Weaving grief into words

"If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale." -Refaat Alareer

Photo by Shyam on Unsplash

The human mind is wired to do something about pain. Drowning it or running from it are the paths of least resistance, but when they become impossible, releasing it— by far the healthier, albeit harder, option— becomes inevitable. I do believe some of the most powerful forms of human expression have come from places (releases) of pain, often as poetry when prose proves too restrictive to describe the illogical.

As for myself, for as long as I can remember, I have written. The act of putting pen to paper, hands to keyboard and emptying my heart onto a blank page, in a way that might move someone else’s, is as intoxicating as it is cathartic.

But with this latest iteration of the genocide in Palestine came a strange, abrupt, and seemingly eternal winter of my ability— need, really— to process life through language. On October 7, 2023, my words froze. I am still clearing the backlog and paying arrears, scooping unspoken fistfuls from the recesses of my chest hoping to find something acceptably coherent.

I have as of yet been unable to meet my own standards in this regard— specifically, frustratingly, I keep falling short in any attempt to characterize the pain of a mother losing her child. One would think such a universal and indiscriminate agony would be fairly easy to describe. And yet, translating the literally breathtaking urgency, weight, and scope of this specific grief, so that it is accurately perceived by someone not in its throes, is one of the most difficult linguistic tasks I have encountered. I am starting to think the words do not exist.

What, after all, do you say to someone who can still, nearly 2 years deep in bloodshed, construct a counterargument to the body parts of children strewn across the world’s screens?

But I remembered recently that I have been here before.

As any mother will attest, reason leaves your body when it comes to the safety and health of your children. As any single mother will attest, there is a roiling sea of emotion— panic, terror, rage, anguish— that accompanies the possibility of separation from your child. It is the sea in which Palestinian mothers are actively drowning. I have only dipped my toes, but it was enough to realize that so long as God allows me, I will cling to the shore until my dying breath.

Parallel to this and among the crueler realities of this world is the paramount need to maintain one’s composure in the midst of the very storm that threatens to tear it apart at the seams: To use your head when your heart is actively breaking, stay calm as every cell in your body is screaming to run. A positive outcome— in the case of my single motherhood, my ability to function as an anchor for my children— depends upon this composure.

You cannot escape the storm, and you cannot allow it to drown you.

But what, then, of the pain? It urges, nags for, demands release.

In the early days of adjusting to having the girls for only a week at a time, I realized very quickly that I would not be able to outrun or adequately muffle it. It gets easier, certainly— but never easy.

Even now, on the first day of their dad’s week as I sit here and type this out when I should probably be catching up on work, I can feel it lapping at the periphery of…well, everything. The relentless, oddly welcome pace of life’s mundane-but-somehow-still-chaotic tasks— homework, lunches, end-of-year projects, driving to and from school, bath time, refereeing arguments over stolen PlayDoh— has once again come to a brisk and jarring halt. And despite the mountain of tasks I have to complete, I am still left wondering what to do with the silence.

It always catches me by surprise, the pain of separating. It has been nearly 3 years of this dance and, despite the difficulties, an overwhelmingly positive change for everyone involved. Every time, I find myself thinking, Shouldn’t it have stopped hurting by now?

But as of late, another, louder voice has started to ask more important questions: Should it ever “stop hurting” when a child is separated from his/her mother— whether for onlookers or those directly involved? As a mother myself, how do I make sense of the little ones— just as loved, wanted, and cherished as mine, being torn from their mothers’ arms— whether by ICE domestically or indiscriminate bombs overseas?

What is the purpose of our existence if this universal pain does not permeate every single one of our defenses? Should the world not end when a tragedy of this magnitude, a crime absolutely contradictory to human nature, does not move our collective soul?

In a mindless grind numbed by innumerable and easily attainable emotional anesthetics— drugs, money, alcohol, sex, things— is this not the ONE experience of such overwhelming pain that it should be immune to any manmade balm and stop us in our tracks?

And so I hold onto it, the grief— as proof of my humanity, a testament to a living heart, and the thread that connects me with the mothers of Palestine, Sudan, the Congo, Kashmir, and everywhere else mothers are hurting. I sit with it, and I wait for it to tell me how it wants to be seen, rather than trying to force it into words that will not come. I cradle it, like the mothers of Gaza cradle their children’s shrouds, run my bruised hands over its jagged parts, incubate it, honor it, until it emerges as something perceivable and undeniable.

Until it becomes a tale.