Letting Go: Wisdom From Our Grief

This certainly wasn’t the 2021 I imagined, long ago, when I thought the whole future would be in effect by 2020 — I grew up expecting flying cars and space travel any minute now. Instead of negotiating black hole etiquette and aliens, the year was filled with overwhelming grief cycles. I cried more than I ever thought possible in a single year. I want to write a column for you that is just a list, but it’s not about the people we lost this year. Can you imagine how many people died from old age?

And when we weren’t dying, we were going through the tumult of trying to decide if it is safe to go outside of our homes. Many of us were tired of practicing collective safety practices in defense of those who won’t or can’t. We were moving to new cities or to another country because we were tired of the same landscapes and walls. We were tired of the same arguments, and we were breaking apart. We were learning how differently we all define “safety,” and what some of us are willing to risk our lives for. We were learning how deeply paranoia and mistrust are embedded in our collective psyches. We lost friends. Not everyone could cope with the distance or differences in our survival strategies. We lost organizations; not all could turn their existence into something useful and accessible for Zoom; not all groups could weather the emotional storm of such loss.

And, quietly, with no shortage of survivor’s guilt, some of us were devastated by the loss of what we had planned for these years. The journeys we were going to take, the love we were going to discover, the school we planned to attend in person, the friends we were going to go on girls/boys/theys’ trips with, the freedom from our parents or kids we were going to celebrate, the kid we were going to have, how lost we were going to get in new cities, the sabbatical we were crawling toward.

There is grief on top, and there is grief shaped by grief, held in grief by grieving people.

But I have some good news… I think.

In this journey, I lost my certainty and now I fly by the seat where my emotions and experiences take me. But that is the good news — we are more clear about how little we know, and how uncertain everything is, and how constant change is, than we have ever collectively been before.

We are learning so many things about how grief affects us individually and collectively. We know we must get good at grief, because change — both the kind we want and the kind we dread — requires a letting go.

If we really accept the truth of change, how much it is beyond our control and how much we attempt to control, then we can let go the misguided belief that we are in charge, or that controlling should be our goal.

When we sit with the work of grief — the nonlinear emotional journey of facing undeniable loss, a journey which is somehow recognizable even though it looks different in every iteration, in every face — we have to recognize that one day we will be the one who is grieved. And in every one of our current and future relationships, for everyone we love, know, or ever will know, an element of grief will someday enter — one of us will die before the other, leaving the other to grieve.

This all leads me to an overwhelming awareness of how precious life is and how precious this moment on this planet is. How, to have a healthy relationship with life, we must be open to letting go of practices and beliefs that lead to premature death.

We must let go capitalism and the accumulation drive, supremacy posturing and it produces in ourselves.

We have to let go our destructive tendencies toward one another and the planet. We extract from each other, destroy each other — we do the same to this precious and only Earth we know.

We must stop thinking that there is one way to accomplish everything. I was recently given the gift of these words from Ojibwe ancestor Walter Bresette: “Thinking there is one way to do everything is the most European way to approach life.” We have to let go of that colonizer-thinking, which is at odds with the complex biodiversity of all life. We must stop trying to make everyone think and act the same, and learn real strategies to share a planet that is not fully ours.

Along the way, we must be able to let go of those parts of ourselves that were socialized under capitalism and oppressive systems. These harmful patterns and behaviors are markers of our past selves and make us more curious, complex, and more compatible with the present. Ultimately, I believe we have to let go of anything that isn’t love.

Inspired by my grandfather, I wrote a little spell to help with this release. This spell is mine and you can use it to inspire your own spells or articulations of letting-go.

papa’s prayer

Let it go
You won’t be here forever
Let it go
Let it be dust blown out of your palm
Let it go
The mistake was made
Let it go
don’t build that wall of disappointment
Let it go
This is your best, it was their best.
Let it go
You cannot force anything to happen.
Let it go
Keep only the lessons
Let it go
Your hands are smaller than Godhands
Let it go
you cannot even fully comprehend it – what a gift
Let it go
Give generously, you have plenty
Let it go
Keep moving towards your joy
Let it go
You can still be joyful
Let it go
Live like a river. Take a long, slow spill home.
Let it go
This is the only moment, this is the dream
Let it go
With your next exhale
Let it go