This is how you grieve.

This is how you grieve.

Start with an empty room.

Open your arms, stretch them out in disbelief, tremble with a fear that cannot be

breached, and gather your things. You’ll need some help, here, if you can find it. The

room may be quite large, but also it could be impossibly

suffocating

shoulder-bending small.

If you find your sad self in this kind of a tiny room, stooped over, nagging kink

in your neck, and fighting an eye spasm, hold someone’s hand and wait.

This room will grow.

Start with an empty room, and gather.

Drag in a table. Line it with dishes, or flowers, or scratched out angry letters, or

bottles of booze, or chewed up plastic straws. Or nothing.

You need this table.

You need a surface.

You need a landing.

This may seem exhausting.

It will be exhausting.

Now find a lamp for your room. Maybe one with a dimmer switch? Because some

days will be darker than others and you want to show the lamp that it is necessary and

yes, lamp, you are appreciated.

You may need more than one lamp.

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You will find all of this aggravating.

Pull an area rug to your room. Not wall-to-wall coverage, you need some distance

between you and the floor and the walls and the oxygen.

Your rug fibers ought to cushion your knees:

In prayer. In pleading.
In the frenzy of your wild anger. In the quiet of your stuttered breaths.

Make sure it’s thick.

Unfurl the rug, strand by strand, and feel the weight in the room.

Feel the world beneath your feet, ok?

Imperative: couch. bed. chair. instruments of quiet, feather-filled stops.

Your couch will be important.

Trust me on that.

For the sake of your tired body, trust me on that.

For the sake of aching ribs.

For the sake of solemn skin, stretched too far across hungry cheeks and dry lips.

For the sake of empty elbow crooks.

For the sake of wilted eyebrows.

For the sake of drowsy blood flow and cramping fists.

For the new iron casing around your chest and fingers,

the weight in your bone marrow that you cannot lift or shake or lose.

Please wearily accept the gift of respite:

when you sleep without dreams,

when your baby wakens and calls your name,

when the sun shines hot through your car window,

when you remember how to spice your spaghetti, 

when hope pokes a tiny sprig in your direction,

Rest.

Find your couch,

Stretch across your bed,

and rest.

Live in your room.

­

As long as you need, stay in your room.

Welcome in guests, if the room will hold them.

Explore it. Scrape the floor, crawl the corners, examine the bumps in the walls and the cracks in the ceiling. Trace every inch.

Fill a vase or a hundred old bathtubs with your tears.

The dead do not mean well. They come, they go, they leave us behind to tread the deep murky waters of in absentia. Heaven may hold them, but earth holds us, tether bound to the grocery store and decisions for tomorrow, which is terribly unfair when our hearts have recently begun a slow descent into our guts. Who needs grapes and milk at a time like this?

This is how you grieve.

Start with an empty room.
Gather your things.
Settle in.

Move about.
Rest.
Rage.
Wonder.
‘Til you are left with one wooden chair.
Send the rug to the cleaners.

Haul the couch to the curb.

Stack your dishes and tidy your angry letters,

water your flowers and give them away.

Sit in the wooden chair.

Remember the room when it was crowded with sorrow.

And when you are ready,

And you’ll know when you are ready,

leave.