teacups, tribute, and champagne

Organizing Grief

My Oma was an “uneducated” woman. Poverty and the limitations of an abusive stepfather barred her and her sisters from pursuing an education once they immigrated to Canada from a German settlement in Paraguay. My Oma has told beautiful stories of those times, and laughed in every repetition of their punchlines, despite the hardships and conditions that many Western children may currently describe as utterly miserable. For someone who didn’t go to school past the eighth grade, my Oma took education very seriously; she always said that an education was one thing that no one could ever take away from me. One time when I was 18, I skipped class to have lunch with her at White Spot (as we often did), because I was sad about a breakup. When I confessed this to her, she told me I was too smart of a girl to let a break up keep me from “committing to my studies.”
I went to school the day after my Oma passed away. Colleagues and family told me to take the time I needed to recover –– to work through the healing process and “take care” of myself –– to sit with grief. But grief is not an acquaintance you meet for lunch at a scheduled time. Grief arrives when they’re not invited; like a flat tire when you’re already fucking late or when a student describes their grandmother’s Easter bread as an answer to Question of the Day. I took my five allotted bereavement days. My mom told me to use them to my advantage –– to catch up on some of the marking and work I had put off with the initial force of just existing as a first-year educator and surviving as a young adult in the Lower Mainland. I booked an 11:00 counseling session on a Tuesday. I canceled it. I laid on the floor. I cried in the kitchen. I drank a mimosa. I watched Finding Nemo. I went back to work.
My mother and I made an emergency ferry crossing from a Vancouver Island getaway to meet my Oma in the hospital in Chilliwack. We stood on the vehicle deck and watched the mountains pass by on our way to Horseshoe Bay; it was so cold in the wind on the water, but we didn’t notice. I remember my mother telling me that I was her “person” to go to in trying times. She has told me that I inspire her to be more fierce and to stand up for herself and what she believes is right. What a flattering and daunting responsibility to hold.
My mother is a functional woman, like her mother before her. My parents started cleaning out Oma’s stuff right away because that’s the way my mother works and the way she copes; my father is one of the most caring men I know and he will do anything to support her and our family. I respect my mother’s process and my father’s unconditional support, even if this immediate reaction was harmful to me in those fresh days of mourning. I love my family dearly. They do what they think is right and they do it with conviction.
I spent my brother’s birthday in February alone in my Oma’s half emptied home. The last time I was in this house was to attend a celebration of life which I watched my parents organize and execute despite grieving, working full time, and dealing with the bureaucratic bullshit that accompanies the death of a human being. I had stood beside my mother in this doorway between kitchen and living space and held her shoulder as she read her mother’s eulogy to a room missing one too many people –– stood beside her as she poured champagne in plastic cups for the mouths of strangers, traitors… and family.
My father and I share a delicate bond of quiet, mutual understanding rooted in the necessity of both leisure and familial duty. My mother and I hold each other up, one becoming the other’s foundational support for the others’ ambitious endeavors. I’m what you’d call a daddy’s girl… and I’m also my mother’s Woman.
I arrived at my Oma’s home that day expecting to feel a wave –– to be overcome by the loss. But it was so quiet. And I thought of the days that we didn’t go for lunch, how quiet they must have been. And I thought of how loud my days have become, how much noise interrupts, and how much the cacophony of responsibility drowns out the creaks my body makes –– the creaks that tell me where to go.
It is in those creaks within our bodies –– parched of rationality but saturated in reason –– that truth occurs in art-making. I think of Kathryn Rickett’s words on the function of an improvisational and creative process:
… it is in this event of unravelling embodied stories with these dancers, where we acknowledge and surface the secrets of our unconsciousness as they become more like truths of the human condition whispered.” (Ricketts 2).
Multiple “truths of the human condition” is an important aspect of the stories discovered through movement exploration; a “truth” is but a perspective. But of more importance, perhaps, is acknowledging the time necessary to witness this unraveling. Nachmanovitch identifies that “the Creative and the Receptive, making and sensing, are a resonant pair, matching and answering each other,” perfectly describing an artistic process that unravels without intended meaning and, rather, follows the silent intuition of meandering (34). How many accessible hours must one have in a day to Make and to Sense?
What a luxury time is. What a luxury to be able to ponder, to listen, to galumph… and to take care. It is a luxury to have access to the Chronos time needed to fall into the Kairos flow necessary to enlighten our trajectory in this world (Snowber 28). As artists living in timetables, we can try our best to organize our Kairos moments to fit into the Chronos minutes that don’t demand our energy for profitable endeavors. We can’t be distracted by the creativity-craving waves that flow through us at inopportune times… but we also must do so in order to know our needs and be able to take care of ourselves. We can schedule a time to improvise in the studio. And of course, in that scheduled time, often nothing comes. And thus is the conundrum of the balancing act of listening, producing, creating, and living. I can’t claim to know the world, but I can take care to know the way I move in it.


References

Nachmanovitch, Stephen., and ProQuest. Free Play : Improvisation in Life and Art / Stephen
Nachmanovitch. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1991.
Ricketts, Kathryn. Hold on to your hat! All aboard for the train called fiction no fiction!
Snowber, Celeste Nazeli. Dance, Place, and Poetics, Springer International Publishing AG,
2022, pp. 11–25, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09716-4_2.