Three weeks after Jules died, the week Willa’s eyesight began to return, we decided to make a schedule. The proceeding few weeks had a structure of their own, taken up as they were with nursing shift changes, ER visits, medication regimens, and, I suspect, hugely elevated levels of adrenaline and cortisol. When the dust settled and our family headed back to the west coast, grief took up residence. We felt unmoored — tumbling through worlds, suspended in ecstatic time. What were we to do now that there was nothing that could be done? 

Willa and I are not the kind of people who do well with a lack of structure, so we thought having some kind of schedule might help. We should “turn our house into a monastery” was how I put it, having spent some of my twenties in sojourns through cloister doors of various kinds, attending vespers, singing Taizé chants, sitting zazen. 

It was still winter, there may have even been some snow on the ground. We were walking very slowly through the park by our house, remarkable really, given how early Willa was in her recovery. We went home and drew up a proposed (and very packed) schedule.

“Where is the time for crying?” Willa asked.

After each event on the schedule, I put a slash and added “crying.”

We never looked at the schedule again, but we have discovered that many things can be done while crying. Waking up crying. Going to sleep while crying. Reading a book, reading an email, reading a poem — crying. 

Singing a song crying. Crying while taking a walk, taking out the trash, taking a shit. Driving while crying (not advised). Crying making coffee, making dinner. 

Crying while smiling and even while laughing. Learning to let both sorrow and moments of levity commingle in our home and in our hearts. It’s an uneasy coupling and anything like levity, joy or happiness is possessed of its own simultaneous painfulness in Jules absence, but nonetheless it is part of this path that we travel, this unwelcome journey we are making.

People talk about waves of grief, waves that follow the rhythms of some hidden moon. Yet, when a great sadness comes to you suddenly, the grief does not come in waves in the beginning. You wake up drowning in a vast sea of sorrow. There is no shoreline in view for waves to break upon, and the endlessness of it feels overwhelming. What direction could you even swim in? I might also say that grief is a fire, burning white hot within your soul. You sometimes fear to touch it, lest you be consumed in flames. 

Mourning, then, is a practice. Like all practices, it requires a kind of learning: learning to pick grief up slowly, coal by coal; learning how to stay afloat, even when you don’t know where to swim. As Mary Oliver puts it, in those words that we have read over and over again (while crying):

“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it–
books, bricks, grief–
It’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it 

when you cannot, and would not 
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

There are a set of received forms in mourning, and they are useful in metabolizing grief, in finding a way to live with it, to move through it. Many of them are religious, for religions are not just sets of metaphysical propositions. Religions are great bodies of practice, traditions of song and symbol, movement and memory, stretching back across the generations. 

So, when Jules died, we received many religious rituals from you. You told us that his name was being read at your Masses, that you had said the Kaddish prayer for him, you wished for us that his memory might be a blessing. 

We did not think of it at first, but you told us that you were lighting candles for our son at family altars, in your synagogues, and at your churches. So we printed a large photo of our Jules, and we lit candles before it many nights as a symbol of love and memory. Now I have such a visceral understanding of those roadside memorials, the piles of photos, flowers, and candles that are left in the wake of tragic death.

There are also cultural forms that it seems to me have their origin in the knowing not of the mind but of the body. For instance, you sent us food to nourish our bodies, and chocolate to remind us that some sweetness might still remain in this bitter world.

In the early phase of grief, those weeks of adrenaline, I didn’t understand why people were sending food. I was like a blade of grass who had been cut, but was still yet to fall, not foreseeing the great torpor that was to come. But you knew better than me, and for your gifts I am grateful.

Since Jules died, we have not listened to any music, we have not watched any television or movies. We have turned off nearly all ringers and buzzers and notifications, apart from the most necessary. We have, until recently, avoided nearly all news. These were less decisions that were made than things that our bodies demanded. Only later have they become a kind of commitment.

On Christmas eve, I went out with my father to buy black clothing to wear in my mourning, a tradition that apparently goes back to Roman times. In other cultures, mourners apparently wear white, the common thread apparently being the avoidance of bright colors.

Symbols of continued connection between the living and the dead also respond to an almost bodily urge, giving rise to a variety of practices. At the hospital, they gave Willa and I two small white ceramic hearts, each with a smaller heart inside. We left the bigger hearts with Jules in the morgue and the crematorium, and now they rest with his ashes. We wear the smaller hearts on yellow ochre cords close to our hearts, recalling that e.e. cummings poem: 

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in 
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere 
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done 
by only me is your doing,my darling).

So, these days I wander the world in my black attire, with my little white heart hanging from my neck. I sometimes feel self-conscious, thinking I must look like some eccentric devotee of a niche new age religion or an emo musician. I am self-conscious even now, that these words I am writing will feel overly dramatic, that you will pity me or, worse, think I am wallowing. But then I think to myself that I did not choose to be this person, living this kind of life, and that it is only proper that there is some visible sign to the world that I am still half-dead. 

And that, I think, is the origin of many of these cultural forms of mourning: silence, withdrawing from society, wearing dark colors. They allow for the symbolic participation in death, because your own body is participating in death, exhausted from the labor of grief, and yet you still go on living. 

Here it is worth pausing to mention that these rituals require time and resources. Historically, they belong to the people who have what could be called the luxury to mourn. Of course, that’s also true today. Many employers often only provide a few days of bereavement leave and many provide no paid leave at all. What can that be, except a cruel joke? Poor people, people of color, working class folks, they are the people most likely to need time to mourn and least likely to have it. 

Willa and I have been fortunate to have had several months mostly away from work. Even now, I have only returned to work part-time. So we have been fortunate to have had a good deal of time to make our ways of mourning.

For the first three months, we spent much of our days in bed, drained of vitality. We rose at ten, roamed the world like zombies for a few hours, then found ourselves in bed again by six. We spent many of these hours in bed each day reading aloud to each other. While Willa was pregnant with Jules, we read a number of books about pregnancy and early childhood parenting aloud. Since Jules has died, we have read widely: books on spirituality and religion, works of fiction, humorous books to bring smiles to our faces, volumes of poetry to help us see beauty in this world. Along with Mary Oliver, we have read many short stories and novels by Wendell Berry, who likewise extols a kind of quiet protestant mysticism that aims to grasp the wholeness of human living in the natural world. (This is notable in that the great protestant reformer Martin Luther emptied the monasteries; a mistake from which, in my view, much of protestantism has yet to recover.)

On Fridays, and sometimes other days, we sit in Jules’ nursery and look at the photos we have of him from the hospital. It is a time of surrender to the sadness, a time for holding onto the memories we do have. I often try to remember holding Jules’ soft downy head to my chest. I know from the photos that I held him to my right side. But when I try to remember it, I feel his head on my left side. I guess it is a sign that I am indeed carrying his heart in my heart.

I have also been going to a new pottery studio to make Jules’ an urn. I have been making several actually, wanting options, but the first one has emerged from the kiln after being forged at 2300 degrees Fahrenheit. We have set Jules’ ashes in it, and placed it beside his photo. 

When I was making those sojourns through monasteries in my twenties, I went on several Sesshin, weeklong Zen meditation retreats. During a Sesshin, you do not speak, or read, or look into the eyes of another human being. You cultivate a deep silence and stillness. Sometimes, the abbot spoke of these practices as creating a “container” for practice.

These many mourning rituals — religious, cultural, personal — create a container for living through grief. They form the walls, and floors, and doorways of our monastery. They have enabled us to put one foot in front of the other, to trust that the ground is there even if we cannot see it, even if we cannot feel it. They hold some of our grief for us, marking our bodies, so that our minds can find moments of respite, when we cannot put it down entirely. 

Easter Sunday will mark four months since Jules’ death. There are days when it feels like we are emerging from our winter, when there are signs that spring is breaking through. We have more energy, we have more laughter than tears, we enjoy the company of friends, family, and co-workers. Then other days, the grief still breaks through — uncontainable, uncontrollable — and yet these mourning rituals allow us to give it expression without succumbing to the sea and to the fire. 

These rituals (and you, too) remind us that God — or whatever you might call that which encompasses and transcends both being and non-being — has endowed this absurd world with a kind of love or beauty or goodness that exists even amidst suffering and death. Even when all you see is Good Friday — that strange story of a terrible night when not even God’s own son was passed over — and when Easter morning is nowhere in view. Even when you have no understanding of what all these grand metaphysical propositions might mean, exactly, of what all these stories amount to, as if you ever knew. Even then.

Note: We will be holding a memorial ceremony for Jules on Saturday, April 23rd in person and on zoom. If you would like to attend please contact me for details.