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summary written by claude.ai
Making Friends with Grief
I have this image of grief in my mind that I’ve never really talked about publicly until Amanda Saint and I went live together last week.
He’s tall. Bony. Ancient-looking, with cold clammy skin and gnarly knuckles. He wears a cloak. And when I was writing my novel The Shadows Shine — about a 12-year-old girl who watches her best friend die — I realized the main character had to stop running from this cloaked figure and actually go out into the woods and talk to him.
Because he wasn’t going anywhere.
That’s the thing about grief. We can’t make him leave. And the Western approach — the sterile funeral home, the casket on a button, the pastor who didn’t even know the person, the fake grass placed carefully over the hole so you can’t see the actual dirt — is designed to pretend otherwise. To contain the feeling rather than express it.
Amanda’s processed 19 bereavements since 2016. Seven of them came in 24 months. She talked about how writing a tribute to her friend Tim — four years after he died by suicide — was the moment she finally understood what their friendship had actually given her. All the things she’d never said out loud. Even the things that drove her crazy, like his electronic music with no discernible rhythm. Writing it made him more alive to her, in a way she couldn’t access just by thinking.
That landed for me. Because I’ve been doing that with Julie’s irises.
Julie was my best friend for decades. I got the call on my birthday in 2019 that she’d fallen and broken her neck. I fed her breakfast almost every day for six months until she was gone. She’d planted an iris garden right before she fell and never got to see it bloom. So I took some of those bulbs. I’ve been tending them for five years now, and last year they didn’t bloom after I transplanted them — which was its own grief, another losing of Julie. But this spring they came back in abundance. I go out with my coffee every morning and name them and find personalities in their little faces and hear her voice saying things like oh, that one’s got a fuzzy tongue. I share them on my Substack. And now readers are telling me they have irises too, and wanting to send them to me. Julie is becoming someone my readers almost know.
Writing does that. It makes the dead more present.
Amanda brought up something that stopped me cold — she described a grief ritual from Bali that a friend witnessed, where women danced with familial daggers pressed to their chests while a cacophony of drums and clanging pots drove them into an altered state so they could embody their ancestors. And then she told me about the Famadihana ritual from Madagascar, where a year after a loved one dies, the family exhumes the body, dresses it in beautiful clothes, and dances with it before reburying it. That ritual inspired a flash fiction story Amanda wrote that got accepted by a literary journal in half an hour. Because she wrote from what was really there, really felt.
What I keep coming back to is this: expression means to push out. All of these practices — dancing, drumming, shrine-building, writing — are forms of pushing the grief out of the body so it doesn’t twist up inside you.
In my ancestral work with my shaman, I had this moment in the woods upstate New York where I’m in full regalia banging on a stick (representing my grandpa Edgar) and a stool (representing my grandma Alice) with another stick, yelling at them to go fix my failing yoga studio. And at some point I became very aware that I was wearing feathers and hitting furniture in the middle of the forest and I just started laughing. And then I’d switch back to grandma and start sobbing. Laughing, crying, laughing, crying. I’ve never felt so profoundly both at the same time in my life. And within six months I’d filed bankruptcy and was traveling the country teaching yoga — set free.
That’s what the full expression of grief actually does. It opens something.
If you feel grief you’re not recognizing as grief — for a job, a version of yourself you thought you’d become, a home, a friendship that changed — that grief is real and it has nowhere to go unless you give it a channel. Writing is mine. What’s yours?
