A new wave of grief

F*#K 2024. And a poem.

Hello friends. How are you holding up?

I am devastated, angry, and still in shock. I don’t get it. The majority of my fellow Americans have chosen to elect to the highest office the misogynist, the rapist, the racist, the felon, the fearmongerer - because apparently that’s more palatable than electing a woman, no matter how qualified.

I’m exhausted and tired of fighting for my rights to be treated as a full human, and for the rights over my own body that have already been hard-fought and won. Of being told over and over that my life, and the lives of people I love, are less-than.

I am grieving. For our country, for my family, for women, for everyone who has been marginalized in our country and who will be further excluded by this administration. I’m holding you all in my heart today. We will continue to care for each other even as our government fails us.

Today begins another wave and type of grief in for me what has been a year filled with it. But I’m learning that it is important to let myself feel grief physically in order to repair, and in order to eventually keep up the march toward progress. To let these feelings fuel the fire and the fight rather than consume and silence me.

I recently came across this poem about grief by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer that deeply resonated; today feels like a good day to share it. 💙

Hypertrophy

Perhaps it is like lifting weights,

the way we learn to carry grief.

At first we cannot lift it at all,

crushed as we are beneath it.

But then, because to live

we must move, we move

just the smallest measure.

With our lungs, it so happens.

And breath by breath, we lift grief

the tiniest increment.

That’s how it begins.

Oh the muscle of stubbornness.

How life longs to live through us,

even when we would rather give up.

How strange that the only way

to rebuild our strength

is first by breaking down.

The ache is great. Everything tires.

But eventually, the body repairs

what is damaged, relearns

how to carry what at first seemed impossible,

until we are familiar with the weight,

conversing with the weight, even smiling,

even laughing, even playing with the weight.

It’s like the way a mother’s arms

strengthen the longer she carries

her child. It’s like the way I once

could barely lift the barbell,

and then it was not that the weight

became lighter, but that I developed

until I could work with it better.

Does the weight ever lessen?

I don’t know. But I do know it’s easier now

to carry it. And sometimes

I need to change the way I hold it

in order to go on moving.

And sometimes I am simply

so humbled by grief I must

put the weight down and all I can do

is breathe.

And so I do. So I do.

- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer