Grief Decomposes Our Love Like a Body - So That it May Be Born Anew

Grief is how our body digests death. Let’s talk about it.

“Marigold” by artist Cam Rackam

[ Decomposition is a process by which organisms: plant, animal, and fungi, begin to break down another organism to extract & recycle energy and nutrients stored in that organism’s cells. These cells are comprised of valuable resources that make up the building blocks for healthy ecosystems, and as an organism is deconstructed cell by cell, their bodies become the metabolic fuel for a community of other organisms. While the decomposition process is a necrobiome in and of itself - a microcosmic ecosystem that is facilitated by various communities of detrivores, “the feeders of dead or decaying matter” - some organisms take much longer to decompose (such as a dead tree), facilitating a microcosmic ecosystem that may live just as long, if not longer than the organism’s actual lifetime. Their “afterlife” becoming a source of food, nutrients, and shelter for generations upon generations of organisms, until finally becoming the fertile soil from which its descendants grow for countless more. ]

A “nurse log” - or a dead tree that becomes a host for a community of organisms

Grief is a necrobiome of our love.

Grieving is an actively Alive process. It is the sign of a healthy, embodied ecosystem. It is an indication of not only Death, but Life, of Becoming, and Becoming on Behalf of the Dead (and/or that which is dead).

When left uninterrupted and given the ideal environmental conditions to facilitate its process, grief has its own life cycle.

And in order for this life cycle to complete itself, our Love must be swallowed whole, and sometimes we have to be swallowed up with it. Grief and its community of detrivores (anger, bereavement, acceptance, confusion, numbness, guilt, peace, denial) devour our bodies for weeks, months, and sometimes years. They consume us to the very last bits of atoms, cells, and minerals - the material “stuff” that makes us us - and the rest, to be transformed into something else.

Sometimes, “the rest of us” that is consumed means forgetting how to love for a little while. The way we used to love creating a deep and hollow ache in our body; she is a chickadee whose song is sung into a void, with no audience to hear her, as we yearn to love the person that is no longer in our life, when our relationship to them is forever changed.

Our belief systems, our worldviews, how we understand ourselves and the world around us, collapses in on itself when we have the momentary strength to the acknowledge that our loved one is no longer here, when we have the courage to integrate the concept - they are not here - into our daily lives. We must let so many pieces of us die, die and be devoured, die to become something else.

We become soil.

Lost in the depths of our grief, we become transformed into something so metabolized by it that we no longer carry the shape or form of who we once were, and yet, a trace of us remains in the most subtle, spiritual of ways. Our love never truly dies, it is simply absorbed into something bigger than ourselves. In the way that when we step onto a patch of moss in an old growth forest, our foot sinks down into hundreds, if not thousands of generations of dead organisms - trees, plants, fungi, and animals.

Grief over those we’ve lost becomes the fertile compost from which the Garden of Our Love grows.

It is Spring once again, and our little chickadee’s purpose is renewed as she sings her song with delight - optimistic and awaiting for someone to whistle back a tune that reminds her of the ones she has loved and lost.

The mycelium devoured our once inconsolable sorrow, and along with it our memories small and large, only to allow them to once again emerge as fruiting bodies when the conditions are *just right*: A particular song playing in the background of a crowded bar. A single line you read in a novel awakens the memory of buttercups under your chin on a summer day. Eating burgers in the same booth at the Pilchuck Drive-In on your way to go fishing.

This is the garden of your love.

In Loving Memory of my father, Paul Clymer.

10/13/48 - 10/15/23

© 2024 Marika Clymer, Energetic Ecology Northwest