carrying for all that has been lost. I am grieving ….

By holding my heartbreak tenderly, I also make space to take in the gifts and lessons this past year has brought. In this year, I have received the gift(s) of ….

Turning toward the year ahead, I hope to leave behind ….

In this next year, I seek to carry forward ….

By naming the grief and gifts of this year, I honor all parts of my experience as sacred. With these words I set my intentions for the year ahead, knowing that I am loved and held in care. May it be so.