Kathryn Burns
Presence is the number one thing I need.
I imagine my grief to be a little kid. We go for a walk together, me careful to slow my pace so that the child’s short legs don’t get tired. Or I pick her up, carry her, rock her, if the walk goes long. Sitting on the coast alone, imagining that I am holding this child, my grief, cradling her with both arms.
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Maybe this is hyper-vigilance. I feel out of time–outside it and like nothing can wait any longer.
My sense of safety in the world, that I had never acknowledged as my own, is no longer here.
Dissolving boundaries around other, unprocessed griefs.
Everything that existed before the moment that my brother was gone.
Things I thought, on some level, I still might be able to return to.
The idea that time is linear rather than spirallic, rather than a series of concentric circles, threatens my nervous system into hysterics. When I lived across the world one year and was deeply homesick, I remember beginning to long for and crave parts of home that I didn’t even like.
This sometimes feels like that.
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I need a grief doula. Someone to hand me plates to break when my anger flares unexpectedly.
The emotional quality of the first days is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Sometimes I think art might help but I cannot move, cannot even cross the apartment.
On more than one occasion the pain tackles me from above and I fall to my knees.
The drama of this movement shocks me, even as I cry.
Someone suggests that water might help.
I light candles and climb into the bathtub and let the water hold me for two, three hours.
I do this every night for a while.
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I can't meet outside this place. It demands my attendance, my attention, anything else feels like a sickening, a disassociation. True care comes only from friends who find ways to make the trip consistently to visit me here, sit with me or call me. Those who have themselves been here before offer reassurance about the lay of the land, the rules of gravity. Some, who haven’t, somehow still know what to do… ask me questions, open up space to talk about where I am, to describe it.
They listen, don't compare. I'm afraid to navigate conversation with anyone else, don't know how to ask to be met here or give out my coordinates. Before this, I didn’t know that grief was a place either.
“Do you want to describe the state that you’re in? Or would that not be helpful?”
[It helps.]
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For a while I occupy a state of fear,
not knowing if things will again slow or if the color or meaning will ever come back.
This state begins as acute, urgent; it allows me to slice through everything unimportant (most things), fly home across the world. Overtime, the first few months, this fades into something else.
In North Idaho, where I was born and he grew up, snow would fall by the foot in December and January. You could surrender to the totality of the season, drop everything else, turn to activities and comforts reserved for these periods.
Late winter to spring had none of these characteristics. Warmer weather brought ill- natured reprieve, the unpleasantness of wading, with soggy pant legs, through slush and mud which turned to ice each evening before melting again into dirtier puddles. There is nothing romantic about this time, nothing pure. It doesn't remind you of the intensity of living or invigorate desire to love deeper. It is malaise, a dull achy questioning, dulled senses, energy. It goes on and on.
Apathy. The throbbing pressure of every stress, tedium of performing routine tasks.
Desire to stay in bed, to stare at a wall,
compounded by failure to eat.
On a Friday night, that’s also Valentine’s Day, a deep pocket of grief opens, swallows me again.
I’m afraid. By now I know who I can reach to. A friend listens by text and I realize, alone in this state,
that the act of being heard, witnessed eases the isolation and the feeling of suspension.
Some of the fear is that I too am lost, being lost. I need to be told that I am still in time, this holds and tethers me, locates me as crossing a rift in reality.
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I imagine self-portraits before I reenter the world. Of the heightened (im)possibility
of casual relationship, casual attachment, connection,
alongside accelerated fear of loss.
I laid in the bath today and was struck by a blinding panic of losing someone else.
I cry so easily now, like a cup filled to the brink with water.
Drop any penny in it.
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I don't know what brings me back into grieving some days. It's sensation before its thought.
Growing up, I wasn't taught to seek emotions in my skin, in my exhaustion, in my muscles or bones. My mind used to run these endless scans, looking for hot points, seeking explanation for any sadness seemingly without cause.
The scans are less common since he died. Grief has become my first question.
Do I feel tired, lonely, cranky, slow, frustrated, or are these pleas for my attention?
Grief is physical and the body speaks for itself.
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I think of the way he used to say my name as a kid when I would tease him, grinning and chuckling.
I think of the way he danced, shoulders leaning forward, head bent, his entire body rolling with the music.
I picture him running and hurling himself off the dock by our house, into the lake.
I try not to think of his daughter too much, yet.
Grief is becoming a kind of devotion.
Devotion from the grief of never getting to dance together
again, of never dancing together in our adult lives even once.
The shape of the body that is our family now that he is gone, the violence of the act of having
to say that I have four siblings, that we are only four and not five.
The loss of a man who would have really known me, the adult relationship we never had.
Of being seen and understood by him, loving him in his depth, gentleness, heart.
I tell him out loud how much I love him again and again.
On a train ride, grief wraps around my chest, warm and sleeping.
There’s this deeper sense of self-compassion and self-possession that I’ve started to notice I can access now if I pay attention, curled up inside me. Grief as mooring, too. Even as strength.
As devotion to home.
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Kathryn Burns
Kathryn Burns is a a feminist writer and researcher based in Budapest, Hungary who grew up between the Monarch Mountains of north Idaho and the central coast of California (unceded lands of the Ohlone and Kalispel tribes). Her creative and political interests are rooted in community building, politics of care, and storytelling as a tool for individual empowerment and social change. Burns holds an MA in Gender Studies from Central European University, and is co-founder of Poder Popular Feminista, a platform for community-led feminist learning and doing. More of her writing can be found on substack at Beyond the Meteorology of Magical Thinking.