According to one perspective of time, transition is upon us. There is one day left of the year 2020. I’ve always resisted the pressure, to put too much weight into the passing of a new year. But in this moment, that urgency for sudden newness at 12:00AM on the first of January, 2021, is fierce and all-encompassing, as is my desire to not give in. Both, I think, come out of a desire to look away from all this year has left bare. Some of us are doing so by putting all our hopes for something different into the tick of the clock, immediate transformation at the turn of the calendar page. Others of us are motivated to keep our heads down, avert our eyes and power through this passing of time. We’re all afraid to look over the edge, to take stock of all this year has held, all this year has lost.
Had it not been for a transition within my individual life emerging, I imagine I would have scoffed at those putting all their might into packaging the global pain of this year into a singular series of digits, nothing bleeding into 2021, while I, too, would have kept myself out of the mess of standing face to face with this collective journey around the sun. But shortly after 2021 begins, I will start my long awaited, long delayed PhD, and I sense, deep in my bones, a need to ready myself.
I’ve made all the lists, organized my filing system 12 different ways, fine-tuned a minute by minute care routine. My laptop could not be more ready. With a few more days of sleep training, my body will be ready, too. But my soul, my self, my spirit… part of it is left back on March 13th, some is scattered in protests and unjust acquittals, other pieces are still clinging to the first time I called a family who had just lost someone to COVID-19. There’s certainly still some stuck at the day the United States crossed 100,000 deaths, some wrapped up in images of food bank lines wrapped around city blocks. And I know I haven’t been fully present for 200,000, 300,000, 2 million the world over. I’m sure there are other fragments left behind and all bound up in other moments when this year overwhelmed, brought fear, laid plain the darkest capacities and most fragile vulnerabilities of humans.
I’m realizing I won’t be ready for this newest iteration of my life if I don’t open my eyes and go back to collect all my pieces, to bring myself fierce with reality, to name the losses of this year. I worry what will happen if we collectively deny this step as we rush to name a new year, worry the scar tissue already hardening in us, between us, surrounding us will build and build, walling us off from our fullest selves. This step is not so that we can start afresh with a blank slate or to put this year soundly to rest, but so that we can carry it with us honestly and openly into the newest iteration of our individual and communal selves.
In other words, we need to ask ourselves, allow ourselves, challenge ourselves, to grieve.
Often the popular imagination of grief is a prolonged, deep misery brought on by an immeasurable loss, and often only granted credence if tied to a particular death. We think of unsatiable tears and impenetrable darkness. Certainly, the death of one loved leads to grief. And certainly, grief can manifest as a deep depression for some. But so often boxing grief into tight definitions of when it is justified and what it should entail is not only untrue, but is also harmful. It’s harmful for those who have experienced the death of someone close to them, creating pressure to grieve “well” or live through the loss in the “right” ways and confusion if they aren’t fulfilling the precise archetype of sorrow. And it’s harmful for all of us, when we aren’t given space, either symbolic or physical, to recognize and claim our need to move through the process of grief, of coming into reality with what is, with what we are without, of living into a different iteration of our lives and selves, of finding a new wholeness, through all life’s many forms of loss.
This year, some of us have lost our favorite people, some by physical death and others by fracture. Some of us are ending this year without parents, without children, without the possibility of children. Some of us lost time, time with family, time in community, time around dinner tables, time in laughter, time watching children grow. Some of us lost bodily health, others a steadiness of mental or spiritual health. Many of us lost income, security, a sense of sureness and stability. Some of us lost our houses, some of us our homes. Nearly all of us lost plans, big and small in significance, and the sense of progression and movement that comes with making and fulfilling them. We lost trust in one another. We lost fabricated facades of equity and justice that we needed to lose. We lost patterns, to our harm and to our benefit. We lost the comfort we laid in certainty. We lost confidence, false and real, that we will not hurt each other. We lost noise and we lost quiet. We lost old truths and forged truths of who we are, on our own and together. We lost our familiar rituals of celebration, of mourning, of loving one another.
These are losses worthy of, requisite of, demanding of our grief, our taking notice.
To grieve our losses does not need to mean we cry out loud, fall apart, or sink into despair, although for some it may. To grieve them means we need to say them out loud, to give them a name, to let them be significant. We need to identify the holes in ourselves, the new jagged edges, the softened corners, the deep wounds, the openings they have created. We don’t need to heal from them all or to heal from any completely, but as we step into a new year, a new stage, we need to acknowledge their presence in us and in those around us. Because our losses will continue, and I fear if we don’t let ourselves be in grief now, holding radical compassion for ourselves and each other, we never will, and we’ll never start to recover the pieces of ourselves we lost along our way through this year, so that we might come into a new wholeness.
So as we all approach this numeric and symbolic transition, have you taken stock? Have you found the parts of your soul, your self, your spirit you left along your way through this year? Have you named your losses? Have you said them out loud? Have you let them seep into you? Have you noticed how they’ve taken shape and root in you? Are you grieving? Will you give yourself that kindness, give this world that compassion?
callie daniels-howell 