Poets and writers have long explored the human condition and the multitude of common emotions and experiences that unite us all. Within these, perhaps the profoundest of all is grief — the devastation, the frantic feeling of panic, and the unbearable pain that comes when we lose someone we love.
When we struggle to find words and articulate our feelings, it's often a poem, a note, or a piece of writing that has the power to illuminate, heal, and reframe the unspeakable into solace and hope.
In his essay collection Inciting Joy, prize winning poet, author, and Indiana University English professor Ross Gay talks about his own experience with grief after the death of his father. Gay spent six months caring for his dad before he eventually succumbed to cancer. As the author struggled to come to terms with his experience, writing became the vehicle through which he processed his sorrow and honored the person he loved.
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“It was terrifying ... and heartbreaking to see someone you love, just to see their body sort of losing the capacities by which you know them, but also to know that they're also in a good deal of pain, that's devastating,” he says.
Gay admits he had no idea what to expect or how gut-wrenchingly painful the experience would be.
“The truth is, I was doing a lot of work not to feel the sorrow of my father's dying,” he says. “I was trying very hard to avoid feeling it, and to kind of intellectualize it.”
While it was hard for Gay to articulate his emotions, he found release in his prose. In an excerpt from Inciting Joy, he shares the last moments he spent with his dad in a deeply personal and moving manner:
I remember feeling frantic, trapped, as I kept asking him if he could hear me. My hand was on his chest. I was shaking him just a little, asking if he can hear me, “Dad, can you hear me?” And he stayed sleeping quietly. “Can you hear me Dad? Can you hear me?” And by now I was crying hard. And I was kissing my father's face again and again telling him I loved him again and again. It was the softest face in the world, my father's face. So quiet like that. I never knew it. I'd never touched it before. I was crying onto his eyelids and cheeks and kissing him and telling him again and again. I loved him. [a]
In grieving for his father, Ross Gay wonders whether, "sometimes we refuse grief, because it reminds us that we are connected to each other fundamentally — you don't grieve if you're not connected.” Photo by Natasha Komoda.
At 17, poet and essayist Chloe Honum lost her mother to suicide, and struggled to navigate the isolation and shame that followed.
“Quite spontaneously, if I was asked about my mother I would lie,” she says. “It would just be in the moment — it could be difficult just to find the language, and to say the word ‘suicide’ is difficult.”
Born in Auckland, New Zealand, Honum came to California as a teenager. Now an assistant professor of creative writing at Baylor University, her collections of poems include The Tulip Flame and The Lantern Room. Honum reflects on the meaning of her poems “Come Back” and “Offerings,” and how she’s found poetry both “steadying” and “illuminating.”
“Poetry became really steadying to me,” she says. “It didn't have to be poems that referenced suicide, but to see poets able to speak of those experiences was something that was that was really illuminating to me.”
Honum says that her poems allow her to heal her grief and continue to be in conversation with her mother: “There was so much I wished I had been able to talk with her about, and that sort of continues as I grow older and I gather new ways of seeing things that I wish I could talk with her about.”
Chloe Honum, pictured here, turns to poetry to navigate the ongoing healing process from grief. Photo courtesy of the author.
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