I attended a grief course online recently that brought it down to earth for me differently than before. Which surprises me to say, because I thought I knew grief. It’s shaped my entire life because of my mom’s death when I was a child, an event I’ve spent decades processing and recognize now as an ongoing theme. It is the focus of my memoir, The Art of Reassembly. During the class, I recognized more ways that grief shows up in ordinary living, especially now.

The presenter, Meghan Riordan Jarvis, is a trauma therapist and grief expert whose work is significantly informed by lived experience. In her mid-40s, Jarvis experienced the loss of her dad a year after his cancer diagnosis and then the sudden death of her mom two years later. The first loss aligned with what she knew to expect, while the second led to a PTSD diagnosis and inpatient treatment. Drawing from all this expertise, Jarvis now writes and teaches a practical, holistic approach to grieving. As an energy healer, I immediately resonated with her definition of grief: Energy created in the body on account of loss. To grieve, then, is to move that energy through the body.

The surprise came on the second of the course’s five days when the usual clues of my inner state being unsettled appeared: irritability and restlessness. Recent or distant deaths didn’t seem activated. It was something else. “We lose more than people,” Jarvis said. Changes in identity, relationships, health, along with world events create grief. It seems that sitting at my screen for three hours a day, exploring mindful exercises and hearing stories, gave more subtle losses a chance to seek my attention. A mix of things both personal and communal that I might say make me anxious or afraid, angry or frustrated, could be called loss. That I am grieving.

Typically, I engage with these emotions through “coping techniques” I find genuinely supportive and that do move energy, from activated flight/flight to a more grounded state for example and increase my self-awareness. What would happen if I looked through a grief lens?

Right after the course, we enjoyed separate visits from our out-of-town children, a highlight of which was observing our two granddaughters, cousins age 2 and 5, playing together. As they dressed and fed dolls, drew with markers, and did puzzles, hints of sadness blended with my overflowing delight to witness their giggles and tussles. Oh yes, I have grief that I can’t enjoy these moments in regular life because one family lives 8 hours away. Even just this naming shifted my internal energy toward greater acceptance of myself and the situation. Might I wish to engage more directly with this loss? Or with my grief at floods, genocide, rising authoritarianism, shootings? I think so, but how?

The tools and resources that we use to process the energy of grief become our grief practices, in Jarvis’ terminology. Arriving at them can be a monumental effort requiring much support, depending on the loss. There are myriad options, but the task is to find what works, realiziing that they evolve over time. I have done this for years in relation to the loss of loved ones, especially my mom, through writing, therapy, cemetery visits, photo and heirloom curation, and connecting to other grievers.

I’m curious about grief practices and would love to connect with others around this topic, particularly because many griefs are communal, yet we have few outlets to mourn together in our culture.

Resources from Meghan Riordan Jarvis:
End of the Hour: A Therapist’s Memoir
Can Anyone Tell Me? Essential Questions About Grief and Loss
Grief Is My Side Hustle Podcast

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash