The Ceremony of Grief

Loss and its resulting grief are an important kind of ceremony, made more powerful with the support of ritual.

I’m learning a lot about the ceremony of grief these days. Last year we made the leap to bring ducks into our family, here on our very small plot of land (shy of a quarter of an acre). For the last 10 years, since having the great fortune of landing here, I have painstakingly supported the transformation of soil, and therefore everything else, that encompasses our ‘compound’. Slowly learning the practice of permaculture – the art of curating self-nourishing loops and cycles within an ecosystem – we were definitely missing something before the ducks arrived. 

With our ducks, affectionately named The Gertrudes, we gained family members with a natural and unsurpassed capacity to eat insects, including slugs, beetles and flies. We gained their extraordinary nutrient-dense manure that, when deposited in water (a duck’s favorite place to be), becomes a plant food that is ready to be offered to the hungry gardens, with no composting time necessary. We gained roaming garden aeration. And of course, The Gertrudes produced eggs, which are higher in antioxidants, Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin A and protein than chicken eggs. What we didn’t imagine, could not have imagined, was the tremendous love we would feel for these family members. And with that love, came the most heart-rending grief when things didn’t always go according to plan. This rainy morning, just a little over a year after our duck experiment began, my heart is full of grief.

As I open my computer to write you this invitation (keep reading to get to the invitation), I see this morning’s Brain Pickings email in which Maria reminds me that “grief is the shadow love casts in the light of loss.” It is such a mysterious thing, these emotions that come without bidding, that consume our momentary experience – and sometimes consume entire lifetimes and even multiple generations of lifetimes. In this last year we have lost three of our beautiful ducks. The loss of them brings an experience of heavy grief that sits on me like a suffocation. 

Grief is a thick emotion. It so easily gets stuck. And things can so easily stick to it; like shame, guilt, and regret. Stories, opportunistic and defeating, can attach themselves to grief; ‘the world isn’t safe…these kinds of things always happen!’ But if handled properly, grief is powerful and it is essential. It is like the end of the loop of our human experience that brings us back to our embeddedness. If we tend to it. And for me, tending to it requires that I drop into ceremony.

So last night, as the sun was setting long and golden across the fields behind our home, my partner and I set out with the dogs, carrying the sweet and beautiful, lifeless body of our most treasured adolescent Welsh Harlequin beauty, Citrine. She, the gentle, curious, affectionate, dear-hearted creature, along with her sister Rosalie, had just joined us six weeks ago at the tender age of 2 days old. And now, just as they were weaving their way into the family, we are already saying goodbye to her. And doing so because of our own missteps, taking our eye off of our wolf-hybrid, who is gentle with the adult ducks but gets activated by the younger ones.

Tonight would be a simple ceremony because the day had been a big one, made almost impossibly hard by Citrine’s violent death. Walking slowly, holding Citrine’s beautiful just-feathering body, her stripes and dots, her opulent creamy breast, her long strong prehistoric legs and talons, her bill made exquisitely for scooping, shoveling, crushing and filtering. As we walk in silence I remember that my people, the North Norse, (and particularly my first-generation father, his parents and their parents) have worked hard for my right to grieve. 

Allowing and feeling grief isn’t practical – or even possible – when you are struggling to make ends meet, to assimilate, to belong. But I imagine this quiet sojourn out into the fields to be one that my ancestors would be grateful for. To care for a thing and grieve its loss is the sign of a well-enough nervous system. To enact the necessary rituals and ceremony to keep the grief generative – as opposed to stifling it so it becomes toxic – is a sign of a well-enough life. 

We arrive at the place we usually go when our grief is too much for us to hold on our own – The Grandmother Tree – who stands 80 feet tall in the center of these fields. We lay our little lifeless Citrine at the base of The Grandmother’s immense trunk, noticing the owl pellets all around and hoping that this young duckling will feed some others. And then we speak our griefs and our sorrows. We speak our frustration and even rage at losing Citrine in this pointless way, a thing that could have (should have?) been avoided, if only…. And then we speak our gratitudes and appreciations for Citrine and for The Grandmother Tree, naming the love and joy we have so experienced because they are in our lives and hearts. Then we are silent for a few moments as we let all this settle in and around us. The silence is heavy because this doesn’t make the grief go away. If anything, it amplifies it a bit. But it also lubricates it. It keeps it supple and in-motion. We breathe deeply and loudly, sighing so often the dogs look at us concerned.

And then, with that, we turn and make our way back across the field to home. As I sit here, the morning after our brief ceremony, looking out on the rainy fields, our two remaining ducks making their way across a very wet lawn, hunting and rooting and calling out for Citrine, I have a sense of Life-in-process. Life-in-motion. And this is part of it. I feel so deeply sad, which doesn’t feel good. But, I also feel well. I feel grateful. Our simple ceremony of the night before anchors me.

Perhaps this story reminds you that you, too, are hungering for support with your own heavy heart? 

Or maybe, you might benefit from some companionship in your own ritual and ceremony process? 

Or perhaps you are, like so many of us, hungry to gather once again, in the flesh, to laugh and sing, dance and cry with each other as we work a kind of sacred choreography of ceremony alongside each other? 

If so, I encourage you to join us for Eros, Ceremony & Belonging, an all-camping weekend in the forest and open meadow, Aspen stand and cool waters along the Colorado Trail. Starting Thursday June 17th, we will step into a gentle ceremonial space that allows us all to do exactly what we need to do, to honor all that we are, to give deep wordless gratitude to the Earth, the Waters, the Night Sky, the Sun and so much more.