Why Embracing Grief Brings Me Ease

On living with loss, Occam's razor, and surviving the political blender.

David Sipress, The New Yorker, 2017

HI

I’m not sure when I learned what grief was, but after watching the movie Contact seven times in the theater at age 12, I certainly knew what it looked like. And I knew that I understood it. Or rather, that it understood me. In Contact, Jody Foster plays Dr. Eleanor Arroway, a federal SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) researcher carrying a spaceship’s load of grief into her quest to find life on other planets. If it sounds like sci-fi, it’s not, really. It’s about what happens when we try to figure out why we feel so alone in a massive universe teeming with life.

At 12, I wasn’t into aliens, and I hadn’t (yet) lost a parent (like Jody’s character does), but I knew something about feeling alone. I didn’t have the adult wisdom to understand how common this existential loneliness actually was—that it is, perhaps, a part of the human condition. I went back to watch Contact again and again because it made me feel less lonely.

I didn’t know that twelve years later I would lose my mother, my best friend, to cancer. Looking back, I think some part of me was preparing myself.

Something else I learned from Jody Foster in Contact (aside from an acquired proclivity for men who look like Matthew McConaughey and posture as politically influential spiritual advisors): The philosophical principle called Occam’s Razor. In its most basic form, it posits: All things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one. There are many philosophical razors (designed to eliminate unlikely explanations or ideas for given phenomena), but Occam’s gives me a lot of ease.

It’s a good razor for our news- and social media-addled brains, our psyches saturated with screaming pundits, endless scrolls, images and sound bites designed to go viral. What is it that we’re supposed to think? Who should we trust? What, and in what, should we believe? What if what we really want is (like Dr. Arroway in Contact) to be honest about how alone we feel, how much grief we are carrying?

Lucky for me, brilliant writer and college friend Eliza Clark asked me if I’d sit down for a conversation with her about exactly that. Read our full convo here (and subscribe for Eli’s hilarious, poignant essays on tarot, from a self-described “skeptical atheist witch”).

As one of my favorite books on grief teaches, it’s not just the loss of a loved one that can initiate a grief response. Francis Weller, author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, describes five gates of grief:

• Everything We Love, We Will Lose — the loss of people and things we love

• The Places That Have Not Known Love — those parts of ourselves lost in shame

• The Sorrows of the World — the devastation and loss of planet earth

• What We Expected and Did Not Receive — the life / creativity / work / relationships we hoped for but haven’t yet found; the village / community we are missing

• Ancestral Grief — the grief of our ancestors carried through us

If you’re living and breathing, chances are at least one of those forms of grief resonates.

Even if you haven’t lost a beloved family member, friend, or pet, I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t feel the finger-in-the-bruise of gate three: What We Expected and Did Not Receive. It’s the fulfillment (in work, romance, life) that hasn’t arrived, the dreams we nurtured in youth that haunt our present. (I’ll pause to let you reflect on what that brings up for you, right now. Deep breath.)

And then, of course, there’s the grief of the current political moment. For many of us, especially women, we are carrying a profound sense of betrayal: Whatever little amount of faith we may have had in “our” country to represent and protect our best interests has evaporated over the past years. Beginning with the election to president of a man vaunted for taunting and abusing women, continuing with the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, and cruising right into this month’s ruling to make the presidential office more of a kingship than a democracy, the message remains clear: Women’s bodies are sociopolitical pawns to be debated over and controlled by men.

Anyone else feel like you’ve been trapped in a blender set to *pulverize* along with Biden, Trump, the Supreme Court, news outlets, social media mouthpieces, those endless texts demanding you donate $3 before the whole country vaporizes on your watch, and now, god forbid, J.D. Vance?

This is not a smoothie anyone ordered. My cup overfloweth with What (I) Expected and Did Not Receive.

Mink Stole as Peggy Gravel in John Waters’ Desperate Living, 1977

The ingredients: the presidential debate, during which Trump lied about everything from abortion policy to the January 6th insurrection and Biden, well…; the Democratic party’s ravaging of its own candidate and the liberal media’s frenzy to name another; the immunity case that gave Trump sweeping protections, on which Justice Sotomayor ruled, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent” (don’t forget about the overturning of Chevron Defense); the widespread examination of Project 2025, an ultra-conservative Christian blueprint for reshaping America, and its government; an attempted assassination of Trump; and now Trump’s selection of sycophant J.D. Vance as his running mate.

Meanwhile, we are meant to go on as if our hearts are not breaking, as if we are not terrified for the rights and safety of women, LGBTQ+ communities, people of color, the marginalized, and the planet we live on. We are meant to chop wood and carry water, go to work, pay our bills, hug each other, wring hands, shake heads in befuddlement, sigh and sigh and sigh.

Some of us grieve by denial: turn off the news and tune out the outrage. Others deal in fury: go on doomscrolling binges, rage-text friends, obsess over the trainwreck piling up all around.

Earlier this week, amidst the maelstrom, I saw a post by @jeffberman on Threads:

Over the past 4 years, our kids have lived through:

> An attempted assassination of a former President

> A once in a century pandemic

> A once in a 160-year threat to American democracy

> An unprecedented threat to the earth’s climate

We are the calvary.

And we have so much work to do.

I’d argue this living-through—this grieving—is just as impactful on us adults.

And it doesn’t encompass the personal losses and traumas we suffer alongside the global: the death, heartbreak, wildfire, flood, illness, injury, professional disappointment, and more.

Just this past month, I’ve been to urgent care twice (very grateful for health care; I’m fine), spent days sick in bed (proof that the political is personal; sidebar, it took dozens of labs, an X-ray, multiple exams, and one very insistent friend to determine I had…an ear infection—hello Occam’s Razor), and watched in horror as a 574-acre fire blazed across Haleakalā, igniting PTSD in thousands of Maui residents not even one year from the 2023 fire in the same area (now contained; no building losses or human injuries).

Despite outrage culture thriving on social media and news platforms, our society doesn’t offer much room for what to do with all of that emotion—so much of which is actually just grief. Grief at not knowing. Grief at recognizing the inequities that define our personal and political battles. Grief at being alive to the devastation and the loss around us.

What happens if we talk about it? What happens if we name it? What happens if we’re no longer alone with the loneliness?

For me, this has been the greatest gift of learning to live with loss.

Consider this your invitation to talk about it all, to be in community with all the ways we grieve.

SOME HOT LINKS

To read.

If you need grief resources & support, I’ve got you covered—everything from an after-death checklist that can be used to deal with the minutiae of mortality to book and bereavement group recommendations for many types of loss.

Read more about my mother-loss and romantic heartbreak(s) in conversation with Eli Clark over on Witch’s Mark (spoiler alert: there are baby pics!).

And if you just need an escape: Might I suggest Kevin Kwan’s newest Lies & Weddings, a transportive mille-feuille of jet-setting romance, social satire, hegemonic systems collapse, and a skewering of the billionaire class?

To listen.

Take a deep dive into what makes Contact so powerful with this episode of “This Movie Changed Me”.

This episode of “Hidden Brain” with psychologist and neuroscientist Norman Farb explores how our brains create—and can update—the mental maps that define our perception of the world.

To watch.

Some favorite watching on grief and loss: the film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s novel Wild, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s series “Fleabag”, “The Bear,” for loss of a sibling (to suicide) and family dysfunction, “Shrinking” for comedy about psychotherapists and their patients, “Somebody Somewhere” for midlife crisis vibes, “Six Feet Under” (obvi), and of course Contact.

STAY SANE

The biggest hug. You’re doing great. We’re gonna make it, together.

Love,

Lily