Sean Thomas Dougherty's "Grief's Familiar Rooms"

Thoughts on grief.

Grief's Familiar Rooms

Sometimes I am ok
even though when I come home

from work,
I still sit in your chair for hours

without taking my coat off
pulling at its buttons

that are not answers—

from The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018)

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Sean Thomas Dougherty was one of the first poets whose work I adored. I remember buying his new and collected, All You Ask for Is Longing, almost ten years ago, and it became — along with Bianca Stone’s Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, Terrance Hayes’ Lighthead, Jamaal May’s Hum, and Steve Scafidi’s Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer — part of my little stack of contemporary poetry that surprised and moved me as I thumbed through it on my desk and carried it around anytime I had somewhere to be.

I had some education in poetry before then — mostly from books my mom had given me as a kid. Rilke’s letters, and Auden’s collected, and stuff that I couldn’t make sense of but liked to have because it made me feel big and sometimes confused and almost about to burst out of my skin. But those aforementioned books — Stone’s and Hayes’s and Mays’s and Scafidi’s and Dougherty’s — were my first real kind-of-devouring education in poetry. I was a grad student studying fiction at the time I picked up Dougherty’s All You Ask for Is Longing, and I wanted, almost immediately, to write stories like Dougherty wrote poems. In “Tears for Saint Catherine,” he writes:

Some nights I believe the stars really are the eyes of God,

the remnants of a great sadness sobbing across the cosmos.

I wanted to write stories like that. Stories that could be as romantic and sad and big-hearted and wide-eyed as that. And then I hung out with poets, and the poets allowed me to believe that I could write poems. And I wanted to write poems like that. Romantic and sad and big-hearted and wide-eyed. And not just that. I wanted to write poems like Dougherty’s. Poems that name the names of friends and streets and dwell in the extended images of life — the banal, the ordinary, the beautiful, the fragile. Writing that wrote to get something of this earth down before it was washed and swept away.

Reading poems taught me that feeling can be the operating energy of a piece of writing, that a piece of writing can move by force of feeling alone. And what I’m trying to say, then, is that feeling can be the energy of this life. That, in some ways or in all ways, it must be. That, when we say we are moved by something or moved to something, we quite literally are. We are moved. If not physically, then towards something else — some understanding, some new self, some different way of being. So much of this life — as it is now and as it has come to be — moves us away from acknowledging feeling as truth, and as something to be taken seriously. But feeling, I think, is one of the only truths we have.

When I first read Dougherty’s The Second O of Sorrow, I encountered this poem and left its page open for a long time. It’s one of those poems — maybe because I have a chair that I am currently sitting in that used to be my grandmother’s and used to be her mother’s — that echoes in me, almost without warning. I’ll think of the word buttons as I pull at the buttons on my own jacket, wondering why I’m thinking of such a word, but knowing, still, that the word has something to do with grief.

And I’m thinking of that word — grief — this week, as I know many people are, and I’m thinking, too, of the opening line of this poem:

Sometimes I am ok

And I’m thinking, even still, of the two words that carry that line over into the next:

even though

It’s as if this poem was written from an imagined prompt, a prompt that asked the writer to write sometimes I am ok / even when I’m not, and instead of leaving the second line like that, asked the writer to write out a single image, a single moment when they knew they were not ok.

That image is written by Dougherty here:

I still sit in your chair for hours

without taking my coat off
pulling at its buttons

that are not answers—

I could think of this image — and the way it is written — forever. The chair operates as a kind of substitute for the body, this thing that will never be the speaker’s but is the closest approximation to physicality, this thing he can come so close to inhabiting but can never quite fully inhabit. And the coat, the coat left on — it becomes a sort of symbol for the second-skin that grief makes for us, the way we must carry it everywhere, the way it soon becomes impossible to take off. And the buttons. Well, god. These tiny little things that are supposed to connect one thing to the other. These things that have some real useful purpose and yet also fit into a metaphor, a metaphor for connection and love and understanding. And yet, and yet, and yet. One thing grief does is that it makes metaphors — well, it makes them almost meaningless. They mean — they do — but in a figurative way. They cannot bring something or someone back. And so the buttons remain buttons. The coat is a coat. The chair is a chair. And the sadness, the loss, the not-okay-ness — it stays there.

Dougherty offers another image of grief in his poem titled, singularly, “Grief”:

I nodded into the wet dog smell of it

heaved it over my back,
carried it like a man

who bears a wooden cross,
he will nail himself to—

Though this is a different image, here too are the same themes. The carrying. The relentlessness. The knowledge that all of this — this loss, this everything — is as everlasting as we are mortal. Such a thought reminds me of a few lines from Ada Limón’s “The Vulture & The Body”:

What if, instead of carrying 

     a child, I am supposed to carry grief?

I’m thinking, too, about how both of Dougherty’s grief-poems end with an em-dash. There’s an ongoingness that such a punctuation mark signals, an un-ending. Both poems remind me that grief, like the word carrying suggests, is a practice of life. That the work of grief ends when each of our lives end, but that — sadly — such endings also produce their own griefs, to be carried by others. Grief then becomes a cyclical truth of our existence, because loss is an ongoing truth of our existence.

And yet, one reason I am perhaps turning to this poem today is because of the fact that there must be such a thing as too much grief, which means there must be such a thing as too much loss.

The other day, the wonderful poet Phillip B. Williams tweeted the following:

If you can lose it, you can grieve over it. So imagine being in a constant state of loss without having time to process the loss(es) that came before. You end up grieving the very act of grief itself, allowing no space to heal. I fear the aftermath of that.

I found myself thinking of these words for awhile. I was struck by the fact that, at the heart of them, there is an acceptance of grief. An awareness of grief as a process — both a way to process loss and a process that is part of being alive.

One consequence of living in a moment that is full of constant loss is the inability to experience grief as a process. The inability to sit with loss and move through it. To understand it. To experience it and learn to carry it — like a jacket, or a cross, or a breath, or the sky itself. Whatever shape it takes. However it must be carried, for you and by you. I never thought of grief as a privilege. A privilege of space and time, yes, but also a privilege of living in a world where the only losses one experiences are the ones one dreads but still expects. To live in this moment is, in some way, to miss grief, to miss the way you might be able to sit in a chair, day after day, for however long it takes, to process one loss — not dozens, not hundreds, not thousands. How many chairs are required to process that many losses? How much time?

Dougherty’s poem today offers a tender portrait of life. It offers the permission not to be okay, but that permission — it seems — is dependent on the ritual and process of grief. Both the em-dash and that word — still — mean that the speaker’s act of sitting in the chair and moving through the motions of grief are ongoing. They will never end. I love this poem because of the way it resists resolution, how it — in such a short, abbreviated space — seems to say: this is my life now; this is my life for as long as I live.

In such a way, the poem unites us in our individual experiences of collective fragility. We don’t have to be okay. We don’t have to be fixed. The process of grief is the process of life.

I want to know, though: what is the breaking point of being broken? How much brokenness are we able to endure? I’m thinking of that now, as I write this after another week of teaching in the midst of another week of horrendous news. I’m thinking of it, too, because the morning after Uvalde, I was struck by how many of my students didn’t know about what had happened the day before. This wasn’t their fault — not at all. If you think it is, then I think you should do some soul-searching. It wasn’t because they weren’t paying attention. No. It was because so many of them had to — and still have to — pay attention to so many other losses that were specific to them and them alone. So much other labor that is part of the vital work of life. I read viral tweets that generalized teacher’s experiences, but really, what I felt the day after Uvalde was a kind of ordinariness. It was the sad and terrible ordinariness of a world that is full of too much loss to process. My students who didn’t know about the shooting were not absent of loss; no, they were almost certainly thinking of loss that was closer to them. This shook me to my core. It made me so sad. There is just too much loss. It is everywhere and it is felt specifically by individual people and it is sickening.

Every day, I try to hold on to the radical imaginary, which — I don’t think — is all that radical. Most of my radical imaginations tend back toward the ordinary: a real humility, an acceptance of limitation, a tender compassion, and structures within our society that enact justice for and toward such values. I want a world that is less of what is terrible so that it can be more of what is gentle. It doesn’t feel radical, but I know it is. And it feels radical — everyday — to hold onto that belief. To speak toward it and live for it. Especially when so much in this world gives us no space to dwell in our imagination as we would our grief.