mourning as worldbuilding

ghost pipe, August 2024

In the early days of mourning, I became precious about the world I was building in the rubble of what was left behind. I’d cup the little seedlings, barely half an inch and two leaves above the soil, shielding them from a wayward gust of wind, a misspoken word of criticism, a too-poking question. I built the densest fence I could manage, hammered full of nails and every scrap of wood in the vicinity, bracing all the holes together by sheer force of will.

So when someone asked if I was grateful, in the wake of all that loss — too early in the worldbuilding to know anything but the most delicate stems, months if not years away from bearing fruit — I hesitated for a long time, testing the give of the fence.

The line blurs between between sensitive and hypersensitive, protective and overprotective, vigilant and hypervigilant. Who decides the line, and why?

In her essay last week, Jessica Dore quoted Kathleen Higgins, writing, “Mourning may be an ‘ongoing imaginative engagement that keeps the absence alive yet renews a sense of hope as one goes forward.’ So if grief is world loss, mourning may be more like world making.*”

In those early days, I stitched a worried line between world loss and world making, tying one world to the next in blocks for grief quilts. These days, I knit growing swaths of cloth — the yarn delightfully bobbled, the little sweaters and stuffies for armfuls of newborns and toddlers taking shape quickly. In between romance novel audiobooks and podcasts on good stewardship, the needles click and my phone buzzes with news — “she doesn’t know yet but I’m going to propose;” “send me your favorite books for a first pregnancy;” “my parents are safe from the flooding, thanks for thinking of us;” “can you believe the baby is already a year old?”

Receiving someone’s grief — or mourning, or joy — well requires a simultaneous honoring of difference as well as connecting to what is fundamentally human and relatable in it. If we just do one, we cause more pain than comfort.

We walk lines with each other of comfort, safety, pain, harm, vulnerability. Who decides the line, and why?

I sip my tea and touch the yarn and marvel. If each human is a world, then every relationship is a galaxy, and intimate skills are worldbuilding skills. The work is tender, and sacred — the stitching, the kneading, the mending, the writing.

It is fall, after all, and there is fruit to harvest.