Before Hope, Grief

“We have to purge everything on day one.” This is what my teaching partner said to me as we prepared for a three-day storytelling workshop in the Redwoods a month ago. The topic was “Re-imagining Our Parenting Stories As We Come Out of the Pandemic,” and my friend Suzanne Pullen was right. That first day, I looked around the circle of 12 parents who had been through- well you know, right? Even if you aren’t a parent, your body knows what this has been like. And it was still hanging out in their – in our bodies – that slightly sick feeling when you’ve felt too much for too long and just shut it down because you have to keep going. 

But “doing grief” is sometimes a blindspot for me. As an Enneagram 3, I lean towards unicorns and sparkles. I want to get to the magic NOW. So I will tell you, right here at the top, that at the end of three days, we were crying and laughing together, feeling hope that some worried was impossible at the start of the workshop. The Redwoods helped, of course. The arc of story did too. But if we hadn’t started with really acknowledging what we’ve lost, we would never have gotten off the ground.

We have to begin any journey by feeling what is lost. This is embedded in the great stories that have survived thousands of years. (It’s also part of my Banish Burnout workshop based on the ancient story of Baba Yaga and Vasilisa the Brave. Check it out.) I was reminded of this in the Redwoods and again a few days ago when I listened to the latest episode of the Battle Tactics for Your Sexist Workplace podcast, (It’s back!! Hooray!!)

It starts with Eula Scott Bynoe saying “We are all experiencing a pretty significant grief event this very moment. Seriously y’all. More than 600,000 people have died of covid. And whether we realize it or not, that grief is going to show up at work.” Episcopal Minister Anjel Scarborough goes on to describe the symptoms of deep grief – being “disoriented, confused… you can’t think clearly. You might find it hard to retain new information.”

What she said tracks with what I am hearing from progressive leaders:  

“Why can’t I switch focus like I used to? Why can’t do things that used to be so simple?" 

“I am so quick to anger. I want to be able to be present for my staff, my family.”

And also, ”Two years ago I could not have imagined this life.”

Podcast host Jeannie Yandel says “If we didn’t do this episode, I would have gone through my whole fucking life without knowing what grief looks like.” Jeannie describes the box that grief has been put in : “It’s got to be quick, it’s got to be private and it’s got to be something that you recover from… a way of showing your resilience.”

This is a great episode, I highly recommend it. And I want to recommend something else – don’t grieve alone. I know this is not easy, because grieving alone is now the norm. But, for most of our evolutionary history, this was not so. Our ancestors grieved together in collective rituals that honored and connected and, in time, integrated the loss. My friend, director, artist and ritualist Samantha Ravenna Shay taught me about the ancient rituals led by the Priestesses of Lamentation, in which the dead were grieved together by telling the truth about them and their deaths. Ravenna also shared with me the history of the end of these rituals- they were eliminated at the same time that war became mechanized and impersonal. Telling the truth about grief became a threat to the structures of expanding patriarchal and colonial power. Grief became isolated. 

That feels like now. Grieving together is subversive, powerful and important.

I’m thinking about this as I think about banishing burnout for progressive leaders.  Last week, I talked to a wonderful organizer in Michigan, Megan Hess, who said that she hadn’t begun to grieve because, like so many women I talk to, she is holding together so much for so many. And then she paused and said “Storytelling metabolizes grief.”

Yes. That’s what I saw in the Redwoods. We began with telling the stories of what we thought great parenting meant before the pandemic. And then we told what happened to us, as parents, as human beings in this long dark time. As we told our stories of change and loss together, we opened the way to heal. I want this for you.

Buddhist philosopher, activist and movement elder Joanna Macy says there are three great stories that are competing for our future: the industrial growth story, the apocalypse story and the story of The Great Turning, in which we make the gigantic change toward a life sustaining society. This is a great working of love in a time when feeling has become so painful. And, as Anjel Scarborough said “Grief is the price we pay for love.”  

Without grieving, the ability to feel, to hope and to love- our work, ourselves, our families, our world- all of that gets numbed. And love is the door to everything.

Try this: Ask a co-worker or friend you trust to sit down with you. Share what you thought being a leader or a parent or a spouse meant before the pandemic. Share what has changed. Tell them what that loss feels like. If you want, set a timer for 7 minutes and then switch. It’s nice for each person to be able to just speak freely. And, check out Banish Burnout, my current workshop. It starts on September 21 and will begin with as the wise stories do. We will acknowledge loss together before we open the doors to change.