There are days when I am not ok and there are days when I am disintegrating. I keep interrupting whatever I am doing and picking up a pen to write. Writing feels cathartic, like ripping a bandage off an unhealed wound and letting it bleed. It doesn’t make it easier to breathe. It doesn’t help, but it helps. of the things I wrote today, one is a poem for my friend Louise. I called it A Bouquet of Grief:

A few days ago, Louise shared an article about different kinds of grief.

Without looking at it I knew that I would check every box, still

I looked at it and checked every box, then remembered that lists are not my thing.

What if instead I arranged my grief into a bouquet?

A bouquet is not a haphazard bunch of blooms, but a floral message.

So I decided to sort through my grief, petal by petal, and make it into a gift,

Or something beautiful.

The first flower is normal grief, the one where we move through stages

Never quite past denial, never quite free of anger, always bargaining and praying for acceptance.

The second, anticipatory grief of the future,

Of my own mortality (on behalf of my children),

Of mortality of my parents, friends and loved ones,

Of prospective rare earth mining sites,

Of melting ice caps,

Of polar bears,

Of deep ocean ecosystems,

Of coral reefs,

I can go on for ages

Should I continue?

The third, complicated grief

My inability to accept the loss of the nine-year old son of my old-time friend

Who was killed two Novembers past by a car while waiting for a green light at a busy intersection in Phoenix, Arizona.

The knowing that every morning my old-time friend opens her eyes to an empty world,

The knowing that every morning she prays to God I no longer believe in.

The particular sadness of kneeling besides my bed at night with a long list of people and places to pray for

And remembering that I no longer know how to pray.

The fourth, disenfranchised grief of an immigrant,

Of someone who has lost her name, her sense of place and her sense of humour,

Because things are never as funny in translation,

Who traded her birthright for a G7 citizenship and visa-free travel,

Who sometimes wishes that someone asked her where she is from and gave her time to answer properly.

The fifth, collective grief

Feels almost like joy on the rare occasions when we come together,

We don’t have to grieve the same things, let it be different things,

Let it be different griefs, but together.

The sixth, ambiguous grief, like when a colleague casually asks you “do you have any friends”

And you walk out of the kitchen without answering, wondering why your friends

Aren’t returning your texts and never write first and why you

Still haven’t answered happy birthday messages received last June.

Why in fact you never answer birthday messages, as if you were afraid to believe that you mattered to people.

The seventh, absent grief about no longer feeling hopeful about the world.

The eights, secondary grief, when your children are fighting and you break down in tears

Not because they are fighting, but because of the war, and the climate change,

And the fact that AI will surely destroy humanity, and the fact that humanity surely deserves being destroyed,

But you still feel sorry for it.

The ninth, silly grief (I just made that one up)

When you finish a really good novel,

Or your favourite show runs to the last episode and you feel inexplicable feeling of loss

That you wouldn’t admit even to yourself, because what idiot would grieve about an end of a stupid show, when the whole world is dying.

The last, cumulative grief as a space for everything else

Big and expansive and lonely and saulty, like an ocean.