Victoria Chang's "Grief"

Thoughts on grief and comparison.

Grief—

Grief—as I knew it, died many times. It
died trying to reunite with other lesser
deaths. Each morning I lay out my
children's clothing to cover their grief.
The grief remains but is changed by
what it is covered with. A picture of
oblivion is not the same as oblivion.
My grief is not the same as my pain. My
mother was a mathematician so I tried
to calculate my grief. My father was an
engineer so I tried to build a box around
my grief, along with a small wooden
bed that grief could lie down on. The 
texts kept interrupting my grief, forcing
me to speak about nothing. If you cut
out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky,
no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it
with a blue frame, place it faceup on
the floor of an empty museum with an
open atrium to the sky, that is grief.

from Obit (Copper Canyon, 2020)

I have found myself endlessly fascinated by this poem ever since I first read it. I came to Victoria Chang’s much-lauded Obit a little while after it was published, and was drawn to the form. I like any form that borrows itself from the world outside of poetry. Weekly weather forecasts, directions of a board game, instructions for assembling a chair — each of these are structures waiting to be used as the outfit of a poem. In Obit — which presents most of its poems in terse, justified format (which I can’t replicate via Substack’s formatting) — Chang uses the ubiquitous form of the obituary, and its concise, newspaper-needed delivery, to offer meditations and criticisms and elegies and more on grief and loss and language.

Through this form, Chang allows the specific to take universal shape. She offers obituaries on everything from specific people to voicemails to ideas and themes — things such as hope and grief. And part of what I love about today’s poem — and Chang’s work in general — is the way in which such a decision supplants the mundanity of its form — the newspaper obituary — with the possibility of something poetic. And part of that subversion is the idea such a collection presents: that the poetic should always be there, that the poetic should always have a place within our ordinary language. That it is through language itself that we often come to find some semblance of translating this life into something we can carry and love and even attempt to understand.

Years ago, I wrote a poem I’ve yet to publish with the following lines:

It’s like that, grief is, isn’t it? 
This dark closet of your heart where you hide a terrifying plant
that you feed if only to keep it from eating you from the inside out.
& there are the nights when being alone is enough, when you are kept,
nearly held, by the simple flickering light of another window, when
you make a meal you don’t have to share with anyone, when you bring
a beer into bed with you but never drink it. When your grandma died,
you did the same thing, & when your aunt sent you the obituary
because you were the writer in the family, you didn’t have the heart
to make a single change, & so read it the next week & told yourself
no one would notice the misplaced apostrophes. 

And maybe that’s why I’m turning to this poem today — because I was going through some old poems, and I noticed this one. And I remembered the moment that inspired these lines. I remembered a time years ago, when I was asked to look at a draft for an obituary for my grandmother. I was standing on the sidewalk, looking at my email, and I felt so much all at once. I was still so sad about my grandmother’s death. And, at the same time, I found the request so strange. I could not believe that this was my life, that my grandmother had died and that I was receiving an email with a link to a few short words about her life. I didn’t have the heart — as the poem says — to make a single change. And then I remember when the obituary was published, and I remember how odd and pained I felt, to see this person I love existing as an exercise in concision. And I remember that second grief. That grief of my failure to offer my help, and that grief of loss — that final grief, experienced again, and into forever.

When I first read today’s poem, I found myself caught by these lines:

The grief remains but is changed by
what it is covered with. A picture of
oblivion is not the same as oblivion.
My grief is not the same as my pain.

The moment I read those words — My grief is not the same as my pain — I stopped. I found, in such a line, a relentless clarity. A resistance to compare, and, by comparison, to reduce. A desire to use language to make what can’t be clear as clear as can be. I sat with this line for a long time. And I sat with the lines that came before, particularly the notion that grief remains but is changed.

For as long as I can remember in my own life, grief has been associated with heaviness, which — I believe — is related to the etymology of the word grief. Grief is a burden, something someone carries after the experience of loss. I think of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, and how she translates the description of Laertes — Odysseus’ father — waiting through grief for his son to come home:

Odysseus' father was alone,
inside the well-built orchard, digging earth
to make it level round a tree. He wore
a dirty ragged tunic, and his leggings
had leather patches to protect from scratches.
He wore thick gloves because of thorns, and had
a cap of goatskin. He was wallowing
in grief.

I’m struck by this description because, if not for the mention of grief, I don’t know if I would think of it. I would consider the raggedness of the tunic, the dirt. I would think of the solitary labor. I would certainly think of sorrow, and sadness. But it is not until that final statement — He was wallowing in grief — that I come to some deeper sense of the true feeling and mood of the moment. And that is, perhaps, what a word like grief does. It sets a tone. It exists beyond description. It brings a heaviness into the fold. And yet, the heaviness elicited by the word grief does not do justice to the feeling of grief — to whatever makes a father stand alone in a field, waiting for his son to come home.

I see such a feeling played out in today’s poem:

My grief is not the same as my pain. My
mother was a mathematician so I tried
to calculate my grief. My father was an
engineer so I tried to build a box around
my grief, along with a small wooden
bed that grief could lie down on.

Here in these lines is a description of the attempt to make sense of grief. And I think part of the way we talk about grief — as something heavy, as something to be carried — offers a comparison that allows us to try to make sense of it. But, as that line — my grief is not the same as my pain — suggests, perhaps it is impossible to bring the idea and feeling of grief into the language of comparison. Chang repeats the word “tried” twice in these lines but never mentions success. And maybe that’s because when you analyze these metaphors, they are metaphors of calculation and precision. They are attempts to make out of grief something understandable. To maybe determine the exact scope of it — its emotional length and breadth. If grief is heaviness, Chang seems to be saying, part of being a human is this longing to know how heavy, so that we know how long we might able to carry it, and what else we might be able to carry along the way. Or what we might have to put down. It’s a fascinating insight into language, isn’t it? It probes this deep hope within us — that, if we just find the right name, the right word, the right description for anything, we just might be able to manage.

I know that we often attempt to place grief — and so much that consumes us — within the confines of comparison. In an old novel draft I shelved long ago, I once wrote:

Grief, an old therapist had once told him, was like a ball bouncing in the square room of his mind. There was a button on one wall that, when pressed, would detonate a groundswell of pain within his mind, the memory of his mother barefoot in the kitchen, scrubbing an egg from a pan. A memory he thought was so far gone after so many years, so deeply buried in the rut of his spinal cord, that nothing would bring it back up. But grief, that therapist told him, did not depend so much on triggers and conscious thought. Grief was a ball bouncing around that room, and each day removed from his mother’s death, so long ago now, two decades last July, the ball grew smaller and smaller.

I borrowed the idea of this passage from something a therapist actually did once tell me, which was that grief might activate a feeling of pain in this same way — seemingly at random, and with an almost-violence. And, in thinking of this, I considered the idea that grief was a ball, something from childhood, even. You know? Like a little red-pink bouncy thing. I thought of grief as this energized thing, this constant force bouncing around within my body, and I thought of grief, too, as a button. At any time, for whatever reason, the ball of grief might hit the button of grief, and the feelings would ensue. Feelings of pain. Feelings of sorrow. Feelings so sudden and sometimes so seemingly nonsensical, but feelings nonetheless.

I liked this description of grief, but I know now that no comparison or metaphor one might make of grief is ever apt to do it justice. Grief is — maybe first and foremost — beyond comparison. This is why I’m so struck by Chang’s final lines:

If you cut
out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky,
no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it
with a blue frame, place it faceup on
the floor of an empty museum with an
open atrium to the sky, that is grief.

In these lines, Chang offers an image of grief as something that not only mirrors the sky itself, but also exists in multiple planes of vision. It’s a comparison, yes, but also a kind of anti-comparison. It is unplaceable and yet everywhere. I think, perhaps, that what Chang is getting at is that grief exists whether you look down or up, and that grief is not simply some heavy and grey thing, but rather something that can occur on the bluest of blue-sky days. I imagine someone encountering this image. I imagine a moment when someone walks into a museum, expecting art, but instead finds this rectangle in the ground where the floor should be, and, upon peering into it, notices that it is the same color and texture as the bluest of skies. And then I imagine them looking up, and seeing through a glass window the exact same sky. I don’t know what this imagined person might feel in such a moment, but I don’t doubt that they might feel whatever they feel. They might think of someone beautiful. They might think of someone living. They might think of someone gone. And I imagine that — no matter what they feel — they might cry. They might cry because of how unexpected this life is, and how beautiful, and how gorgeous, and how painful. And I imagine that somewhere in there, amidst all that beauty and all that loss and all that surprise — that somewhere in there, some grief might reside.

The very last stanza of Victoria Chang’s Obit reads:

My children, children,
this poem will not end because
I am trying to
end this poem with hope hope hope,
see how the mouth stays open?

When you say the word hope aloud, your mouth makes a shape that is open. It swallows the world around and, at the same time, breathes out into it. Our language, I think, is part of what makes us. It must be. If grief is a word we carry, then we do actually carry it. And it does have a weight. We feel this weight and maybe it is impossible to name exactly what the weight is or how heavy it is. But it is there — unnameable and incomparable. And if the word hope leaves our mouths open, then it leaves our mouths open, and we must figure out what to do with that openness.

It is through language that we often try to make sense of what makes no sense. I remember being young. I remember the day my father told me that our family was starting to come apart. I was ten years old. I was sitting in the back seat of the car. We were a family of practicing Catholics then, and we had just finished setting up doughnuts for the parishioners at our church to eat after mass. We were driving home. And my father, for whatever reason, decided then that he would tell my brother and I something about him and our mother. Something sad, something that would change our lives forever. It was — I will always remember — the bluest of blue-sky days. And I wondered later why and how such sad news — the news of addiction, the news of something I did not at the time understand — could possibly occur within the confines of a day so gorgeous and beautiful. But the news did occur. And I remember.

Now, when I think about it, I realize that it was only the telling of the news that occurred on that blue-sky day. Everything else played out before and after. The dailiness of life and the way such dailiness is full of love and loss and anger and rage and joy. That life — which is this life — existed on grey days and sunny ones. It lived through the seasons. Grief is like that because it is like life, which I compare to so much else because it contains so much else, even though it is beyond comparison. It holds no boundaries. We live and we love and we grieve. It is in our nature to contain so much — you and me both. We who are — like life and love and grief — beyond comparison.

---