Keen In: It’s Time We Express Our Collective Grief
“Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul.”
— Francis Weller
It’s mourning in America.
But where’s the grief?
Depending on the talking head you listen to, between 1,500 and 2,500 of us are dying each day. And that’s just from COVID-19.
That daily death toll doesn’t include “excess deaths”—the thousands more dying each day across the country from indirect effects of the pandemic.
Nor does it include the countless numbers of our fellow Americans who die each day from heart disease, cancer, suicide, drug overdose, car accidents, mass shootings, homicide, and the myriad other unnatural causes that extinguish thousands of lives in this country each and every day.
And this is just in America. It’s 3 pm Pacific and globally, over 100,000 people have died today, a number that goes up by one every fraction of a second.
The collective daily loss of life each day is staggering.
That much of it preventable or at the very least could be mitigated and substantively reduced is a colossal loss in and of itself.
That much of it goes unreported — and thus unnoticed, unacknowledged, unfelt by us — or gets buried in depersonalized, dehumanized aggregate statistics disconnected from the lives they represent is yet another tragic loss.
The loss of feeling.
The loss of connection.
The loss of our shared humanity.
It’s mourning in America.
But where’s the grief?
There are lots of displays of emotion happening around our country at the moment in response to the current pandemic.
We’re clapping, banging pots, and cheering — we wild ones in Northern California prefer to howl — at dusk to show support and express our gratitude for first responders and other essential workers.
Baser instincts stoked by unhinged, reckless, self-interested power-mongers drive others to displays of rage and hate at the perceived infringements on individual freedoms.
But where’s the collective emotional response — the outpouring of sorrow, the grief— acknowledging and mourning all those we’ve lost today?
It’s mourning in America.
But where’s the grief?
It’s been suppressed. Left unexpressed.
Forced out of the public sphere into hiding. An emotional response to manage on one’s own, in small groups, or stifle altogether.
Grief is raw, it’s vulnerable. There’s something primal, something feral about it as Francis Weller so insightfully observed in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow.
Keeping this primal emotional energy bottled up inside without a safe, socially sanctioned outlet is as dangerous as trying to keep a ferocious wild beast in a tiny cage. Rather than diminish, the unexpressed sorrow builds and builds until it bursts free with devastating effects.
My Scottish and Irish ancestors recognized the importance of public grieving in the face of death, performing a traditional grief ritual called keening at the graveside of the dearly departed. A ritual necessary for the soul to ascend and the community to heal.
A ritual so raw, so primal, so divinely feminine, that it scared the Catholic church into suppressing it out of existence in the 1950s, branding it as culturally backward and unseemly.
Professional keeners — one or more elder women often paid in whiskey — were invited to the burial to give voice to the loss and the powerful emotions it evokes in a wild, dramatic, vocal performance that was more guttural than lyrical and often accompanied by pounding on the ground or banging on the coffin.
Keening was designed to express the grief of the family and community. It required deep empathy from its practitioners to give authentic voice to the loss of someone the keener might not have known personally. Keeners bore powerful witness to death and loss, emoting dramatically and publicly to help the family and community process it.
It’s mourning in America.
But where’s the grief?
It’s beyond time we brought grief out of the shadows and returned it to its rightful place in the spectrum of acceptable emotional responses. To come together and publicly give voice and bear witness to our individual and collective sorrow.
In the face of the current pandemic and the unimaginable death, I feel called to honor the spirits of my ancestors and express the grief I’m feeling at our Great Loss.
Tonight, after you clap, bang, cheer, or howl, I invite you to join me in a Great Keen.
To come together as a collective and wail like banshees.
To publicly and vocally mourn the tragic loss of the 100,000+ souls who have died so far today and the tens of thousands more we will lose before the day is over.
To connect with the unexpressed grief buried deep inside each and every one of us — giving voice to it, bearing shared witness to it, and releasing it.
It’s time to keen in.
If you’re navigating grief and/or being called to do the deep inner work and would like a guide to support you, book a curious conversation to explore how the Vulnerability Doula can be of service to you.