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The Grief is never gone / Grief cannot be minimized / But it can be forgotten / Under the floorboards / Of the heart / Or flow with the sails in the wind

I almost didn’t see you when you walked into the shop. Your second oldest, a daughter with long red hair, walked in before you. You were wearing black: a cap, suit jacket, pants, shoes, and a white shirt.

My path to joy would be years in coming, after death painted me into a corner. My grandson’s joy was as tangible as the sunshine after days of clouds and cold, a magnification of my own inner glow.

Where are you? / You disappear; no longer here / This year you are Elsewhere / A rainbow that doesn’t end / A trick of light revealing the unsaid / A peace from the rain in my soul / Our future sold to Azrael /

Collective grief is stimulated by large scale losses and tragedies, some impacting people and communities far from the initial ground zero of the event.

The world feels heavy right now. Between the ongoing wars, devastating hurricanes, and the divisive political climate, It's no surprise that many of us are experiencing a range of difficult emotions, anxiety, overwhelm, sadness, anger and even numbness.

Whenever I turn on the news, I'm overwhelmed by distress and suffering across the world. Despite taking breaks from the media, the sense of unease never fully fades.

Is it possible “to heal,” as in “done and dusted, I can officially move on from this experience of profound loss and grief, once and for all?” I am provoked. Which means… I’m ready to write.

My heart has yet to find the words to express this emotion. I’ve been captivated by the way plant kin choose their season to bloom and offer their medicine to the people. There is no randomness in how plants respond to the shifting winds and the flow of time.

Ambiguous Grief is one of the most difficult loss experiences to traverse. The person is still alive but the relationship you have with them must change. When that happens due to divorce, it leaves both parties, and their children and friends flailing about for clues on how to behave and how to treat one another.

Identity ignored = Isolating more / Loss leads to love realized in the maddening goodbye / It was held against me / They called it “hysteria” back the day, still some things haven’t changed / But this isn’t The Yellow Wallpaper / More grief like losing Old Yeller / But relief to lose the one who yells / Part heaven; part hell / Who am I now?

Immigrants know identity loss and ambiguous grief intimately well. There are the big losses like not getting to be there for graduations, weddings, births, and deaths. And then there are the small, daily griefs: the constant mispronunciation of our names, the blank stares when our homelands are mentioned, the craving for food that somehow only tastes right in our childhood homes, the way our tongues stumble with rust after not speaking our mother languages in days, months, years.