It’s easy to view grief as something that has a relegated time and place, like a funeral or in the immediate aftermath of a death. But it’s often more difficult to create a time and place for grief in our day-to-day. Amidst the continuous flow of life, and especially in adulthood, expressions of grief—like crying or sharing our feelings of sorrow or existential dread—are forced into private, isolated moments. Giving voice to these thoughts seems to interrupt our ability to be productive and to go about our daily lives.
But the flip side is that feeling heard and seen by others in our grief can be transformative. This past Thursday, South Side Weekly and Build Coffee and Books hosted the first of our Third Thursdays open mic and writing workshop. The workshop I composed was inspired by a poem I included in the Exchange, the Weekly’s poetry corner, and explored the grief and warmth created by the passage of time. The past can be a place of deep comfort or sadness, whether we’re reminiscing on childhood memories or looking back to see loved ones that we no longer share space with on this side of earth.
Both the open mic and writing workshop created a moment of pause for participants, and several of them shared pieces that seemed to work perfectly together with this theme. It was almost as if we’d agreed that this was a safe place to be honest about things that are most heavy on our hearts. It makes me wonder: if our individual feelings of grief were more often given the proper space and time to be experienced within a collective, could we move from a state of constant coping to something more? It was empowering to see participants arrive as strangers and become comrades, even exchanging contact information, and reinforced all the reasons we wanted to launch this series in the first place.
The next Third Thursdays will take place on March 19 from 6:30–8:30pm at Build Coffee and Books.
– Chima Ikoro (Community Engagement Editor), and Andrew Ntamere, (Workshop participant, writer, ICU RN)