You ever think you could cry so hard
that there’d be nothing left in you, like
how the wind shakes a tree in a storm
until every part of it is run through with
wind? I live in the low parts now, most
days a little hazy with fever and waiting
for the water to stop shivering out of the
body. Funny thing about grief, its hold
is so bright and determined like a flame,
like something almost worth living for.
"What is grief, if not love persevering?" This quote from Marvel's television series "WandaVision" has resonated throughout social media. On Slate, Dan Kois has a thoughtful essay comparing it to the depiction of grief in "Nomadland," a front-runner for this year's Oscars and already a multiple award winner.
The same weekend that Nomadland won its Golden Globes, a particular quote from Wandavision was making its way across Twitter. It’s a flashback from Friday’s episode, “Previously On,” in which Wanda and Vision sit in Avengers headquarters and discuss the death of Wanda’s brother. Vision notes that he can’t truly understand Wanda’s grief, but asks, “It can’t all be sorrow, can it?” Then he says the line that launched a thousand memes. It’s easy to either belittle the line or laud it as poetry, but what is the line saying, exactly? What is grief? Is it, in fact, love persevering? In a year in which over half a million Americans have died of COVID, it’s a subject much on all our minds.
Green burial doesn’t have an official definition but generally refers to a range of cemetery practices that limit fossil fuel usage and the amount of human-made materials put into the ground. More broadly, the green burial movement wants to help people approach death with a more natural, and less commercial, outlook.
Green cemeteries substitute exotic hardwood caskets with renewable wood coffins or burial shrouds, and they don’t line graves with concrete. They shun mown lawns for native grasses and trees. Some green cemeteries mark graves with native stone or plant memorial trees; others don’t mark graves at all. They reject embalming as unnatural, unnecessary, and toxic. (Embalming chemicals contribute to high rates of cancer in mortuary workers.) Green cemeteries look more like nature preserves or parks than the orderly cemeteries we’re accustomed to.
...
[Jack] Goodnoe started designing conventional cemeteries in the 1980s and began working with green cemetery movement when the movement began in the late ’90s. While Goodnoe supports greening the death industry, he also thinks that green and conventional cemeteries need to learn from each other. The green burial movement has been led by charismatic industry outsiders—academics, environmentalists, spiritual types—with big ideas offset by a lack of knowledge about cemetery management. Goodnoe recommends that “when someone wants to start a green cemetery, they partner with a traditional cemetery that can bring all the legal, grief, record-keeping elements that they’ve learned from decades in the industry.”
The incomparable Judith Viorst, author of classic books for children and Necessary Losses for adults, writes in Moment Magazine about the people she loved who are no longer here, and what remembering them means.
An excerpt:
As I count the dead, my coulda’s and shoulda’s besiege me: I should have sat with Clara and heard her stories. I should have held my baby before he died. I could have been a more welcoming sister to Lois and not been such a meanie when she cried. I could have invited my in-laws to please come inside and stay a whole week instead of a weekend. I could have made more room in my heart—and made more time in my life—for the people who came knocking at my door. I could have mustered more grace and more good humor as I barreled through my kids-career-marriage days. I could have treated my “To-Do” list as something less, far less, than a sacred document. And although I figured out some of this in time to mend my ways, the regrets I have to live with, I’ll have to live with.
