Grief in Three Bodies: A Conversation

The following conversation is an intimate discussion that formed in the early months of COVID-19 lockdown, when I talked with poets and writers Victoria Chang and Prageeta Sharma about our personal experiences living with profound grief. Due to the nature of this dialogue, while also enduring the ongoing pandemic, the pacing of this project was sporadic, taking over twelve months to produce through email exchange. This conversation also honors the Grief Garden, a collaboration between the Poetry Foundation and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in 2018 that featured my poem, “On Visiting the Franklin Park Conservatory & Botanical Gardens,” in an immersive poetry installation, which served as an invitation to foster open conversations around death and loss, as well as the ability to grieve personally and collectively. Please note: the content discussed includes sensitive topics.
—Khaty Xiong

on memory

Khaty Xiong: Just as grief is shapeshifting, so is memory, like a doorway leading to more doorways, and what lies beyond them changes every time we walk through those portals. After all, death has such a way with asking for our attention. Victoria, I am especially reminded of the following lines in Obit: “To acknowledge death is to acknowledge that we must take another shape.” And because death makes such an impression, even memory “gets up after someone has died and starts walking.” Such chilling words, leading me through my own complicated memories of my late mother.

My concept of memory used to be quite textbook in that it was simply a way to remember past events. Through my mother’s death, however, that concept has grown, making memory more of a living artifact, complete with nerves, including the ability to alter the truths of said events and how these changes can impact us greatly in the ever-changing present. In other words, memory is constantly informing the grief inside us, which brings me to another line in Prageeta’s Grief Sequence, discussing memories as “curved and then sounded....” I have been so moved by both of your books as they map out the terrors of profound loss with such heartbreaking precision.

In my own grief journey, I am still traversing these terrors, on and off the page. The Grief Garden that was set up a few years ago really amplified for me how even something as private as grief can be powerful (even life changing), particularly when experienced in a communal setting (in this case an immersive installation). It was such a privilege to share that space with others. Though as I search through my own memories, I wonder when I’ll stop feeling like I’m still in limbo (if there is anything else from which to emerge) or is limbo the only destination for the bereaved? I am curious how you two have navigated the realms of memory and grief in your own worlds.

Victoria Chang: I’ve been thinking a lot about memory and grief, and how in some ways memory is grief. I think I wrote something like that in a book of essays I’m working on called Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. The title includes writing, memory, and grief because, for me, all three are stitched together. When my mother died, and my father’s brain died, their memories died, too, and their memories are all the memories tied to my family history that I didn’t know much about because they never seemed interested in talking about it (trauma, I imagine). I’m thinking about Prageeta’s words too in Grief Sequence (“Memories curved and then sounded ... ”) because memories are alive, like cells. I’ve now resorted to asking relatives about their memories, which, of course, are different from everyone else’s memories.

Prageeta Sharma: Oh, the Grief Garden is so moving. Thank you, Khaty. And, Victoria, the poetic forms in Obit structure this evocatively. How do you think you are going to approach these themes in the future? Does Obit feel completed to you? I don’t mean to suggest that memories are ever fully complete in their reflection, as we must keep returning to all of them and our recall, but I am thinking about form. I am really interested in how you both engage with form and how memories are held in them. I’m interested in how these essays, formally, build. Do they bring you to a different place?

I’ve been thinking about how memories kept shifting for me through the passage of time. The one thing I knew about it was that my relationship to my memories would change its shape, they would “curve,” they would sound, they would cry out to me, in some way, until some subsided and others manifested. It’s because I started to realize after Dale died that the unfinished business was how to think through a marriage with a complicated partner, an alcoholic, who kept me at a distance while I was one of the few people in his life he could trust. It’s painful. I had to let go of some of the sweeter memories for realer ones, but it didn’t mean I loved Dale any less. This is the hardest to explain to people; they assume when you’ve had a tough marriage and the partner dies that it might be similar to divorce because it was a difficult experience, but you didn’t choose to lose them, they died on you, and that is still the fact of it.

VC: I think grief never really ends, does it? It just changes, like memory. So I’ll probably be writing into and out of grief for a while, I imagine. The hybrid essays I referred to above are stitched with grief as well. I also love how you talk about how your relationship to your memories is “curved” and how the complex relationships underlying a death make an already complicated process of grieving even more complex! I loved how raw the poems in Grief Sequence felt to me, and these curvatures were very much a part of the poems. Sometimes people will say my poems on grief are raw and very open and I wonder if this is just because I am not a white person writing about grief. So the experience feels different to some readers.

PS: Thank you. I found Obit so inspiring because you straddle so much in your poems in this book. I was so inspired to think about the way the poems built distance and yet stayed immersed in their subjects. And how the elegiac moves in your poems are constructed from memory. I think about how memories die and how, in the fifth anniversary of Dale’s death, I have a different relationship to the memories because I have to piece together lots of loss and many secrets that he took with him; it’s so hard to figure out. But I’m grateful I had a sense to keep a lot of documents that may seem peripheral. I knew that if I looked at them again, they would trigger the memories I wanted to hold onto. And now, I have lost all of Dale’s family except for his sister; his mother and stepfather have since passed, and I’m estranged from my stepdaughter, and not by my choice. Even after feeling like she and I did so much growing together, she erased me, my parenting, and our life. We explored so much: blended family, multiethnic identities, and styles of parenting. And I’m starting to write about the way my parenting got erased from the equation and how racialized it feels to me. And to be childless. So I guess memories haunt me. I wonder, did I have that life? What was it? The aftermath made these memories shift so much. I’m grateful that I had something “pure” for a while in Grief Sequence because I don’t know if I would have been able to write the same book today. Reading both your books, and Khaty’s recent poems, I am struck by what we all do with the memories. How do we conjure them up and retain their presence?

VC: Wow, Prageeta, this is so complicated and interesting, this notion of what happens to a stepchild after your partner passes. In sort of an idealized fake television show, you can imagine how the stepparent and the stepchild lean into each other as they grieve together, but I can imagine the exact opposite happening in reality. An estrangement.

KX: Prageeta, I’m so grateful for Grief Sequence and for that “pure[ness]” of which you speak. I too have already noticed changes in both my grief and in my poems. It makes me wonder if putting together my second book will be an even harder project because of the passage of time and its influences on memory and grief. Victoria, I’m also struck by your account of your parents’ memories having died with them when they passed (along with what knowledge they had of your family history), perhaps because this resonates so deeply with a lot of Asian, war refugee, or immigrant families.

When my mother died, a very different pulse permeated in my body. I’m not even sure if I was aware pulses could feel different. So much of my mother’s past and our family history (mingled with trauma, death, and war too) perished with her, and with such force and violence, before I had a chance to know them. Perhaps it was my fate not to know. According to the coroner, my mother died upon impact—blunt force trauma to the head, among other injuries (internal bleeding, which ultimately led to her death). I’ve replayed that information in my brain over and over, as if I could understand it or as if doing so will lessen the pain of her death. It’s been four years now, and while the intensity of that information has waned, every time I remember how my mother was alone when she died, I feel like a new death opens for me where I have to imagine and commit to that death all over again, as if I’m hoping to inherit any remnants of my mother’s memories that died at the site of her accident. Of course, I know it’s not possible and I have no choice but to live with that, though what I can’t live with is how my mother’s memories were taken from her. I feel frustrated and embarrassed by this because my mother was a shaman. When she lived, she loved, and she gave endlessly; she healed people. If her death was an act of heaven (in my mother’s eyes), how terrible that her head, including all the memories inside them, was the first to be sacrificed. This is where my memory continuously cheats me because I ask myself repeatedly if my mother was real or imagined. Photographs would remind me she was real, but feelings and memories betray me, which makes me feel strange and almost like a very bad daughter.

VC: Khaty, this is so sad and beautiful. I can relate to what you are saying about history and grief. My book of essays explores what happened to my history when my mother died—it all seemingly died with her. And yes, so much of my own mother’s past and our family history too is mingled with trauma, death, and war on a very large scale. For my own mother, it was the rise of the Communist Party in China. I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens to memories when their origins disappear.

PS: Thinking about what you are saying, Khaty, about “replaying”—so powerful. This “new death” you speak of, did you find yourself writing differently to attend to it? Or is it still too hard?

I am processing how we live the two losses: theirs and what leaves with them; we contend with these as our narrative truths. I’m reminded of what writer and scholar (and colleague at Scripps) Myriam J.A. Chancy says, quoting philosopher Emmanuel Eze, “by way of language, it is memory and history that, dialectically, constitute the subjectivity of the individual ... the conversation of the soul with itself.” It’s such an ontological process, what we confront through grief. I feel so sad that Dale died having to confront his demons, his end, on his own, but feel relief knowing that I did the best I could to keep him as safe as I could. Victoria and Khaty, it seems you both also confront these feelings; they do make one feel helpless.

Thinking about safety, my mother is in a fragile state with Parkinson’s and the loss of mobility and I don’t know how to face our distance under COVID-19. We can no longer connect as she doesn’t speak more than a few words, and I’m not ready to face that I am losing her and our life together, but as she is still alive I am learning to accept this state of affairs. But it’s strange to say that losing Dale first has given me tools to better caregive—I want to think of how to help my mom through this time, even though it’s hard to be so far away, but I work with my dad on this, and help him feel his own solidity.

VC: Prageeta, I feel this—that we can only do the best that we can. I still feel tremendous amounts of guilt though and I’m sure you both do as well. Despite the guilt, I think I’ve learned so much about myself and also how to be a better caretaker. It sounds like you have learned some caretaking/giving skills too.

on time

KX: As you both have already mentioned, even for the living we contend with forms of loss. Grieving, therefore, is hard work, and it is such work that has me thinking more deeply of time, what I consider to be another chief “body” or form of grief. I wanted to take a moment to explore how time has threaded us along in our lives, knowing the different griefs and strains we each carry.

VC: What’s the relationship of grief and time? Is there one? When I’m grieving (which seems to be always), but grieving deeply, time seems to start spinning. It doesn’t stop, but it pauses. It gets harder to do the daily tasks that seem mundane and, instead, I am living in the past, the memories, as if I want to go there and not be here where I am today. Time and grief most certainly feel connected in some interesting fluid way.

PS: Victoria, I have found Obit to engage so deeply with time in such an engrossing and innovative way that I have to reflect on what it taught me. There’s a kind of resilience that I felt I witnessed there. For me, time has taught me that I will have an armload of experiences, and I have to learn how to live in them as they are and as they change. However, I have recently begun to address the experiences with a different narrative expectation. I find that when I have a lot of time alone, I step back into a period of aloneness that has the quality of early grieving, as a way of learning more about what that period of time had taught me.

KX: The forms in Obit definitely reflect for me how time can often mimic our grief to us: boxed-in, tidy, specific, and even fantastical, all of which are so devastating in their seemingly “oversimplified” appearance. I found the longer essay forms in Grief Sequence to reflect what happens to the brain when certain trust is handed over to the page: grief engaged in desperate inquiry. In truth, I’ve always felt intimidated by what time has done to me, and what it continues to do. I am simultaneously in acceptance and in denial of my mother’s death. It has wrecked me, and I suspect the damage will continue to manifest.

Basically, I’ve always resisted the concept of “time” as a kind of “healer”—that “time heals all wounds.” Maybe because in my war refugee/immigrant household, time did no such thing for us. My parents held onto their wounds deeply because it was a form of survival (keeping close the familiar). I caught onto their grief really early in life, which then became a part of me and my own grief for them. It confuses others when I say I’ve been grieving my family for as long as I can remember because not everyone has died. Even when my mother lived, I grieved for her. In a community, there are such fixed ideas or expectations on grief and how it works, “timelines” that we’re assigned by friends and family (even strangers) who will scold us if we’re still dwelling or crying well past those timelines. Even our memories get to be selective—“think only of the good times.” What an odd suggestion, as if goodness is the only thing we deserve to keep of our dead. Maybe I’m too bitter. When my mother died, I simply saw no way to hold time, or to count on it to “heal,” because healing wasn’t what I was after. To heal, as others wanted, felt like an embarrassing closure—closure on a body, closure on the memories of that body. Instead, especially in those early grieving days, I was after death itself, because that was where my mother now lived.

VC: I’m not sure wounds ever heal either; although they may heal physically, the memory of those wounds is still there, and since those usually can’t be forgotten, I think they will always be there in some way. The idea and concept of healing wounds and time healing wounds is also very American. I feel like I was raised to endure wounds, to live with them, which is a different kind of relationship with grief, pain, and memory. Oddly this kind of thinking helps with those of us who live with chronic pain.

PS: Yes, I have such a problem with the ableism behind the idea of healing, particularly in white culture. I do like that we have love, psychic energy, and generosity to give each other, and there is therapeutic value in making time for people. I do believe it can help them feel better about some challenging situations and conditions. I found that I struggle the most with people foisting magical thinking, astrology, and new age philosophy on me as it relates to death. I think that’s why it was so enlightening to find studies that delved into complicated spiritual grieving because it helped me be kinder to myself around the grieving process. I didn’t want a cure, I wanted to understand what I was facing. Dale’s wasn’t a violent death necessarily, but it did feel violent to me in how gutted his body was in less than two months’ time, and how quickly we had to succumb to hospice. And his dying spanned seven days.

on space

KX: As our relationship with grief evolves, how are each of you engaging with your communities and those outside these spaces? Personally, as I’ve searched for the space to grieve, several friendships have died and/or suffered. As a result, it’s become very difficult for me to trust people and to trust myself to grieve openly at times. However, this level of transparency has also nourished my understanding of profound loss (the acceptance part of the bargain). In the Midwest, where I’ve been residing the last few years (and even when I was in the Pacific Northwest), I have learned, especially as a Southeast Asian woman, that I am quite invisible to the public eye, and therefore my existence (as well as the grief inside that existence) is not real. On top of the isolation I’ve felt in the Midwest—being caught in the erasures of body, language, and identity—grief has really pivoted me in a place where I either accept these erasures and flow with the void, or resist it (survival instinct). Maybe writing and talking about grief is the act of making space.

VC: Space, for me at least, shrank, and yet, at the same time, it expanded beyond the physical world. Meaning, I felt disconnected from humans. I was very alone in my grieving, but I felt a kind of existential connection with space and atmosphere. All the little things (petty things) that I was concerned about before didn’t seem to matter much anymore. This is still true today. I have a very “we will all die so none of this matters” mindset. Sometimes, I think, maybe this is just depression.

PS: I’m going with the theme of loss in friendship here, though there are a lot of losses that happen, I think (at least in my case). Perhaps I’m getting a little too zealous and long-winded here, but I’ve been writing about grief, whiteness, and the function of the complaint right now, so it’s consuming me and taking over my writing. I think the hardest losses to process (several years out) are the secondary ones because their hold seems just out of reach, and they teach you about change in uncomfortable ways. For the first year or so, I felt a bubble of protection around me. I felt understood in the sense that people left me alone to grieve. What I didn’t come to process until much later is how I was still racially different in my community, and that difference wouldn’t go away even with discernable loss. I started to process what use I was to people around me—who did I really relate to?

I recall losing a friendship to a white woman, a poet whom I was very close to. I had found out that she disparaged me in so many ways, very early in my grieving process (like a month in) but was deeply duplicitous. She actually gossiped about my hardship and blamed me for her problems, and decided to criticize my hostility around death, because our friendship shifted and our roles changed and I was no longer taking care of her emotional needs, which I had done for a long time. I was hostile about Dale’s death. I felt angry, sad, and hurt by him and his death. I was vocal about not having the closure and also vocal about some of Dale’s behaviors that I felt hurt by. She had no capacity to understand me, see where I was coming from, or help me in practical ways. I could see that she had no real empathy; it was just a performative gesture. I found myself humiliated that I had entrusted her with my vulnerabilities, particularly that she understood race and trauma, which she didn’t. She was actually very cruel about race and trauma, and said quite mean things to me about that, not recognizing that her white privilege made her suffering a different kind of thing. I realized that, to me, she was a stereotype whose hold was so pathological. I sound like I’m in high school again, but that’s what it felt like. I’m learning now to see the archetype of these sorts of friendships. What I realized from that experience is that I was only going to keep trustworthy, kind, and honest people close, which was what many widows told me I would learn. I think deep grieving can allow you to weed out petty people and discard meaningless white friendships where power defines the terms.

VC: “I think deep grieving can allow you to weed out petty people and discard meaningless white friendships where power defines the terms.” This is really powerful and true for me too. I naturally weeded out people during my process of grieving, simply because I could no longer relate to them. Even now, I seem to keep my distance from people. I’m not sure why, but I think grieving has something to do with it.

PS: I’m getting ready to teach Obit this week, and I am thinking about the poem that starts with “Friendships,” how “All my selves spread out like a deck of cards. It’s true, the grieving speak a different language. I am separated from my friends by gauze.” And Khaty, these recent poems I’m reading are so moving: “So this is what grief looks like when it no longer moves” from “In the Fourth Corner of the Earth,” which is such a compelling title. I’m stepping into both of your works through this COVID-19 time and am nourished by the language here.

KX: I’ve definitely lost a lot of meaningful relationships because I was so deep in my grief, but I feel equally disappointed that my grief was also the sole reason why friends stepped away from the relationship (though of course they’d probably never admit to that). It could be that they also have a complicated relationship with grief and it translates into dissolved friendships. Is this truly the norm though? Will we ever be prepared to talk about death? Or is this just the experience of Western culture? My response to each lost friendship has been full of rage and loneliness. I know my partner, who’s white and male, also has a hard time processing and witnessing my grief; he often feels like there’s no place for him there, like consolation might not be possible. He does, however, acknowledge my grief, and see that it is real.

VC: Yes, it’s very hard to grieve “with” others, meaning I noticed that grief can be very asynchronous. Even when grief is “communal,” meaning people experiencing a death together, it’s not necessarily true that people will grieve similarly or together. Grief, to me, has always felt like a very lonely and private experience.

KX: Something that’s also been on my mind is that I think physical/geographical distance can play such a role in impacting how one grieves. By that I mean that my mother passed away in California while I was living in Ohio, and it has affected my grief in ways that I don’t think my family can understand. My mother died a terrible death, and alone, and it was nearly an hour before paramedics arrived to confirm her death. Between the paramedics’ confirmation and my family receiving the news (as they scrambled to make calls and other arrangements), by the time I finally got word of my mother’s death, it was already 2 a.m. in Ohio, which was technically the next day. It’s a lot to process—which has me thinking a lot about the poems in Obit, and how almost every poem has a unique “timestamp” for the many deaths being grieved (e.g, “The Future,” “My Mother’s Lungs,” “Optimism,” “Hands,” and more). For me, I’m thinking: When did my mother really die? On May 16, 2016, around 7:25 p.m.? Or was it a whole hour later when paramedics officially announced her dead? Or maybe when my family received word ... Or did she sincerely die when the news was finally relayed to me?

I’m still working on my “existential connection” with space and the humans who’ve left that space; I’m also thinking of the spiritual connection between my mother and I, post-death, how it thrives and deepens. I’m hoping, as Prageeta pointed out, that in time I’ll be able to surround myself with others who are relatable and/or supportive of my grief journey.

VC: I can understand so much of what you are saying here. No one experiences grief at the same time, as I just mentioned, and few experience it in the same ways. While my sister and I both lost our mother, and it was comforting to know she was feeling terrible too, we still didn’t know how to talk about our grief. The public and others are not super interested in your grief because it seems to infringe on their lives and their own happiness, and possibly remind them of their own mortality. That’s when I turned to writing my poems because I figured out that I ultimately had to grieve alone.

Interestingly, grief too is different depending on the person one is grieving. My mother was ill for so long and my father too. So grief for me has been very long and very fragmented, while I imagine your grief for your mother is entirely different than mine for that reason alone. This is also a fix-it culture. There are therapists, doctors, drugs; everyone is always trying to sell you something so you can feel better. I think grief is just something you have to live in. It’s like air.

PS: Thinking back to the concept of loss creating space is how we’ve all made room for the reckonings we need; it’s quite stunning and I’m grateful to be able to write so freely here. (It felt a little scary, but good scary.) Something that could be the topic of a new conversation is how one might let some personal shame go in order to let grief and connectivity teach something? It taught me to be open. For now, I need to recognize the space and gift you’ve both given me in acknowledging me for myself, through poetry, and in our shared alterity. I’m in deep admiration of your respective works (and brains and sentience!). Thank you for this conversation and friendship.