The River

"It's grief. They want you to have some normal response to grief, you know, so they don't have to watch. But it's mine."
--Henry Carter portrayed by Kevin Spacey in the movie Shrink.

Three days ago…

While walking next to my girl Maritza through the streets of the Mission District in San Francisco on Dia de los Muertos, I realized something profound was happening. Painted skeleton faces. Candle luminaries all around. Packed crowds full of mourning, carnivalesque pilgrims communing with their dead. Skull and bones etched upon elaborate altars made from scratch. They call the march a "processional." Here the boundaries of life/death, religion/secular, sadness/celebration, here they go blurry. Here the isolation of grief meets its eclipse. I turned to her and said "Pretty prophetic for a culture that doesn't want anything to do with grief."

We don't grieve because we refuse to face the unnecessary damage we accumulate through unnecessary war, unnecessary violence (read: racism, sexism, neo/colonialism, heterosexism), unnecessary consumption/production practices, unnecessary distancing, unnecessary silencing. Our refusal multiplies the contents of grief. So we accumulate and accumulate and accumulate and the buried dead, the relational deaths, the sorrows of significant and untended loss—they whisper, call out, scream and haunt. They haunt, hoping we will wade in the water, hoping we take seriously the things we have loved, hoping we will not turn away.

Maritza nodded. She knows a lot about death and dying and grief--and about the murderous silence often accompanying them. She works for/in the Latino/a community, in the field of AIDS prevention and outreach. She lost her brother. She knows. She uses the language of "crossing-over" and while that language is foreign to me, it communicates so honestly the trespass, the back-flipping liminal space that momentarily exists when what's lost comes alive again in memory. This is the real stuff of resurrection. Christians should make this street their classroom and put down their pathetic theories of heaven. She bends down and gazes into the altar constructed for Cesar Chavez. She takes pictures and lingers. His work is her work. And I witness her witness, his resurrection inside her wide-open heart. And this: my gaze upon her adoration, this is the work of mourning together, the hard, sometimes almost impossible work of staring at and seeing loss without trying to strangle it, or put a wall up in front of it, or shooting someone because you refuse to feel it. This is the radical and creative motion necessary for the ash to penetrate the earth while giving permission to its surrounding soil: yes, let something new bud here.

If we create space for each other, if we allow our companions the dignity of grief, without attempts to control or fix or minimize, we might possibly end the ceaseless marches to war. We might instead, begin floating in a river that changes its pace, follows no predetermined direction and therefore promises no security, and sometimes gets colder than we can tolerate. But the river, the river will deliver us.