Grief as a Portal
An interview with Sebene Selassi & Jennye Patterson
There was this point early in the pandemic shutdown where every time I sat down to meditate, I'd start crying.
It was pretty instantaneous. Sit, close eyes, cue the weeping.
And so, I actually avoided checking in with myself in this way for a bit. It just felt like too much. Outside of those moments of check in, remember feeling quite numb and overwhelmed by all the uncertainty swirling in the air. This was about when we were still bleaching our groceries because we just didn't know anything yet.
So that may be why, something eventually shifted, and I came back to sitting and just letting myself cry. I almost weirdly looked forward to those moments of being with my intense feelings. What seems most remarkable to me now is that I actually had the space to cry every day. My Philly neighborhood was country-levels quiet.
I don't have children, and my partner and I didn't live together, so I wasn't navigating the friction of being in lock down with other humans. It was mostly just me and my very quiet dog in our quiet house.
As a leader of a business that supports small businesses, everyone around me, my team, our clients, was for very, very legit reasons, freaking out.
And in retrospect, if I hadn't had that space to be with my feelings, to grieve, I don't know if I could have shown up to help all of those disrupted businesses and support my team.
Now I'm sure that you have experienced loss at some, if not many, points over the past few years. Maybe it was connected to a global event outside of your control, or maybe it was closer to home. The loss of a loved one, the loss of a part of your work, business, hell, even the daily routine of your favorite coffee shop run.
And my point is, we're in a time of constant change. This change is happening at the very personal scale, and at the global scale, and then at every point in between. Which means that for so many of us, grief is a near constant companion in our lives. And that loss, and accompanying grief, show up whether we have the space to deal or not.
As I've been exploring failure, business closures, and endings during the Summer of Failure series I've been writing these past few months, I knew I wanted to close with a conversation about grieving.
I wanted some help understanding what tools we might need during these times, and to think through how we might make space for grief in our lives.
How do we navigate all the feelings that come up around loss? How do we make space for grief as an ongoing companion?
So I invited
and to come on the podcast for a conversation about grief and grieving.Sebene Selassie is a writer, teacher, and speaker who explores the themes of belonging, resilience, and well being through meditation, creativity, and nature. Sebene has taught classes, workshops and retreats online and in person for over a decade. She is the author of the book, You Belong: Call for Connection, and writes
.Jennifer Patterson is a grief worker who uses plants, breath, and words to explore survivorhood, body(ies) and healing through her business home, Corpus Ritual. She is the author of
, The Power of Breathwork: Simple Practices to Promote Wellbeing, and editor of the anthology Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti- Violence Movement.Both Sebene and Jennye work with and guide others in grief and grieving through their writing and teaching, and I knew would have so much wisdom to offer on being with grief.
Listen to the full episode:
Read an excerpt:
I wanted to start with talking a bit about what grief is, and how we think about it in our lives now. I noticed that a lot of the messages from dominant culture, at least here in the US, tend to point to closure and acceptance as sort of the prescriptions for how we should grieve, correctly, grief. And, particularly in these times of ongoing crisis, that feels like an extraordinarily unhelpful frame.
And so I want to explore this idea of how to think about grief by starting with a personal question for both of you and ask you both where and how grief is showing up in your lives lately? And is there a different way to think about experiencing grief?
Sebene: I just want to start by saying thank you for having me here and having me here with Jennye, who I adore, to explore something that's really poignant. And I think, is being talked about more, but at the same time I feel there's a lot of confusion and maybe even disagreement about this and even you naming that there is you know, this push to have closure.
And I also witnessed the like opposite side of that where people are lost in their grief. So I just want to name that it's such a challenging topic because I think we've really lost our mooring culturally and we've lost our traditional practices around grief. So grief is something that I've been really exploring a lot for the past seven years.
My mom died seven years ago, November, and that was...it's a huge loss and process for me. And then just to speak to your question, more recently and presently, I've been mourning the end of a marriage, a 14 year marriage, which is coming up on a year of that decision and process of physically separating our lives.
And then, the grief process continues in actually sorting through all the emotional material around that. Process is the best word I can think of, it really is this ongoing exploration.
But for me, it's a really important to understand embodied, engaged ways of participating with grief that include ritual and voice and movement and space and time. For me what's been missing a lot from the larger conversation around grief, that it becomes only sort of a psycho-emotional process and excludes all of these other elements, including the elements and nature and all of these other things that can be part of our process with grief.
Jennye: As a practitioner, I've always kind of identified as a grief worker because so much of my own life and healing has been in relationship to the grief and ongoing mourning, that I've encountered in my because of my life experiences.
I grew up in an abusive family [and] really had to hold a lot of what was happening on my own and felt like I was always grieving as a child. I was a very serious child who really was impacted by what was happening in my family and also always had an eye on what was happening in the world and felt very worried about the future, and I think as I've gotten older, you know, and moved through the world in the ways that I have, the ongoing crisis that I've experienced personally, and then also just, again, having an eye on the world is a lot.
The last three and a half years have been challenging for everybody in different ways, and I've had some really shocking losses, and I would say I'm still in the process. I'm coming up on the two year anniversary of the death of my dog, super suddenly, out of nowhere, and then followed by that, I fell down the stairs and shattered my foot, and then had a very traumatic and homophobic surgery.
And the combination of those things was overwhelming, honestly, and it still feels a bit overwhelming still. And it really kind of reconfigured how I feel about grief and how I work with grief for myself, because in the three months after the injury and the surgery, I wasn't able to walk, I wasn't able to put any weight on my foot, so my grieving was just contained to the space I was in.
And, it was intense to feel like I couldn't distract myself. I couldn't go somewhere. I mean, I could go somewhere else, but I couldn't drive. There were all of these limitations around what I could do and where I could go. And then it just shifted what I called on for support. A lot of people in my life, well-meaning dear ones, were saying things to me, like, Oh, well, how wonderful that you have all these tools at least.
And I was like, I can't access any of my tools. Like, I don't want to breathe. I don't want to be alive, honestly. And, you know, the things that I called on were different. I couldn't find words to let people know how serious it was for me.
And then I had another massive loss this summer, a very dear friend of mine, someone who had an instrumental role in my sense of safety in the world, died suddenly, and I just felt like I was back in it again. Like, what the fuck do I even do with this? On top of, you know, climate crisis, and the ongoing injustices and violences that so many of us are navigating.
I think for me, grieving has kind of shifted a lot over the years. And I feel like I'm still finding my way in it. You know, whenever I'm in the thick of it, I almost feel like I know nothing about [grief], even though I spent my whole life navigating it to some degree.
Thank you. There's so many threads I want to pull on now. Going back to something, Sebene, you said, about the other end of the spectrum. We can sort of get pulled towards closure, but also get pulled under. And I wonder at needing a new toolkit in these times. And I'm wondering what that looks like. Like, is that embodiment? Is that nature? Where do we start to look for when the tools we've had are not enough?
Sebene: One of the things I have come to appreciate is the distinction between grief and mourning, which often is not made, they're used interchangeably, and, and they can be. Used interchangeably, you know, for certain contexts, but generally grief is all of these emotions and experiences that we feel related to loss and mourning are the practices or rituals or traditions that we use to process the grief.
Except that we've lost most of our mourning practices as a larger culture and even as individuals within distinct cultures. So, the tools, I think, are a lot about those mourning practices and understanding, how we relate to mourning, because I think a lot of times people only relate to the grief, and that will pull you under, because grief is a huge emotional soup. I relate so much to the physical things that Jennye brought up because of my metastatic cancer and I've had 18 years of surgeries and debilitation and deformations of my body and more recent ones like a hip replacement.
So I grieve my femur ball, you know, or I grieve my lung capacity or my overall physical capacity. And like Jennye, I couldn't walk for the better part of 18 months or so. And yes, that was a huge loss of capacity— and to acknowledge that some people don't have that capacity to begin with— so there are so many aspects to grief and loss that many of us are dealing with, whether it's physical, emotional, or actual death, which I think is very different.
To lose a person is very different than to lose a capacity or even to lose a relationship or something like that. I taught a course recently around grief and I loved exploring other cultural tools. And understanding what we've lost as moderns and in contemporary society in terms of all of these embodiments that you mentioned. Yes, nature, yes, the voice, yes, song, wailing is a big one for me and my interest really peaked around this when my mom died, because even though I'm Ethiopian, I'm fairly disconnected from my Ethiopian and— I'm half Eritrean— to Eritrean cultures.
But because of the nature of a parent dying, I was pulled into traditional mourning practices by the community around my mom. And I basically was surrounded by wailing for a year, because that's the traditional practice. And it was... amazing for me because it really helped to move the grief through my body and it was also fascinating.
And so what kind of mourning rituals and practices have we lost for ourselves and within community that can help facilitate our grieving process?
The first time I did a group breathwork practice, which was years ago, I think I had just gone through a breakup two days before, so I was, like, ready. It was the first time I did this and it was in person at the time and I remember just sort of being like, you know what, I'm just gonna go there and…just wailed and wept and it set off this chain reaction. The person next to me then started to weep and I could tell it was sort of moving around the room and afterwards, the group of us, We talked about that [after], lbecause I had so much access to those feelings in the moment, it almost, gave people permission to go there.
And so I maybe want to bring us back to, especially in your work, Jennye, the communal aspect of this process and how do we connect our own experiences with the collective?
Jennye: I was thinking about that while Sebene was talking... grieving alone, mourning alone is important and also it's really important to be in relationship with other people and I think there is so much happening that is so hard for so many people. I teach only online as of now, just because of the ongoing complications with COVID and breathing in a room together.
But when we we’re in those in-person spaces, one person accessing their emotions really does create room for other people to access [theirs]. And I think that there can be like a lot of shame around how hard something is for us or impacting us. And even for me in my personal life, going through these really difficult moments over the last few years, I had less and less patience to be around people who can't just let me be in it, you know.
Everyone again has their own relationship to grief and to loss and to navigating it, but I just couldn't, if somebody was kind of like short with me or had an expectation, I was like, I actually can't be in relationship now and it strengthened my other relationships with people who could just hold the heavy shit. And be in it and not have to try to give me a solution or bring closure to it for me.
Last fall— I was, I am navigating long COVID and lots of fallout— I was going through a really fucked up moment on a road trip with my partner and my body was doing all kinds of wild things. And I had this one moment where I was like, I just need to hear Sebene on a podcast.
Just need to hear somebody who is in the shit and knows it and is not afraid of it. Because I also think that these times, they're ongoing. Even this summer with my friend dying, I was like, fuck, I am not prepared to keep losing and grieving people.
I don't feel like I know how to do it well. And I had to work with that a bit because I was like, I actually have all kinds of ways to work with what I'm experiencing, it just might not be on the timeline that other people expect, or they might not understand the necessity of it.Â
I think that these moments of like big loss are portals.
They really are. Like we come out on the other side, different people.Â
And so there's always a part of me that, even when I'm in the shit, there's a part of me that's like, Jennye this is like a really acute special time, actually. It's a really powerful moment if you can just stay with it.
Sebene: I really appreciate, Jennye, you bringing us back again to this place of not bypassing the experience, because that's so much about why people just want to go to a place of closure because grief is so uncomfortable and you naming, you know, really having that capacity to be with it and protect yourself from those who can't.
We are composting this material and then sharing it with others. And it's really important that we understand it really well. And then the other side of it is like, how do we guide people? You know, because we all need to guide each other because as you named, this is not going to get easier. It may get easier for us, but externally, you know, we can all read the writing on the wall, environmentally, socially, politically, that things are just getting more and more intense. And so how do we serve as clear and conscious carriers of the messages that people need?
And we need to be able to do that. To go through it, to do that. And it's so delicate, you know, it's such a delicate balance. And I can't say I know how, I'm still exploring and experimenting and understanding. And it's so important that we have these conversations like this as we do that.
Much gratitude to you,
and , for joining me.Listen to our full conversation: