What I love about poetry, and I'm not the first person to say this or feel this by any means,
but poetry does not give people answers.
It doesn't give you an answer.
Poetry gives you a lot more questions, which I think in a lot of ways is a lot better
than receiving an answer.
[Music]
Hi, they're grief growers.
I am so honored to be here with you as always, especially on the Thursday before Mother's
Day, which I know is a very big holiday for so, so many people who are grieving.
If you have been alongside me in my work for a while, welcome back.
If you are new to me in my work, hello.
My name is Shelby for Scythia, I am a grief coach, two-time author and founder of Life
After Loss Academy, and I have had the joy of helping thousands of grieving people stop
feeling lost and stuck and start building lives that they love from the lives that
loss has forced them to live.
This of course not only includes death-related losses, but also losses like divorce and breakup,
major diagnosis, job loss, pet loss, and any other loss that drastically changes your life.
And here on grief grower, we know for sure that grief is not something to get over, but
something to grow with and alongside.
And then when we stop treating grief like a problem to be solved, and more like an invitation
to live deeply as we talk about with our guests today, we get the benefit of the
living a life informed by and companion by grief.
Everything feels more beautiful, everything feels more precious, and despite the fact we
know in our bones that anything can happen to anyone at any time and some of us are born
into lives of grief, we can also create meaningful lives from loss.
And today on the show, I'm speaking with poet William Bortz.
We talk about grieving inanimate and visible things like hope, stability, certainty, and beauty.
The poems that helped him turn grief into a practice of appreciation.
Why poetry is a great practice for grievers, and how in the past two years he has begun
reshaping Mother's Day as a holiday that is less isolating and more gentle.
Here's a little bit about our guest today.
William Bortz is a poet from the Midwest.
He is the author of many small hunger rings, and the book we're going to talk about today,
the grief we're given.
You can find his work published online in Turning Leaf Journal, Button Poetry, Ok Donkey,
Turnpike Magazine, and others.
William is a music enthusiast, basketball lover, and grateful father and husband.
William, thank you so much for coming on grief grower today.
I am so honored to have you here and kind of just in time for Mother's Day, because I
know a lot of people wonder when the last first happens, how do I get through this?
But a lot of people in the long term too are how do I keep getting through this?
And something that I wanted you to come on the show to talk about is how we can use words
to kind of wrap language around things that we're feeling and how poetry might be a way
to not just get through this holiday, but through all the ways that grief shows up.
So to begin, I'd love for you to tell us your life experience with grief, kind of as a large
painted picture, and then we can totally get into your work as a poet, your relationship
with your mom, anything else that comes forward for us here.
But yeah, to start, tell us your lost story, tell us how grief showed up in your life.
Sure, yeah.
First, thank you for having me.
Appreciate the space that you give people to work through their grief, to discover their
grief, to figure out what role it was in their lives.
So, yeah, I spent a lot of time in foster homes.
My mother struggled with a lot of different things, mental illness, substance abuse, suicidal
ideation, things like that.
So we lived in a lot of different places, moved around a lot, homeless, women's shelters,
things like that.
And I lived with a lot of friends, a lot of family friends over the years and dealing
with that.
I had a lot of my own issues, right?
So I have PTSD, OCD, survivor's guilt, you know, from kind of all the situations that I
had growing up.
It was not an ideal childhood.
Yeah.
But I'm very grateful for it, and I've worked through a lot of things over the years, and
one thing that I consider a lot with grief is it kind of reshaped itself and shows up later.
In different ways, but yeah, there's always been a lot to unpack with trying to make sense
of my childhood, trying to reconcile things.
My father's well passed away.
I didn't know him.
So there's, I think there's a good handful of areas.
The grief has kind of shown up in my life, and more than that, a lot of areas that other
people have been there to help me.
I know that's not specific, and this isn't to mean anything, but I feel like it would take
a while to kind of lay out the different arenas of grief, if you will.
I think you point to something very profound though that a lot of my clients and students
come to me with and something that I experienced as well is that oftentimes when we're going
through it, we don't have a recognition of like one day I'm going to look back and
grieve this or understand that there's something to grieve here.
A lot of times it's very true with things we experience in childhood, but also too, I know
I'm just bringing up the example of COVID because we had Rebecca Sofer on about four weeks
ago to talk about the five year anniversary of COVID.
And for people who are like, well, I didn't lose anybody.
I kept my job.
I was able to work from home.
There was nothing for me to grieve at the time and then to look back and recognize how
much the world has changed, how much their mental health changed.
They may have had to geographically move somewhere or their relationships with people changed.
Sometimes when you're living through a thing, you don't know that one day you'll look back
and grieve it.
And I think that's a thing worth pointing towards and something that is worth talking about
as we continue to get older.
And there's no expiration date on like, oh, it's been X number of years you're not allowed
to grieve that anymore.
You're very much allowed to be like, oh, that was a thing worth grieving.
I didn't know it at the time, but knowing it now, kind of permission to walk through that
doorway of what does this look like looking back now through the lens of grief?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And I think we do ourselves the disservice sometimes of putting sort of grief on a spectrum
of having this cutoff of, you know, that's that's something worth grieving, you know, dear
to your point, you know, and not having lost someone during COVID.
There were a lot of things worth grieving for everyone and some of those things are bigger for
others than, you know, for them some people, but there's not, you know, a capacity as well,
like we can grieve small things.
And we should.
And to grieve the big thing as well.
I mean, there's a lot changes worth grieving number, how bigger small it is.
I'm going to read your own work to you.
I love how you speak about things that are worth grieving for people who are watching on YouTube.
I've got Williams book, The Grief Orgiven, which is one of his books that I found at the
library.
I was on a mission looking for another book and I saw this book and I was like, that's going
to come home with me as well.
And then I read it and knew he needed to come on a show.
Shout out libraries.
But I love that even in talking about your relationship to grief and loss, you're pointing
towards, I'm not just grieving people.
I'm not just grieving circumstances, but I'm also grieving things I can't see or touch,
like instability or like uncertainty.
And there's a poem that you wrote called Outcomes that is about grieving hope or grieving uncertainty
or not really knowing what's going to happen next.
Yeah, it's called Outcomes.
And if you grab the book, it's on page 10.
So as one of my favorite spiritual teachers, Rob Bell says, for those of you keeping score
at home, this is on page 10 of The Grief Orgiven.
William writes, I am scared of outcomes, terrified that they happen, whether I will them to or
not.
Frightened of all the pedals left to wilt in warm palms, love of all things is a haunting.
How do you keep exuberant things close to you without them becoming a shadow?
Even now I am growing dim.
Death will forever be the enemy because it will take and have the audacity to force
me to watch when the only outcome I desire is to be the pedal and not the palm.
And there's I get chills, I get chills reading your work and I did a terribly horrendous thing.
Please don't come for me listeners for dog earring the pages of a library book in addition
to putting post it notes in it.
I promise I flowed them all back up before it goes back to the library.
But this is such, I think, a human desire to have and simultaneously an impossible one.
I can never be this like eternally beautiful thing.
One day I will die, we all must die.
One day I will grieve, we all must grieve.
I want to be the pedal, but I am the palm.
I am the thing.
I am the warm thing that's crushing the beautiful thing all the time.
I wonder if you could speak more to maybe where the inspiration for this poem came from,
but also grieving things that we can't always touch or see, but that we feel.
Yeah, so that one.
It's come growing up and I alluded very broadly.
The way I did, there wasn't a lot of hope even for small things.
An example that I think about is when I was really young.
I remember being promised that we're going to get a dog.
I was very young and I was very excited.
I was maybe fourth grade.
I remember being excited but then I'm immediately knowing that's not going to happen.
I had already, at that point, realized that these good promising things probably aren't
going to happen for me or to me or whatever maybe.
Then as I get older, I have more control over my life and I've been able to work through
things.
How this sentiment, if you want to call it, has lingered is when I have hope for a good
thing and the good thing then comes through fruition and then immediately think, "How is this
going to be stripped away?
How am I going to lose this thing or how is this thing going to lose me?"
That particularly was primarily about relationships.
Trying to be very stable in healthy relationships and then having them being like, "Well, my
brain automatically is streaming."
Like, "Well, seemingly nothing on the horizon has gone over with this but there's always
the end of this, the end that's what's going to happen for everyone."
So I just can't.
With those good things, it's hard to look past that at times.
That's the idea for that.
Whether it's going to be me undoing it or simply time.
That's how that sentiment for my child that is evolved as I'm gotten older.
Sure.
I wonder, "How do you exist now in adulthood with that reality?"
I knew very young that someday this will end whether by my hand or somebody else's or fate
or what have it.
I think a question a lot of people who are grieving wonders, "Well, how do I exist when I know
that's reality?"
I know that to be true because I've lived that to be true, whether through death or divorce
or breakup or diagnosis, something big that changes your life.
How do I just go on living?
This is a very big question I'm asking you.
I'm not asking you to have the answer.
I guess how do you walk around the world just knowing that that's true?
Sure.
For me, it's twofold.
One of the answers was given to me and one I had to figure out.
One that was given to me was people, was community.
I know situations are different for different people, but my entire life I've been fortunate
enough to have at least one person within arm's reach who acted as however small a light
in a moment where I really needed one.
I like to hope that everyone at least has one person.
I would say that person is.
People are whoever clinging, hopefully, to those people.
The second thing I had to learn, which is just something I'm sure we'll discuss here was
poetry something a lot.
There's been a few writers over the past six, seven years who write about appreciation,
whether it's a practice or a posture, as if it's a different language, appreciating things,
being small, whatever it is, has helped.
That's the one I've had to earn is appreciation.
When you're grieving, you've got to look for that stuff.
I'm not saying you have to, that's my challenge for you.
I'm saying you literally have to try and find it sometimes.
There's not always just going to be handed to you.
In the midst of grieving, bigger, small, it's not always just going to be delivered to you.
This idea to look at something and be like, I'm grateful for the thing because there's
a lot more going on.
It's learning to try and look when you have a moment.
I learned small it is.
A blooming tree, warm sun in your skin, bigger, small, but this idea of appreciation is a
different language.
That's what's been a very hard earned thing.
Yeah, and it's something that I know I talked about this in my second book, "Your Grave
Your Way," but sometimes appreciation or gratitude, which I never tell grieving
people to be grateful because that can feel like an insult when you're grieving.
Appreciation has a different flavor, kind of wonder or curiosity.
They have slightly different flavors than gratitude in toxic positivity culture.
But a lot of times I'd be working with people and they'd say things like, well, a blooming
bush feels like nothing in the face of this grief.
And also, the reality of it, and I think what you speak to is that it is something.
It may be like a David Goliath 1% up against 99%.
The scales may be very unbalanced if you're measuring, if you feel like your soul or your
heart is measuring.
And also 99% is a little bit different than 100%.
And that glimmer or that possibility if there's just a little bit more here than despair,
or a little bit more here than uncertainty, or a little bit more here than unavoidable
death to get pretty graphic about it, is that that is where, at least for me, and it sounds
like an affair bit for you where hope comes from in grief.
And maybe not just hope, but like this is what gets me through another day.
I don't know about forever, but I can commit to another day.
Yeah.
That's very well said.
Yeah, even just the glimmer.
Sometimes it's all you get, but sometimes it's all you need as well.
Yeah.
I wonder, I want to pivot to Mother's Day now because I know we've got this hallmark
card holiday staring us in the face and it is such a big one for so many people I work
with.
It's a big one for me because I lost my mom 11 years ago.
And it's a big one for people who have lost children or have wanted to be parents in different
ways.
And so there's kind of like grieving parents, grieving children, grieving mother figures,
grieving mothers who were absent, grieving mothers who were estranged.
There's kind of like this whole motherhood shuffle in the mix that comes along with this
holiday and then the emails and text message reminders and commercials on TV about, have
you gotten something for your mom yet?
And I'm like, I can't.
She's dead.
So I wonder what is your relationship to this holiday if there is one and then maybe some
practical tips or exercises you might have perhaps through the lens of poetry or words
or language that have gotten you through seasons similar to Mother's Day?
Yeah.
My relationship growing up, I'm sure younger was just anger.
That is my guess.
And then probably into resolving to indifference, Mother's Day is a tricky one.
I mean personally, I don't know if I ever got to the point of being without another connection
to Mother's Day.
Now I have a wife and we have a child through this will be the second Mother's Day.
I have through that lens.
I think my answer would then go back to community to people.
For me, thinking about the holidays, Mother's Day, Father's Day, just the various, like you
said, the hallmark kind of holidays that kind of shoved things in your face.
It was easy for me to sit at home and that's when I was the angriest.
I could have been.
It was kind of my most fruitless response to those things was isolation.
It was at least helpful, the least fruitful way that I could respond to that.
And I'm not saying, you know, anger is unhealthy, but kind of turning the anger back upon myself
and responding to it was unhealthy.
I was at progress in age and then my wife.
We ran out of house.
I didn't have a luxury of sitting inside and being engraving that all day.
I had to go out into the world with people who were gentle and caring and acknowledge the
fact that this isn't my favorite day in the world.
And then now, my wife is a mother and it's very bizarre.
Now I also have a wonderful mother-in-law.
It's been strange.
The pivot has been strange and it's hard to see it.
I think how it's that this kind of the mother's day is hard to see it.
I think how it's meant to be seen for me.
And again, so kind of the transition has been, you know, isolation/anger and then leaning
on something that has the strength to hold me up.
And then kind of when I could stand on my own, however shaky, like your kind of distinction
between gratitude and appreciation.
Now that I'm a bit kind of on my own, I can look for that gratitude.
I could be grateful.
Like on a wife who's a mother, a mother-in-law, it was a great example.
And people around me who were moms and who are loving and it's reshaped a bit.
But I feel very, I feel like a child learning to walk.
Can you say more on that?
Because I have never heard anybody speak of it that way before, but it makes a lot of sense.
Like, well, other people I know with intact families, present mothers, not dead mothers,
may have feel like I got a handle on Mother's Day at the age of six when I made my first card
and handed it to her and knew that she was going to love it or what have you.
And to almost relearn the holiday through a positive lens, I think that's a really
neat insight.
Can you say more on that?
Sure.
It's challenging, you know, because last year, like I, my wife's first mother's day, I feel
like I didn't do enough to celebrate it because I don't know the value of, I don't know what
your value of Mother's Day.
I don't know really.
And that sounds like such a strange thing to say.
But it's just, it's very sincere.
You know, I truly never really celebrated a Mother's Day.
And the way that full appreciation of, like you said, like your six years old, you know,
you've done your whole life.
So I, yeah, I have a week away and I haven't thought about it once, which is, you know, I
just do not feel like a good thing to say when, again, I have sort of the training meals
I've had with, we had a last year with my wife and I've had great Mother and Mother, but
I don't know.
I don't know what, but there's, I'm learning how to be grateful for this stuff, grateful
that there's a new holiday for me to, to celebrate something that has just been a pretty dark day
for 30 years.
Yeah.
And almost permission, a lot of times we talk about, with my clients and students, permission
to feel bad and permission for it to be hard and permission for it to not go well and
permission to be a beginner in the, you're doing this with grief, which can feel more negative.
But I truly have never heard anybody speak about permission to be a beginner with, with
Mother's Day being a positive and kind of having that also be a grief experience too of
like I have never had this be a good holiday.
And so relearning to see through that lens is, is a grief experience in and of itself.
So what are some things in the past or in the present, maybe even tied to writing or
language or poetry that you might offer people who are deeply grieving in this season or
whenever they, they chance to come across this interview, whether Mother's Day or any
other grief day.
Mm-hmm.
But I love about poetry and I'm not the first person to say this or feel this by any means,
but poetry does not give people answers, it doesn't give you an answer.
poetry gives you a lot more questions, which I think in a lot of ways are, is a lot better
than receiving an answer.
It makes us kind of need into the grief and those feelings more.
And for me personally, that has allowed going back to your kind of analogy from 100% to 99%
of grief or whatever, maybe open that up a little bit to see, to go from 100% to 99%.
Or I have a question now, and I can follow a thread and I can unravel a bit and kind of
let some light in.
And then I can find appreciation.
It's like, you know, an answer from a grief like that, and to get, I mean, you've been doing
this forever.
Like, there isn't really ever just an answer.
And I feel like it's almost, you know, a pull thread and unravel and I'm like, all right,
here are three questions.
I'll go down this one and then there's five in there and then it keeps going and the
grief kind of changes and to your point you learn to live with it.
So that's not a direct answer, but poetry is great for that.
It's not going to give you an answer.
It's going to give you questions and sometimes the questions are easy and sometimes they are
hard.
So I would say approach it with care, but you'll get something for sure.
Yeah, something will come out of this.
And I love, I encourage people to read your book because a lot of poetry I've read about
grief is all sort of in a same style or same format across the book.
And something that I like that you do is mix very intimate storytelling with kind of like
some very blank pages that have maybe seven words on them that are a question or are
a thought and that just leaves you there versus there are other pages or maybe even two pages
that are full of text or telling a story from beginning to middle to maybe an end.
So there's a lot of opportunity in here to insert yourself into a storytelling experience
or also sit with a question or an idea I'm going to read your words to you one more time.
Sure.
Again, this is from the book The Grief We're Given by William Boards.
This one is called Possess on page 87.
This is my favorite poem in the whole book because it does present with a question.
He writes, "When you are holding something beautiful, it is spectacular or it is yours, it cannot
be both."
And my first response to this poem was, "Well, why not?
Why can't it be spectacular and mine at the same time?"
But there's this, I'm diverging a little bit into nature and politics and things like that
now, but sort of when you put ownership over something or when you say this belongs to
me, it can sap the beauty or the spectacularness or the wonder surrounding it out.
And it's not to say you can't have and claim wonderful things, but a lot of times I think
this spectacularness of something, whether it's an idea or a bit of nature or a physical
object, sometimes it's wonderful because it belongs to everybody or that it belongs
to nobody.
And it was my favorite poem in the book because I never thought about possession that way.
I wonder if you can say more on the idea of possession and maybe how or if possession
shows up for you in relationship to grief.
Yeah, yeah, first thank you.
You read the poem beautifully.
Thank you.
Lots of audiobook practice to be honest, but yes, I love poetry.
Yeah, that for me kind of was a product of anxiety and it's an idea I think about a lot
of possession primarily.
So when my now wife and I first started dating, I know I've been spent terrible relationships.
I had never really had examples of good ones and I was just terrible.
I was anxiety-ridden, terrified of someone fleeing.
Now wife and I started dating and talking.
I immediately thought of the end.
All the ways it can end most of those being the ways that she would find another way,
find something else, find something greater, something better, whatever it may be.
And this is kind of an idea that I've now, the poem is an idea of reflecting back
on that time.
But the reason I fell in love with her because she was her own person, right?
It was me watching her in the wild, if you will, and then that anxiety was me trying to
put a butterfly in a jar, being like, "Well, I'm really scared if you go over there where
it's super cool.
So I'm going to keep you in this jar, and put you in my shelf or whatever."
And that's just not the thing you fall in love with.
So the obsession is, possessing the thing makes you, the idea of the thing becomes what
you create it to be.
It's not the thing anymore.
It's the idea you've made of it.
And then that's what you have.
And ultimately that will fail you, because that's not the reason you like this thing.
You like it because it's own beautiful individual-free thing.
You capture it.
It's now yours.
You've created an idea that so it was reflecting back.
And it wasn't an answer to the anxiety I had ultimately, but it was a nice reminder of
how that's harmful to myself, not that I was like, "Go wings, I eat."
And it was like, "See ya."
But it was just...
I wish it was that easy.
Yeah, get out of here.
It was just kind of an aff...
I guess it was like an affirmation, sort of like a grounding technique.
I guess you could say moving forward of me seeing this beautiful thing, if I get my hands
all over it with my terrible anxiety brain, I'm going to ruin it.
So I'm not going to try and make it mine.
I'm just going to appreciate it.
Yeah.
And it all kind of revolves back to appreciation again, which is kind of cool.
I don't know if you know that in a book about grief, that's kind of the finger you're pointing
in subtly and every...
I don't think you use the word appreciation once, but that I'm surprised in our conversation
is the thing that's like coming up over and over and over again as grief, as a portal
or a doorway to more appreciation of life as it is happening right now.
And kind of life, it can be spectacular or you can try to control it.
It cannot be both.
By way of anxiety, I think that's really profound.
I'm pleasantly surprised to have gotten through this grief to appreciation doorway to name,
not how I was expecting the conversation to go.
I really love that.
Do you have any favorite poems or poets that have helped you through your own grief that
you'd like to talk about?
Yes.
One, yeah, there's a few, "Penetha Barakeed" who I use a line of his from an essay he wrote
as the epigraph for this book.
Which few are okay with?
Can I read the epigraph from the grief?
Yeah, I would love that.
It's an essay that he had written in the epigraph reads, "God, I have touched the living
face of a person I love.
With the same hands, I have touched the dying face of someone I love and none of that seems
fair."
I think it's a very simple and beautiful acknowledgement.
We're always grieving constantly.
It's the small thing, the big thing is that's overlapping constantly and there's this desire
to try and make sense in a reconciling.
I don't know if that's possible.
He's a remarkable writer and he writes a lot about music and growing up and I think the way
he says things and the way he views things is remarkable.
Another writer, Kavay Akbar, who is a poet and a novelist and I'm going to try and quote
when my favorite lines were him.
And this book, "Calling a Wolf-A-Wooff," it changed how I read and that kind of started
this journey for me of appreciation and there's a line in the title poem of this book that
I believe says, "Thinking if I had a name, it would have a solution.
Thinking if I called a wolf a wolf, I might dull its fangs."
Which I think is such a beautiful acknowledgement that the thing we think is the answer isn't
always the answer.
And the kind of where the bridge is to grief for me is, and I'm again, I've long wanted
to apologize, but there's a great essay from David Foster Wallace or essay or a commencement
speech where he talks about, he talks about this a lot, but 80% of our life is waiting in
lines for things.
We're standing around, we're waiting, we're doing the same stuff over and over again.
And in that 80%, since that's a book of our lives, we have to learn to look up and appreciate
and see things.
And this is outside of grieving, but obviously that's a great overlap that we're often grieving
and lines that grow.
It's a grocery store for, you know, over our lives.
But in that process, we're just grieving and we're just always going through it.
The answer is not always clear.
The answer is not always there.
I think to your point, and what you've, I've heard you mentioned in previous podcast, and
if I quote you wrong, please correct me, but we have to learn to live with the thing.
There's not going to be an answer that's going to be a solution.
Let's see, I was going to end it all in grieving.
Yes.
Well, even to tie it back to language and poetry and putting words to things, even having
a word for something doesn't necessarily change what it is.
You may be able to define it.
It doesn't necessarily change the way grief feels in your body or how it manifests in your
life or how it shows up on big holidays or how it comes out through words or at work or
at the grocery store to your point.
And I love that quote about the wolf because in my first book, Permission to Grieve, I referred
to my grief as a wolf. I was keeping trapped in the basement of my life.
And the first time I actually gave myself permission to grieve, it was like the wolf was
springing forward from the basement.
My biggest fear was that it was going to eat me.
And the only thing that it wanted to do was to be seen and to be loved and welcomed into
the home of my life that I had created.
About calling it grief did not change the fact that it had power or that it was present
or that it was painful.
And I really enjoy having those words from other people who influenced you too.
And you learning through the lens of the words of others, which is why I'm glad you're here
because hopefully then people will learn through your words as well.
The great task of grief is not to disappear it.
It is to sure find words for it, sure ask a lot of questions.
But ultimately learn how to live and to coexist with the thing.
So as we're wrapping up here, I kind of want to know how does grief show up for you right
now in this season of your life?
And maybe how would you like your relationship with grief to show up going forward?
How would you like to grow with grief?
That's a good question.
Because it's kind of ticky tacky a little bit for me.
For no good reason, just pokes me in the rib randomly throughout the day.
And I've mentioned there's a new, a different book I wrote that's kind of about nostalgia and
memory.
And when I talk about the book, I talk about how not in Amazine isn't good or bad, but I
spent a lot of time in the past thinking about it, reflecting, you know, right?
Grief has a house there.
Grief's where grief's summer home is.
Yeah, just vacations.
Kicks its feet up.
That's good.
And so it's just random things, you know, you'll hear a song, you'll smell something,
you'll see something, and you're just kind of nudged and you just are reminded of this
thing.
So it's just always there, again, but just small and little instances and it doesn't really
evolve.
But it's just like kind of pokes a hole and it's like, hey, if you want to come through, come
through.
And I'm like, I'm good today.
I'll just kind of peer a bit and go on my way, but thanks.
And what I've felt as a challenge since writing that book is I was kind of thinking of grief
as a lineage.
You know, I didn't ask.
I didn't ask to be born into this grief, the grief I've given, which is the reason I
called that.
I didn't ask for it.
And I just, because of that, I don't intend to give it to other people who haven't asked
for it.
So I would like to sculpt it into something different that I can offer people, you know,
laughter, more tangibly poetry or just thoughts or something, but I don't want, you know, I kind
of want it to end here and it to become something different.
Because it's your, your, the points you bring up often is it doesn't really end.
So, but it can be different.
I think, you know, the grief that I feel I can turn into something else for my daughter,
for my friends, for my wife, for the people in my life, I can turn it into a story or
again, laughter, which would be my goal, but I don't want it to be grief for them.
I don't want to hand that to them and be like, I have an overflow.
Here's a little bit in joy.
I want to be different.
And that's my, you know, but I'm not saying that's what everyone needs to do.
That's just, that's been my challenge.
It sounds like you have this commitment though and you phrase this so beautifully, is
like, I will, I will not make this my inheritance.
Like I will not pass this down.
Unprocessed, untransmuted, untransformed.
I will not take this thing that has been such a source of wounding and confusion and instability
for me and be like, now that's yours.
Without having gone through you first.
And I think it's almost like pasteurized grief.
How do we take it through some process?
It's a faster idea.
How do we totally and and make it into something that is not just consumable, but maybe you
are nourishing for whoever comes next, which is a really cool idea reflecting on my own mother
and the gifts that she gave me in life.
A lot of them were griefs that she did transform or filter through herself first.
And it's not that they were secrets.
It's not that they were even half formed, but they had been, they had been worked through
in a way where she was ready for somebody else to see and receive them and to learn from
them and say, this was pain I carried, but you don't have to carry this.
I've carried it.
How you know about it and you can live a life informed by it, but it is not something
that's being passed down as a burden.
It's more of a legacy.
It's more of a thing that's woven in as opposed to something that's broken and needs to be
mended still.
And I don't have a very clear example, but that's kind of like the feeling that's coming
up for me right now is a lot of being raised by her is was, is was I play with that
that word a lot.
I think a lot of grieving people do totally felt a lot like her wisdom came from pain, but
the lessons felt like comfort if that makes sense.
Yeah.
And I think that's really beautiful that that's like where you want your grief to go because
I think for so many people who are grieving, that's that's also where and how they want
their grief to go is with that sort of intention.
Regardless of if you're passing it on to your children or just the other people you come into
contact with, it's not all familial family trauma and ancestral trauma is very real.
But by sheer nature of you being alive and in community with other people, you you touch
them with what you bring to the table too.
And sometimes it's unprocessed grief, but the hope is that that it is grief pondered or
grief turned into something or grief learned from in a way that feels healing ultimately
for you and then by proxy for for the whole for the rest of us to.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I love that.
I love that you get that.
Be given that.
Yeah.
Well William, before we go, I'd love for you to tell folks where they can find you and your
poetry and your books and anything else you'd like to share as we head out today.
Sure.
Thank you.
So I have book we've discussed today, a brief forgiven and another book released two years
ago called "Many Small Hungry and Switch."
I don't have currently to my daughter's room and she's in Appings.
So it's inaccessible.
It doesn't exist.
And you know, I'm on Instagram and TikTok and all the things.
I'm free to come hang out.
My books are available.
They're in the world.
If you want to read them, go ahead.
If you don't, that's great.
I just yeah, I just hope people have people to help them.
I love them.
That's kind of like an help for people.
So I love that.
People to help them love and also maybe poems to ask questions.
Sometimes in the absence of people, poems are a good way to ask questions, but also poetry
with others.
I've done grief high coups with other people before to see like, "If you had to cram
your grief into the structure of a high coup, what would that look like?"
And that's a fun, challenging exercise.
Yeah, I would love to, but I also am like, "I will pass.
That sounds hard."
You're like, "That sounds terrible, not for me."
That sounds, that's a challenge right there.
How fun.
Yeah, that's fun.
Yeah.
Something I enjoy doing that a lot of people are often surprised by is like, "Make
games out of grief."
And I'm like, "We gotta do something with it."
Because sometimes the force of it or the weight of it feels so oppressive.
I'm like the only way I know how to interact with this thing is to turn it into a craft
project, which is very much in the spirit of my mother.
Just tactile.
Yeah.
Total craft mob.
Can we turn it into a writing prompt?
Can we turn it into a doodle?
Can we turn it into something that feels a little more, not just younger and childlike,
but a little more playful because grief can be played with that way.
It still may not defang the thing, but it makes a little bit different to carry and coexist
with.
I love that.
Well, William, thank you so much for coming on today.
I have loved speaking with you.
This was so beautiful.
And I just look forward to staying in touch.
This was really lovely.
Yeah, it was a delight.
I appreciate you bringing me on a left talking about grief, poems, all the things.
So thanks for sharing Good See Your Story and trust it with me.
I appreciate it.
That's all for this episode of "Greve Grower."
Thank you so much for joining me today.
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Grave Growers hosted by me, Shelby Forsitia, with lead music composed by Addy Goldstein.
Until next time, grief growers, I say you, I am so proud of you and the work that you're
doing in the world.
And I love you because even through grief, we are growing.
[Music]