WAYUT: On sudden loss and grief
The comforts and discomforts of communal heartbreak.
Editor’s Note: CW - This post contains topics surrounding death and suicide. Please proceed with care.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the healing nature of creative graduate programs. Five days ago, I received news that one of my peers in my graduate program passed away.
I want to be clear that I was not close with this student, and I’m not interested in co-opting others’ grief as my own, so I will not be speaking in depth about him here. What I will say is that his name was Louis Obioha. He was a sincere and gentle man. He was too young. It feels as though part of the collective body is missing. And I know that feeling will remain.
Like my last post, I thought about researching the topic of communal grief. I thought about gathering data, or pulling from a lengthy list of scholarly articles regarding community mourning and bereavement. But I think that would just be a way for me to intellectualize how I’m feeling and remove myself from pain. I’m trying not to do that.
About twelve years ago, my hometown experienced three teen deaths-by-suicide over the course of a summer. I was young, and didn’t quite have the language to talk about how I was feeling, but I felt it.
I felt grief hang over the community like a smothering blanket, dark and heavy and relentless. Everyone’s edges seemed to dull. People were fuzzier, out of focus, with a vacancy to their movements that no one could really shake.
That’s how this feels.
As someone who loves words, I hate it when they fail me. Right now is one of those times.
When people die—especially suddenly, tragically—all I’ve found myself searching for are words of comfort to ease the sharpness of the loss. Something poetic about death, something lyrical or elegant I can wrap around myself. But losing someone so soon never feels poetic or lyrical or elegant. It’s just fucking horrible. And unfair.
And when it’s a community that’s grieving, the awful and relieving part about it is that you’re never alone.
You’re able to come together and share memories about the person you lost, and laugh and cry and try to hold yourself together but inevitably fall apart and if you’re lucky, you are held. You are held by that community and you hold the community in turn, and there is some twisted solace in that reciprocity. There is some deeply grim and gut-wrenching satisfaction in knowing you are not in this alone.
But sometimes you can’t hold others, and you don’t want others to hold you. Sometimes you want to sit in your room and watch Love Island for hours because that’s all you can do, and your friends will text you to check in and say things like “No need to respond, just know that I’m here” and you will feel loved but also a bit ashamed because you don’t want to talk to anyone, really, and you honestly can’t predict a time when you will want to talk to anyone again and you hope that time will come but for now you’ll just watch the next episode and feel dull around the edges.
Communal grief, to me, can sometimes amplify mourning. Because the community grieves both the person who is lost, and the loss of the community itself. We will never move the same, never relate to one another the same, never be the same collective.
And that feels like kind of a horrible and selfish thing to say—maybe it is, I’m not sure—but I think it’s an important thing to note: that this astounding loss will ripple. That grief compounds.
I don’t know. There isn’t really a neat way to wrap this up, is there? There is no fairness, no neatness, in death. This shit is going to hurt for a while, and it'll hurt others much more, for a lot longer. I’ll do my best in supporting others when I can, and I know it will never be enough.
That’s kind of the thing, isn’t it? That grieving—alone or together—is never enough. It’s casting the love we have for the ones we’ve lost out into the world, desperate and wailing, and hoping that, somewhere, they can feel it.
It will never be enough, but it’s what we have.
Talk soon,
Meg