Loose Leaf Notes

We were asked to be present to an evening that will never happen again. We were asked not to take photos or video clips at the Nights of Grief and Mystery, so this is for memory.  But it’s a true story and it really happened, as Griefwalker Stephen Jenkinson likes to preface some of his storytelling.

And storyteller he is. In a testament to living language, Stephen’s stories embody no advice, no soundbites, no sugarcoating or preaching, no facts and information, just his human-lived experience told in his own words, words like poetry that hit a human chord of truth and show that more than one reality can exist at the same time, and they don’t cancel each other out.

It’s hard to describe what the Nights of Grief and Mystery are. There’s a band, storytelling and readings in an atmosphere of intimacy and honesty. I know I laughed loudly. I know I cried from deep within and danced in my seat a few times.  “Cognitive dissonance, a love letter for grown-ups, the dark road headed out of town,” are a few of the ways that Stephen has described it.

On his webpage, Orphan Wisdom, he says: “We know and you know that the “Feel Good Now No Matter How the World’s Doing” industry is in full swing, so anything that calls itself A Night of Grief & Mystery seems a tough sell there on the banal information-overload, post-modern killing ground, where depth and spirit and subtlety are usually substituted for ‘steady as she goes’. Concerts for Turbulent Times they surely are. We aren’t poets – we wouldn’t claim that – but the evenings are poetic. They are musical and grave and raucous and stilling, which probably means they are theatrical. They are ceremonial, you could say. They are nights devoted to the ragged mysteries of being human, and so grief and endings of all kinds appear…”

Oh, so that explains it. The day after the Nights of Grief and Mystery, I tried to explain my response to it to a friend, and in doing so explained to myself why I felt so shaken when it was over.  For me, the experience was like a ritual, and I was cracked open with old wounds exposed.  I have always felt undone and in need of concrete closings of the ritual circles. I would have preferred to go home in silence, but there was book signing, Floyd friends and life to be lived.  It’s also true that wounds and gifts are intertwined, as articulated by another wise storyteller, Micheal Meade, who said, “The gifts are near the wounds. In order to get to the gifts, you have to go near the wounds.”

Here’s one of Stephen’s story gifts that unglued me, touched on a deep grief, a lie told and remembered:  After he spoke of Rome and how the country people (pagans) had to pledge loyalty to Rome in order to live, he spoke of the fall and the dark ages that were followed by a time when the people were told that they didn’t need their land, their culture and language or their connection to their ancestors because they had a soul that transcended all that.

They were taken up to the top of the hill where they witnessed the cutting down of every tree. ‘See, nothing happened. You’re still here,’ they were told, and ‘now we have all firewood for many years.’ The people were confused, but some knew better. They knew they had been ripped off, stolen from with a lie, one that goes on to this day, one that explains my mistrust of second-hand spiritual platitudes and organized belief systems and creeds. The girl (Greta Thornburn) who spoke at the UN is one of the people’s descendant, Stephen said.

“The nights are devoted to the ragged mysteries of being human, and so grief and endings of all kinds.” And death, my curriculum of study since my brothers died back-to-back in 2001. First, I studied death hoping to find some kind of proof that I would see them again. Then I studied and contemplated being okay with not knowing. I can lean into some beliefs that resonate, but the truth is, I don’t really don’t know.

The author and Harvard educated theologian, former hospital director and consultant to palliative care and hospice organizations says, “Dying is a time for learning how to love your body, not for what your body might still do, but for what it has done, and will do … no more.” He talked about learning about dying from watching our loved ones who are dying and letting them help us by being honest with them and asking them questions about what they are experiencing.

When he said those words, I relived being with my brother Danny when he died and felt the gift he gave me, through his hand gestures, his apparent communication with who or what I couldn’t see, his struggle to say “I’m alright” after his breathing tube was taken off, his showing me something of my own death.

Deeply felt songs of mystery broke up the tears of the evening, and humor brought big belly laughs, like Stephen’s story about being in Dublin when he was physically and emotionally drained and felt he had nothing to offer. He was in a green room that was “neither green or a room,” more like a perch above a stairway, he said. Someone ducked into the opening at the bottom of the stairs, not to call him to the stage, but to make a phone call.  He heard a man urging someone to come to The Nights of Grief and Mystery.  If she liked what Stephen said, their relationship would have a chance, the man said.  ‘Don’t put me in the middle of your romance,’ Stephen thought to himself. ‘…And if you do, on this night, you’ll lose…’ The conversation ended with the man saying, ‘you have to come. Hearing Stephen speak is an opportunity you might not get again because… he’ll be dead soon.’

“That’s how I found out,” Stephen, an elder, said after a pause, delivering the punchline to a roar of laughter.

What I took away from the Nights of Grief and Mystery is that I am on the right track, the right dark road, I should say.  The evening was an affirmation that validated the direction of my poetry – first for Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife and now Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear –  as if carving words out of air, as Stephen describes it. I was inspired by the creativity of everyone involved in the ritual performance and thankful to recognize and receive their moving artistry. – Colleen Redman

“On a good day, don’t you remember that none of this will last. You do. That’s what makes them good.” – Stephen Jenkinson