On Grief (On My Father's Birthday)

Today would have been my Dad’s 66th birthday. This time of year is typically a little fraught for me and this year is no exception, but I’m doing my best to lean back into the ways I cared for myself in 2015 when life shifted in such a profound way.

The day after he died I found myself lost in a deep fog of grief. I felt ashamed and confused with how upside down my world felt, nothing made sense. The logic that once tied me so firmly to the world was now gone. I was unmoored and felt like there was no “I” to speak of, just a body that was dizzy and spinning in an endless isolation. I only fully grasp now, almost 7.5 years later, how hard I was on myself at that time and how ashamed I was to be in the space of grief. But also, how much I had to push myself to “get on and get over it” because of the demands of life at the time. I started a new job just two days after he died, while making the funeral arrangements, and preparing to start a yoga teacher training that some month. I had to push through. I did not fully process and often didn’t choose to sit with the feelings I was constantly pushing away.

I attended a yoga class the day after my father died. I told no one in class what had happened and did my best to hide my grief, not wanting to have to face sadness and pity reflected back to me from others. I wanted to carve out a time where I could feel “normal” (maybe for the last time) and untouched by the entire summer where I watched my father’s consciousness slowly deteriorate and then die. But, really I was denying myself the right to feel and be witnessed in my pain.

When I got to class, my teacher Bonnie asked the small group if there was anything we wanted to work on. One person was incredibly brave to share with the group that they had just gone through a breakup. I couldn’t tell you now for sure who it was, but I remember their pain and tears and what their vulnerability meant to me, as I was working through the urge to harden my own heart. Bonnie devoted the whole class to heart openers and we surrounded the person with love, care, and reiki. I needed so badly to be in that environment, but I would not ask for it or accept that kind of love for myself at the time. But, in a moment of magic and connection, it was given to me anyway by the willingness of another to be vulnerable in their own pain.

Yoga was/is such a refuge and sanctuary for me. I have lost my connection with it and found it again countless times over the years. But, I truly don’t know what I would have done without the regularity and comfort of the mat and the yoga teacher training program I started the month he died, as well as all the many, many beautiful souls I shared my practice with during that time. One of the only ways I knew then how to let love in was to attend yoga class.

It's taken me a long time and many words on the page to practice getting more comfortable with being vulnerable in my own grief and pain. I recently read a book called “The Modern Loss Handbook” and feel more certain than ever that talking about and holding space for grief is essential to the world. I often feel shame now about how ill-equipped I feel to meet others in their grief despite my experience with it, in part because of how many times and how many ways I have denied it in myself over and over again.

In the book, the author asks the readers to think of the ways that people showed up for you when you were grieving that made the most impact and to use that as a guide going forward to show up for others. Grief, for me, in a lot of ways is still a dense fog. It’s no less cloudy or convoluted but I’ve slowly learned how to navigate around without being able to see.

I want to be a light to guide others and make their experiences easier, but also there isn’t much I remember that did feel good because, despite having love shown to me, I mostly didn’t feel safe or worthy to let it in. I remember, however, finding immense comfort many times in the vulnerability that others showed in their own grief, in person and in writing. I know expressing this realization is part of my own practice of trying to befriend the pain I have felt from many losses that have happened over the years.

I have a strong desire and need to alchemize or harness these losses to help others. But, I often find myself feeling so empty and lost at the prospect of making any difference. This is an indication that I am abandoning and denying myself again. The cycle continues, the practice of moving through this grief continues… if there is anything I have learned through it all, it is to keep going, to keep writing, to keep trying.

The Lessons of Mushrooms

I’ve been spending more time in the forest since the quarantine began. I live in an apartment complex that is in walking distance to a patch of woods that surrounds a local river, which is a great privilege I do not take for granted. It has been raining a lot this April and morels are in season for a little longer. So, I have been venturing to the woods at least once a week to look for them (and also to collect garlic mustard - an introduced species that grows like wild around here). Just walking and getting my body moving has been essential to my mental health.

Also, I have been working on creating a hidden section to this site to house some of my recipes that I have been creating under the name The Radish Room (Instagram) since 2017. You can find the recipes here: akalder.com/theradishroom. I am slowly typing up my handwritten notes and getting good photos of favorite meals to share with the world. One dish that has worked particularly well with foraged ingredients is my sunflower pesto recipe. I substitute garlic mustard for the basil and use that as a sauce for pasta, with chickpeas and sautéed peppers and morels.

Foraging brings me a lot of joy. The hours spent in the woods forgetting about the outside world, then the hours spent in the kitchen remembering nature. Getting low to the ground looking for mushrooms changes my perspective, helps me to better appreciate the smaller aspects of the forest and the interconnectedness of the ecosystem.

This pandemic has brought joy and purpose to the forefront of my consciousness in a big way. The joys in my life now “pop” with a new brilliance. Yes, there has been sadness and despair and anxiety too. But those also illuminate the joy in a way. Because when I contemplate how I want to spend my limited time here, writing and being in nature stand out more than ever. Both of these activities are ways that I connect: to other people and to the natural world. I value connection, networks, diversity. I am finding new ways to connect that I never considered before, like online writing classes and zoom calls.

In many ways, I feel life has prepared me in its own way for this global health crisis. I spent the greater part of my adult life studying edible plants and the patterns of nature, as well as mindfulness and healing techniques to deal with depression and anxiety. I trained in yoga and reiki, I learned to cook and how to eat really well at home. I have (for the most part) eased away from alcohol and others ways of numbing out to pain. I have lost many loved ones, including a parent and a parent-in-law. Just this last year, my spouse and I lost three family members within a few months of each another. The year 2019 was, by far, the hardest of my life so far … and then in 2020 we all get hit with a global pandemic. For much of this past year, I could not understand how that kind of compounding loss ever could serve me, how it could teach me anything other than that I needed to endure and just keep living when things felt utterly hopeless. With each death, though, I realize that my grief evolves a little. I have gotten better at accepting life’s impermanence and moving with (instead of fighting against) the current reality. This has also illuminated joy in my life. I can be more present with my life when I live in this acceptance. I am by no means perfect in grief. Not even close. Grief answers to no one and will do what it pleases, after all. But, I do feel more prepared than before to deal with whatever life will throw our way next. I do want to mention that I also have the incredible privilege in this pandemic of not being in survival mode, worrying about a paycheck or housing or groceries or any other basic needs. Although this would not have been the case for me for most of my adult life, which is mostly a matter of timing, I have had more mental space and bandwidth to process and think. As Yuval Noah Harari so aptly says, “thinking about the big picture is a relatively rare luxury.”

Most of my life, I also believed that I was flawed because I could never just be one thing … I worked many jobs across many fields (environmental, fundraising, accounting, retail) and cultivated deep interests in several areas (nature/science, writing/communication, wellness/healing). I almost never felt adequate in the world and often felt like a failure for not being able to just put my head down and commit. But, now, I am seeing clearly how these aspects of myself converge to serve me (and thus help to serve others). Now, more than ever, I know that I was not put here on earth for the status quo. I am here to help build something new. In these words is where my interests merge, art is where they come together.

Mushroom hunting is a lot like life in this way. Sometimes I need to be patient to wait for the lesson. I need to get down low to the ground and humble myself to change my perspective. There is a season for everything in life. When the season is over it is time to let go and begin something new.