It Was the Blue Heron that Held Me Together

Grief: Why It is Good to Unpack it.

When I was in first grade, my friend Heidi G.’s brother Chris was run over and killed by a school bus, sucked under the front wheel by a distracted bus driver. Chris was two years older, with sandy blond hair and a mischievous smile. They said he was rough housing with friends as they walked home. An adult also told us that Heidi was with him when it happened. I remember looking into the grey eyes of her mother Linda when she escorted Heidi to the classroom her first day back, and seeing Linda’s grief physically, the weight. How teachers and other adults approached Linda in hushed tones.  This was my lesson about traffic dangers and a hint about how to identify grief. I kept scanning Heidi’s face for it, but as Heidi was chronically bubbly and chatty, I couldn’t detect much. Maybe that’s how she coped. 

Grief remained a mystery, though I had experienced early losses in and outside of my family. I had no place to put grief.  Around that same time, I watched the movie Brian’s Song on television. A friendship between two football players is cut short when one is diagnosed with and dies of cancer. It was a sad story, but when I realized it was based on real events, I burst into tears and wept as if I had lost a family member. It was the first time I felt a physical welling and release from grief even though it wasn’t associated with me directly.  I remember the same desire to feel grief run through me in the song by Terry Jacks “Seasons in the Sun” and later the book and film The Outsiders. 

After Chris’ death,  I wanted to be prepared-- to ask questions. But as other deaths inevitably occurred: friends in car accidents, my hair stylist to HIV in 1984, high school and college classmates’ suicides and several homicides, I had no answers. Adults offered zero help. There were those who turned to alcohol. Those who divorced, others who ate until they didn’t have the energy to drive to the store, and those who grew permanently quiet in a recliner in their living room. There was no healthy model for what to feel, think or do. 

In the early 2000’s when I was in my low residency graduate writing program, one of my professors, Frank, who was in his mid seventies, lost his adult son, who was a well known actor. Frank wasn’t assigned to me as a mentor, but was just a generous human. I was a single mom raising a young son with autism--and he regularly wrote me letters and postcards, buoying me and telling me news of his life, adding in lines from poems or essays he knew I would appreciate. Though I had visited his farm house once and toured his barn turned library, I didn’t know him well enough to ask him directly about his loss or his grieving. But in a letter he wrote, “when life feels untenable, as it has for me at times these last few years, immerse yourself in nature, looking and listening closely. And, of course, in poems and art as they never fail. Today for me, it was a blue heron that held me together, and I think she may show up in a poem.” 

After I lost my unborn, but very wanted daughter Sophia, at 21 weeks, the grief of her death felt like a slow burning weight. Smoldering. I was letting go of the potential as I held her paperback size purple body in my palm. Somehow, I blamed my body for not being enough for her. It was a peak of self-hatred, where my relationship with my body was put asunder. How could my body betray me this way?  It took having another healthy child and years of almost daily hiking to one day start feeling whole again, lighter, more accepting of Sophia’s decision to come and depart in the way she chose. 

I see now that my grief was tied to an idea that I no longer held, inherited by the version of evangelical Christianity that I was raised with: your pain and suffering is causal to your relationship to Christ.  If something bad happens, it is evidence that you aren’t praying enough, reading your Bible enough. You’ve been a bad girl. Though I had intellectually shed that sham notion long ago, blaming myself for Sophia’s death was evidence that the brainwashing had staying power. Religious dogma can make processing grief unnecessarily hard.  

We are made vulnerable (etymology: the ability to wound), in the processing of grief, which might be why so many people avoid it. When my dad passed in November of 2021, though he had been in fragile health for years, it took me off guard. A few texts from my stepmom that they were heading back to the hospital (a normal occurrence), and then “He’s getting morphine for pain and his ongoing breathing issues.” And then, “He’s gone.” and a photo just after he had died.  I felt physically disorientated, floating above my body.. Yesterday, I spoke with him. Today, I was staring at my dad’s lifeless body on my phone. 

The science, which I was able to read months later, helped clarify for me what was happening. 

Several regions of the brain play a role in grief, including areas within the limbic system and prefrontal cortex. These involve emotional regulation, memory, multi-tasking, organization and learning. When you’re grieving, a flood of neurochemicals and hormones dance around in your mind. For the first five days, it was like I was hosting a neurochemical rave in my head. I felt again severed from my body. 

Grief that lasts for weeks, months, or longer, for which the loss of a parent, partner or child is likely, can push the body into a state of chronic stress. Chronic stress puts the brain into long-term survival mode. This means:

• Fight, flight or freeze hormones are released

• Heart rate increases and breathing becomes shallow

• Blood flows to the more emotional and fear-based parts of your brain instead of the higher thinking regions

Despite the science, there is an idea borne from the American cultural milieu that after a week or two of digesting all of the “thoughts and prayers,” and the memorial is over, we should pack our emotional bags and move along. 

Rituals can help buffer the pain as they give us some forward momentum. Several months after Sophia passed, my husband and I put her ashes into the ink for a memorial tattoo--her name and date of death written across each of our left wrists. On the anniversary of her death, we practice a set of rituals to remember and honor her. These help. For the grief of my dad’s passing, talking to those who knew him and miss him or watching a commemorative video that I made for his memorial service are a sort of salve. 

When you are on the other side of a large loss, the trope about grief never leaving becomes  lived knowledge, body knowledge. I think Jack Gilbert’s poem, an extended metaphor for grief, captures it best. 

Michiko Dead

                            By Jack Gilbert

He manages like somebody carrying a box   

that is too heavy, first with his arms

underneath. When their strength gives out,   

he moves the hands forward, hooking them   

on the corners, pulling the weight against   

his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly   

when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes   

different muscles take over. Afterward,

he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood   

drains out of the arm that is stretched up

to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now   

the man can hold underneath again, so that   

he can go on without ever putting the box down.

We carry grief’s weight, regardless.  But sometimes when we make a shift, we can feel less impacted by it. Of course, grief holds some beauty. One day a blue heron will cross your path and buoy you. We have reminders that we are still here, throwing us into art, nature, rituals or our knees to find or redefine meaning--honing our sense of self and longing for this small future the rest of us have together. 

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Recommended texts for those who are grieving. 

The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing edited by Kevin Young

Obit by Victoria Chang

The World of Made and Unmade by Jane Mead

A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

I Wasn’t Ready to Say Goodbye by Brook Noel and Pamela Blair

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve by Sandra Gilbert