Posts in Grief
Science and Poetry
Science and Poetry

On the day after Thanksgiving 2022, I dragged my husband to a thrift shop outside Boston to look for a book I'd donated nearly twenty years ago. It started as a Twitter dare the week before. I was chatting with some pals about a book an ex-boyfriend gave me when I was twenty and we were at the height of a love affair that lasted seven years. My ex died in February, and I was having a hard time talking about it; most people didn't seem to understand why I was so upset about the death of a guy I broke up with so long ago. The easiest thing to do, sometimes, was to play it for laughs; at least that way I got to talk about it a little, with strangers who didn't know me well. "Why don't you go look for it?" someone said. "You never know, and it'll be a great story if you find it."

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GriefKristina Buschgrief, loss, relationships Comments
What's Memorable
What's Memorable

My mother’s eyes registered my arrival, but without her dependable smile. The bones of her face were sharp and craggy, her nose slightly humped from a childhood fall, her eyes blue and deeply set. Tita, who cared for her, had dressed her in her brightest blouse and hung a necklace round her neck. Mom was crooked in her chair and not pretending, while a cheerful string of rainbow-colored letters on the mantle shouted happy birthday for her eighty-ninth and last.

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GriefKristina Buschfamily, grief, loss, memories Comments
Coming Back Up
Coming Back Up

“Dear Poo, I’m sorry I’m writing this in a letter, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you face to face…”

We’d been in our new house just a couple of weeks when my dad—Da—left a letter and, with it, left us. He was gone. And none of us knew what gone meant. Mom couldn’t tell me where he went or why. She called Grandma to try to decipher his note. Whatever sense they made of it wasn’t shared.

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GriefKristina Buschfamily, grief, divorceComment
Hard to Love
Hard to Love

When my ex-husband told me his father was dead, he said it casually. The way you'd mention an alma mater, or that you'd lived abroad for a while.

"My dad died five years ago," he said. We were at work, in a courtroom with no privacy, dressed in our lawyer suits. He reached down to tug up his socks when he said it. I remember searching for significance in how he announced his tragedy while adjusting his outfit. It made me wonder if his father's death was an easy thing to bear. Or if it were so painful he needed to reveal it in the bright bustle of a courtroom, with busied hands. He usually seemed so guarded.

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GriefKristina Buschdeath, family, grief Comment
Trespasser
Trespasser

When I realized that I probably shouldn’t be there, at your funeral, it was too late to leave. I was sitting alone in the center of a cushioned pew halfway back, picking at my cuticles in my lap, too self-conscious among strangers to put my fingers to my mouth and chew. The little chapel was sparsely filled. It seemed I was one of the few who’d found out about the service, or else, perhaps no one was meant to come who had not been asked. When I arrived, I had expected a large crowd to disappear into, or perhaps an old classmate to cling to, but neither were found. I had not gotten in line, to file past where you rested. Instead, I ducked into a pew and sat down, to hide, to gather my thoughts, wonder if I should leave or stay, try to shake off the feeling of a spotlight on my back. Being there felt like some kind of transgression, though I only meant to pay respects.

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GriefKristina BuschDeath, family, relationships Comment
On The Water's Edge
On The Water's Edge

On the day of my best friend’s funeral, I received a friendly text from a colleague asking how I was enjoying my summer. Not knowing I was in despair, I did not want to distress them. So, I replied with a number of clichéd nautical terms. I felt like a ship without an anchor. I was lost at sea, set adrift. This proximity to water, without the sight of land, creates disorientation and resignation. My early grief came with a strange apathy born from a newfound loneliness and struggle. Will power and the habit of duty kept me tethered to the deck. I hoped I was not at risk of falling overboard. I am not a strong swimmer.

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GriefKristina Buschfriendship, grief, loss, RelationshipsComment
Karen and the Heron
Karen and the Heron

When I sent Karen the picture of the great blue heron that had sidled up to me as I sat reading on the beach, she did not yet know that she would die soon. Of course, neither did I. She was sick, and her illnesses were frequent and never satisfactorily explained, but we still believed they would be cured, that someone would figure them out and apply the right treatment.

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GriefJulia Nusbaumfriendship, grief, loss of a friendComment
Hummingbird
Hummingbird

Week thirteen of pregnancy I began spooning a serpentine pillow that my husband, Caleb, gave me. Uncoiled, it stretched from my feet to my face and took the pressure off my hips and chest. I was thirty-five-years old, and although Nurse Becky labelled me “a geriatric mother” at my pap smear appointment, I felt on time to motherhood. At this pace I could have a pair of children before I turned forty: a pepper for the table salt.

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GriefSelena Raygoza Comment
Mother's Day Over Madagascar
Mother's Day Over Madagascar

Fucking first times, my therapist calls them.  First holidays, significant occasions, anniversary of the death.  The first time after you’ve lost someone, lost a child.  It caught me off guard the first year, things that I didn’t expect took me to my knees.  Easter, why did that leave me weeping, lashing out at everyone, feeling like a horrible failure?  We weren’t religious and even if we were, Nel was most certainly not.  She’d called me from prison the last Easter she was alive, Happy Easter! I tried to chirp at her.  She stopped me mid-happy.

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GriefJulia Nusbaummotherhood, Death, mother and daughter, grief Comments
Primer For One Left Behind
Primer For One Left Behind

A / Anyone

You want to become anyone, a head placed on any random body. At the county fair, faces from the crowd fill the cut-outs where heads of farmers or cows should be. The souvenir photograph, a reminder of a new identity. You want to go into witness protection, become someone else, anyone else, an image the mirror recognizes. This is normal.

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GriefKristina Buschgrief, mental health, widow Comment
Grief and the Dentist
Grief and the Dentist

 “Hello,” I said holding the phone to my ear as I walked into the master bedroom, shutting the door behind me to drown out the sounds of the boys wrestling in the living room. I answered even though I didn’t recognize the number. I had assumed it was either the NICU or the funeral home and as much as I was dreading those calls, I wanted to get them over with.

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GriefSelena RaygozaComment
What I Didn't Say When I Gave Your Eulogy
What I Didn't Say When I Gave Your Eulogy

06.25.2022

Umma understands one out of three of my poems. This is why she declares I sound like a poet. I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her before I gave up on art, small girl of ten brimming with precious audacity not yet oxidized by sharp gust of outside air; recited Jabberwocky in a basement, sang Maya Angelou over the counter of an addressless existence. As long as we had no house, I could not be contained. But I gave up on art when I got my first room, blunt molasses space concretizer of reality, snuffer of dreams. Word became flesh and I hated mine, blunt molasses block of pound. What words could soften the thud of me hitting air?

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GriefKristina Buschgrief, grandmother, poetryComment
All My New Friends Are Widows
All My New Friends Are Widows

My first widows’ picnic is where I learned that having partner loss in common is enough to bridge gaps of religion, politics, age, language, and more. Since then, I have hugged and cried with people whose names I don’t know, whose language I don’t speak, whose paths will probably never again cross mine. There are widowed people I hardly know except for how they lost their person.

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GriefSelena Raygoza Comment
James
James

The box from James arrived months after my birthday, tattered and misshapen. In it, a black-and-white striped purse, gray scarf, face masks, a knockoff Purple Rain CD, and two cardigans: one small yellow one for my eleven year old daughter and another for me the color of a bright orange Boston autumn leaf where James and I had gone to college together. 

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GriefJulia Nusbaumdeath of a friend, healing, griefComment
My Three Griefs
My Three Griefs

“John has dementia, probably Alzheimer’s.” The diagnosis came at us like an arrow shot from a crossbow. The arrow went straight through my husband and embedded itself in me. Of course, the disease was inoperable and couldn’t be treated. We both knew the outcome. There was nothing to do but carry on regardless of pain or grief.

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GriefSelena Raygoza Comments
Exempt Human Specimens
Exempt Human Specimens

According to the United States Postal Service website, it’s illegal to send body parts through the mail.

“Heavily restricted,” is a better way to put it. You need the necessary permits, containers, a transport license from the American Association of Mortuary Shippers. There are rules involved, special restrictions; same goes for dry ice and lithium batteries. You can mail live bees, but not medical marijuana. Those thin, translucent lines that keep us from stuffing a toe into a manila envelope on the way to work.

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GriefJulia Nusbaumdeath and dying, grief, Family, pregnancy, motherhoodComment
Babies I'll Never Have
Babies I'll Never Have

I walk troublingly late. None of the doctors know what to make of me.

“You came out of the womb singing your ABCs, but you didn’t walk until you were two-years-old!” my mother jokes. “You were just so smart. You wouldn’t even crawl. You’d just roll everywhere, like a little log. You were very efficient.”

A very expensive doctor on the Upper West Side finally steps in and fits me for special shoes with arch support. They are pink leather and make my feet look comically large for a child so small, and I wail when they are strapped on to me, wriggling as the velcro crunches into place. I detest the process of learning to walk. I fall constantly. My little knees remain perpetually bruised.

Once I finally get the hang of it, though, I am unstoppable.

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GriefKristina Buschdisability, Infertility, griefComment
Funerals
Funerals

A funeral is an elementary school gym. The same gym where, in the evenings, you memorize the faded lines that mark the borders of the volleyball court, the gym that you and your ten-year-old teammates sneak away from to peek into the boys bathroom, to see if it really is bigger than the girls (“It is!” you squeal, waving over the other girls to see for themselves). The gym where your P.E. teacher sets out little black X’s on the floor to mark each kid’s spot. “Don’t move from your place,” she says, so you sit criss-cross-apple-sauce, even on the day that you sob all through class because you got in trouble for forgetting to write your name at the top of your multiplication test.

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GriefKristina Buschfamily, religion, deathComment
Milk Teeth
Milk Teeth

For years, I kept my children’s teeth in a drawer. Wrapped in a rainbow silk, I tucked them behind the protection of scarves and mismatched socks. In preparation for a move to a new life, our belongings would sit in the liminal land of a storage unit. It didn’t feel right to put the bundle of teeth in the cardboard box behind bars.

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GriefJulia Nusbaumgrief, childhood, growing up, motherhoodComment