It’s an unseasonably warm and hazy November day as I finish reading the personal essay anthology Locations of Grief, an emotional geography, edited by the poet Catherine Owen. As construction workers sling wood and puncture nails into a new structure of residency across the street and in front of me, I soak up a mid-autumn sun and consider the messages the book delivers. Locations of Grief is an exploration of the role geography plays in the act of mourning and grieving. In her own travails through the spheres of loss, Owen had noticed the theme of geography as a recurring feature in writings about grief. With that in mind, she assembled 24 writers from diverse backgrounds, to study how death can alter perspective on a place, how trauma and emotional upheaval can taint or flavor one's view of the world. Whether we intend to or not, we all inhabit many things. Our clothes, our homes, our communities. In these inanimate or abstract structures, we leave legacies and affect changes in our insular or secular worlds. These things house memories of our lives and by effect represent us when we are gone either temporarily or permanently.
I started reading this while the world was figuring out how to celebrate Hallowe’en in a Covid-19 stricken world. All Hallowed’s Eve; the night before the Feast of Saints; the overmorrow of which would be All Soul’s Day, the day in the Catholic calendar on which we commemorate the faithfully departed- all of it was a backdrop to reading this. So it seemed appropriate to read such a collection in these times of reminiscence and considerations of mortality. Additionally, as I type through this, my orbit is passing through another anniversary of my father's passing. November 7th 2003. Because of this, anyone that knows me knows that I hate November. So many bad things have happened in that month, but losing my dad to leukemia was the worst. My mother lasted only 10 more months after that, succumbing to COPD. Reading about grieving has been difficult because I had been feeling that miasma rising, cold, damp and dark, but today the air is warm, soft and kind, so I continue, stooped over, typing, re-reading, and then occasionally straightening up, taking off my reading glasses and considering the senescent autumnal views around me.
This collection of personal essays and memoirs teaches us how we can retain the lives of our dearly departed, keep their memories alive. With the concept of Locations of Grief, we realize that we can dedicate a space to a deceased loved one, and can inhabit the expansiveness of their influences in that locale. The abstractness of their absence is then fitting when we experience them in an either expansive landscape or a focal locality.
For example, in her essay ‘Changing Our Address’, poet Lynn Tait spread her son's ashes all over the world, and in doing so made him omnipresent in body and spirit, his spirit participating in their daily lives with humour, affection and shared grief that was still to come. Jenna Butler, in her essay ‘worry stones’, created a memorial with which to create an interface with grief and assume the act of healing after the loss of daughters unborn or taken too soon. Waubgeshig Rice, in ‘Ancestral Waters’, joins his two grandmothers who come from seemingly diaposed backgrounds, intermingling in the storied waters of Georgian Bay which connects them as family and people, even though in life they had settled on the opposing shores of Parry Sound. In the book’s last essay ‘Never Released: Hamilton, ON and Scotch Village, NS’ by Ben Gallagher, his partner suddenly becomes the victim of an impaired driver in Hamilton. As she had been originally part of the Nova Scotian Mi'kmaq community, Gallagher honours her and maneuvers his grief to right the wrongs of colonization upon the indigenous peoples from whence his loved one hails. Committing himself to the cause, and straddling the secular and the spiritual world, tackling the dichotomies of grief, he seeks to assuage the vexed yin and yang of existence in the temporal world. As with other concepts in the book, peace comes from a reconciliation of all the polarities; alive/dead, present/absent, here/there, and more. All the dearly departed- Nikki Reimer’s brother, Onjana Yawnghwe’s father, Alice Major’s dog, Marilyn Dumont’s departed ex-flame, and even Christine Lowthers’ family members who have left her legacies of either trauma or providence, all of them have been assigned a space where their survivors can connect with and commemorate them.
Of all the stories however, it is the editor’s contribution that touches me deepest. In Catherine Owen’s piece ‘Thrall: A Year of Grieving’, it’s the first time we can read about her husband’s decline in candid language; how, in his last days, he’d divested himself of his possessions as if they were parts of his own self, allowing his addiction to fill the vacancies. In ‘Thrall’, Edmonton exists as the venue of this sad succession of events, coexisting with not the least bit of awkwardness the beauty of their loving one another in spite of it all. Their shared living spaces, the hotel rooms, and then the hospital and funeral home all occupy the area and perimeter of that Alberta city. Owen’s returns through the years are always marked with uninvited recollections and unavoidable reminders, but the most poignant takeaway for it is what is not included in the narrative.
After years away, she returned to Edmonton, the venue of so many things in her life, her thoughts mostly centered around her life with her husband. Buildings, streets, roads, neighbourhoods present reminders that perpetuate her sense of grieving. Still, she buys a house in the middle of it all and creates a new life there, one in which she engages completely in the present, living new joys regardless of the past, as life post-loss should ultimately be lived. In Edmonton now, she has a new life, new loves, new occupations and projects. She lives a full life, with all its highs and lows. She immerses herself in it all, past, present and future; happiness, sadness and even beautiful anger.
Through her piece in the anthology, you can see how she frames the rest of the stories and essays therein, illuminating in each one the fact that grieving is not something we can grow out of or heal from, slotting the pain of loss into the past and moving on as if the trauma had never happened. Grief is something we can inhabit. By projecting grief upon a location, there is room to move and a space to be shared with both the living and the lost. This way, our material world can be heaven, hell, purgatory and all divine states to which we assign our souls.
This anthology teaches us that we can’t be fixated on the throes of grief. We have to find a way to move on. A life can’t be full without the experience of loss and grief. Geography itself is marked with highs and lows, different topographies, different habitats and densities. Such is life. The aim of this anthology was to illustrate the pervasiveness of memory and legacy through geography. 24 times, it succeeded. So it can be for us, as readers and as fellow citizens of heaven, hell and all points in between.
So as I type these last words, and as the warm sun sets behind the building to the west of me, I receive news that Joe Biden has succeeded in becoming the 46th President of the United States. Finally 6 or so years of farce and incredulity can come to an end and we can finally see some rationality from south of the border. The air is cooling and I’m considering going inside to put a sweater on after spending this entire glorious day outside on my deck typing this review up. I haven’t been able to do this in quite a while. Tomorrow promises to be another warm sunny day, as do the next two after that, then it will begin to rain once again and we will return to our regularly scheduled cold grey and brown November. Thank goodness I had this day. I’m ready for the future.
Locations of Grief: an emotional geography is available through Wolsak and Wynn Publishers;
https://www.wolsakandwynn.ca/
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