Embrace impermanence

Grief is the fear of loss. Because of this fear, people fight to hold on to everything they have, which in turn causes more grief and suffering for self and others

Breeshia Wade, Buddhist end-of-life caregiver and author of Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow

For the tourists who set foot in Italy, the country is the land of delights. Following their heart’s desires, they can pick the best the place has to offer. The mellow hills of Tuscany, with their crests of cypresses lined on top, the trees, standing tall and silent, concealing the power to  evoke something unspoken within the onlooker. And again, the warm light on a spring afternoon on Canal Grande in Venice that makes you feel like you are inside a Tintoretto painting. On the bay, the seagulls fight for a morsel of bread stomping on the squared stones washed by the sea water, in the background the chatting of the gondoliers in their stripey shirts, their accents raising and ebbing like the tide, the ever-present mockery in their talk. The list goes on: drinking coffee standing at the counter of Sant’Eustachio’s, enjoying its after-taste while you walk under the imposing and severe porch of the Pantheon. You look up at the circular oculus in the roof, wondering if the sky is raining down on you or if, instead, it’s your spirit flying out through the opening in the ceiling. The mesmerizing colors of the marble floor, a tourist guide’s voice towering over the murmur of many languages, the candles burning in front of the altars. If it was not for the ever-present pickpockets, you could get lost in this hypnotizing mix.

Instead, I grew up in the Po plain, the so-called “warehouse-land.” Like a giant Bermuda triangle, the plain is contained within the Alps and the Apennine mountain range. To me it was all but a land of delights. It was the reign of a dark, deep, stifling ennui. The vastness of the land weighted on my heart, the eradication of its nature - the mysterious grassland with its twisted trees, its impenetrable maze of shrubs, its smell of musk and here and there light brown mushrooms growing in bunches near the rough tree trunks - revealed an eerie, almost haunted emptiness, interrupted only by the brief life of a blooming spring. On my last trip to Italy, I experienced the full weight of this immense emptiness. Driving on the highway that crosses the plain, I was a castaway in the middle of an ocean. As Flaubert framed it, “All the bitterness of life seemed to be served to her on her plate.” 

Breeshia Wade’s replies bring this episode back to today. Breeshia is a Buddhist end-of-life caregiver and the author of Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow, a book that explores our relationship with grief as an ongoing state of fear that forms and informs the choices we make. On a wider level, she calls the role of extractive capitalism into question and how it profits from our fears in our everyday life and, as one bead of a long chain of choices, in our relationship with our own aging process. 

I can imagine my ancestors chopping down the forest that once dominated the plain to make space for fields and farms, for houses and factories, for roads and airports and - of course - those soulless warehouses. I can picture their fear for the creatures, real or imaginative, that lived in the dark. Looking at it from the lens that Breeshia offered me, I can see how the need to control and contain nature, with its trains of ivy woven by invisible fingers, turned into an annihilating spell. I feel the need to embrace the lights and the shadows of my journey, diving into the mysterious harmony of things.

How did you go from being a birth doula to a Buddhist Chaplain and assisting people at the end of life?

It was an accident, really. I had been a birth doula during my first year of Divinity School, where I came into contact with chaplaincy work and end-of-life care. I remember attending a birth that tragically ended in stillbirth, standing there watching as nine months of hopes and dreams were shattered in an instant. I spoke to my Divinity School Director about it, and she guided me towards chaplaincy.

I'd been practicing Buddhism for about five years at that point, and Buddhist theology has a lot to say about the connection between birth and death. Combined with my practice and experiences, I began to see connections between joy and grief, life and death. I saw the connections present in just about every pursuit. So, being a birth doula and an end-of-life caregiver don't seem dissonant to me.

Considering your experience in birth and death, what role does aging play in this arc of events?

I imagine that people more readily think of "Death" when they think of old age. But death and loss aren't things that simply happen as a result of aging. I think that people mistake "Death" with "death"--"Death" being the major transition we all face at the end of our lives, whenever that comes, and "death" being the gradual, daily losses we experience by virtue of being alive (e.g. moving, losing a friend, break-ups, changing jobs). Perhaps with age comes more loss (i.e. "death") by virtue of the fact that one has simply lived longer. And perhaps with age comes more recognition of those losses, along with built skill sets to handle them.

Frankly, I think age is a social construct that we use to measure a lifetime, to mark moments of transition and identify significant experiences. We project a lot of things onto that construct in the same way we project other things, like race, gender, etc. onto bodies. However, the consequences of those projections are real.

How does grief interact with race, gender and sexual identities?

Typically when I reference grief work in relation to anti-Blackness, people think about the grief experienced by those oppressed by White Supremacy. But I am encouraging those who are not Black to consider how their own unexplored grief amplifies the suffering of Black people. There's the concrete grief that people experience as a result of the amount of systemic trauma and oppression they experience due to their race (e.g. Black people experience the trauma of loss consistently - whether it's wondering whether or not we were not called back for the job because of our name, or feeling unsafe walking through our own neighborhood in our body because we are deemed "other"). The same goes for gender and sexuality (e.g. women being afraid to walk alone at night, an LGBTQ couple being afraid to hold hands in public).

However, what is rarely discussed is how people who are white, male, straight, etc. use their own grief (i.e. fear of loss) to inflict harm against others, often because they are afraid of impermanence. They are afraid of loss of power. Loss of resources. Loss of space. Loss of time. As a result, people are marginalized and forced to experience the pain of their grief and suffering.

In your book you mention extractive capitalism. Why does it matter when it comes to grief?

Capitalism is constantly tugging on our grief, our fear of lack and wanting, to coerce us into specific behaviors. That can include buying a product that will make us feel more beautiful because beauty gives us access to connection and relationship. The underlying fear here is the absence of relationships and connection, which are crucial to human existence.

Capitalism can tug on our need to survive. Maybe we work long hours or allow our boundaries at work to be pushed out of fear of losing our job. Anytime something is connected to our survival, it is connected to grief and fear of loss. When we aren't aware of what's being tugged on in us, we allow ourselves to be manipulated. We find ourselves struggling to build lives of authenticity and meaning. That's the trap of capitalism--twisting our grief by forcing us into situations where we're trading money for time, a most valuable resource.

Does extractive capitalism play a part in the way our society views aging too? I think about Mrs. Jackson who you write about, for instance.

Of course. Extractive capitalism reduces a life to a body. That body is reduced to the amount of labor and time it can give. When a body is no longer of use, the life is discarded. I mentioned that anything tied to our survival is inexplicably connected to grief. Most of us who are not close to retirement age are not attentive to the ways in which our time, bodies, and grief are exploited within this system. It is cruel and heartbreaking.

I like that you refer to the latin root of grief: gravare. In Italian, it actually implies carrying something heavy. What happens in our life when we free ourselves from the weight of grief?

I don't believe that grief is something that we ever free ourselves from, or even need to. Perhaps we need to move through the mourning and the feelings associated with grief, which is difficult to move through. As long as we live, we face the reality of impermanence. As long as impermanence is a reality, there is grief. Whether or not we realize that, or are able to step outside of concrete, prescriptive definitions of grief is an entirely different matter. You fear losing your job? That's fear of loss, fear of impermanence—it's grief. Fear losing your loved one? Same thing.

What we can free ourselves from is the suffering associated with fear of loss, which is the form of grief I address in the portion of the book you're mentioning. The suffering that comes with fear of loss is derived from not willingly recognizing, and accepting, the reality of impermanence. So people fight to hold on to everything they have, which causes more grief and suffering for self and others.

You wrote that we all grieve the finitude of our life. Is it inevitably so?

Initially, yes. Until we go through the steps of recognizing and accepting impermanence, there will be grief. Even once we accept it, there's often anxiety, which is still a form of grief via "not knowing." The scale of anxiety ranges from person to person. For a select few people, it isn't there at all, although that's difficult to know until one is imminently facing Death.

If this is the case, how does grief contribute to our search for meaning?

Grief can be used as a tool to allow us to make the most of our time as opposed to being viewed as an obstacle that either needs to be tolerated or ignored. The depths of grief from a concrete loss are often profound. However, profound experiences often include equally profound lessons bought with a cost. I don't think we have to wait to lose something or someone that we really care about. We can work on our relationship to grief when young, when healthy, when old... any time, really. We can pay attention to our relationship to impermanence as a result of "death" and use that to help us define meaning. Am I afraid of losing my wife? Well, maybe that grief can support me in prioritizing time with the people I care about amidst my busy schedule. Am I afraid of not living into my purpose as a writer? Well, maybe I prioritize my calling to write amidst competing demands.

Because we live in a society that worships youth, is it possible that people fear aging because it deprives them of their youthful and therefore privileged status?

Yes. And it brings us closer to something most of us have spent our entire lives avoiding talking, even thinking, about. The reality of impermanence via physical death and grief. Plus, I believe many of us are subconsciously aware of how the older folks are treated within society, and we're afraid of feeling powerless. Irrelevant. I think it is important to stop and think why we associate old age with powerlessness and irrelevance. What can we do about that?

If the loss of status is what our society fears, is aging a “space” where we can meet to embrace race, gender and sexual identities in order to create a more just and equitable society?

Perhaps. I don't think this comes down to being in a particular space to resolve XYZ issue. I genuinely believe that our relationship to grief and impermanence are what underpins many forms of systemic injustice.