Practicing Grief
Will Daddario https :// invitingabundance . net
People experiencing the tumultuous landscape of grief will understandably search for an endpoint , a time when grief will just go away . But this never happens . Grief doesn ’ t go away . It has seasons , and like the seasons grief changes , but grieving will not stop . It doesn ’ t stop for the simple reason that grief is entwined with living . As we live , we grieve .
Believing this to be true , at Inviting Abundance we encourage people to cultivate what we call a sustainable and creative grief practice . We emphasize the word practice because it acknowledges the ongoing nature of living-with-grief . Like a musician might practice scales , chord changes , and improvisational structures with fellow musicians , so too might grievers practice naming emotions , advocating for grief awareness and compassion , and putting love into the world through purposeful activities . Coming from a background in the performing arts , we think of these purposeful activities as art . All conscious acts of making and creation are artistic . For grievers , a daily practice attuned to the possibilities of art ’ s impact on the spirit leads to a renewed sense of meaning in life .
All of this is easier to write about than to do . Especially in the United States , where long-term practices are ordinarily thwarted by promises of quick fixes and the temporary balm of distraction , the cultivation of a life-long grief art project can seem downright preposterous . Indeed , one of the reasons we are so vocal about the notion of a grief practice is that we want to counter the language of consumption and consumerism in the realm of grief so as to replace it with the language of production and creation . Anti-depression medication can help , but the consumption of pills alone will not ameliorate grief ’ s pain . Shopping therapy can provide distraction with shiny objects , but there isn ’ t anything you can buy that will help your body and mind to process the complex emotions linked to pain and trauma . Instead of “ taking something ,” then , we advocate for making something . What will you make in your time of grief ?
All of these thoughts lead me to consider the relationship between grief and the pharmakon . Coming from Ancient Greece and mediated by contemporary French philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler , the pharmakon denotes any activity or object that triples as a remedy , a poison , and a scapegoat . For example , I recently reflected on what I called the pharmakon of conspiracy theories . White people in thrall to the mysteries of QAnon , I argued , are addicted to conspiracy theories in the same way and for the same reasons that many people are addicted to opioids . Instead of mindfully processing acute pain and its connection to emotional trauma , people get hooked on Oxy . The more they take , the more that pill , which begins as a cure , becomes a poison . When eventually the body can no longer live without the poison , the addiction is secure . At that point , much of life ’ s activity becomes an excuse for taking more pills . Similarly , conspiracy theories dressed in right-wing ideology appear at first as a cure for the confusion of the world . How can white people make sense of the growing calls for social justice ? By reading them
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