Getting to Our Grief: Utilizing Poetry to Metabolize Grief

Note: This piece includes poems written during SCRR’s 2024 Winter Institute for Educator Healing, shared with permission. 

“There is incredible value in making sacred space to surface, name, explore, share, and witness our stories and see this process as vital to the possibility of renewal. Only through acknowledging our helplessness, are we able to get to our grief.” – Oriana Ides

Over our project’s evolution at SCRR, we have explored different ways to metabolize the feelings that come up for us during, through, and after crises. When we metabolize our grief we can create more room to be present and better address the barriers and conditions that impact our wellness. We believe that if we as educators can be more present for ourselves, and in turn the young people and communities we serve, then we can be more resourced in our recovery and renewal efforts.

In the Fall of 2022, I joined SCRR as the Senior Project Manager. I got hired, and so did my grief. 

My grief is intimately tied to our collective grief: I lost my mother suddenly in early March of 2020 two weeks before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. At the time, I worked within a public school system that struggled to manage the deep unknown that was COVID while still supporting its schools and young people. With so many things out of my control – or anyone’s control at all –  I felt I had no choice but to let my grief live, breathe, and exist with me. 

Ignoring it and resisting its presence felt like too much work, so acknowledging it allowed me to move more freely through the world while it quietly kept to itself in the background.

I would eventually grieve more than my mother. I would lose her mother – my 90-something-year-old grandmother –  in early 2022. And, I would also experience grieving the individual and collective past that we abruptly left behind with the onset of the pandemic.

I took advantage of the opportunities that isolation and doing work differently afforded me so that I could process, make meaning, and be with my grief in a way I would not have been able to had things just returned to normal. This time and space were incredibly valuable and meaningful.

As we approach five years since the pandemic was first declared, many global events that have happened since March 2020 have uplifted grief and grieving as a topic for more of our communities to consider and confront. Finding ways to make meaning of our experiences and, in turn, metabolize them requires multiple modalities that honor internal and external processing. 

SCRR’s Winter and Summer Institutes for Educator Healing are designed to engage in different recovery and renewal practices that allow us to attend and attune to our needs and emotions.  On January 11, 2024, SCRR hosted our fourth Winter Institute for Educator Healing, “Heart in Hand: Holding Generative Space for our Collective Healing” – designed by our field coach Oriana Ides. She curated and cultivated a space to reflect on and explore our personal and collective experiences with crisis so that we could begin the new year more renewed with the support of our amazing guest faculty. 

Dr. Tiffani Marie offered a keynote in which she explored her own experiences with grief and death and how they in turn impacted how she began to view education, schooling, and herself.  Hala Khouri led us through a movement and embodiment workshop, referencing Tiffani Marie’s keynote and exploring how we internalize what we experience in the systems we live and work in. We closed our time with an art-based healing practice facilitated by Xico González – which explored remembrance and celebration of our loved ones through practices typically used during Día de los muertos,  making mini altares, and “nichos,” poetry writing, invitations for participants to write and honor our loved ones. “What the altar does with physical items, we can do with words. The idea is to create such a strong sense of the person through the details in the poem that they, in a sense, come back,” Xico shared. “ The power of the words, the details of speech, physical description, and thought, bring these characters to life in our minds and hearts.”

After quietly writing our own nichos, we collectively held and witnessed each other while poems were shared aloud and virtually  -in a floricanto – a term derived from flor y canto (flower and song in Spanish). Rafael Pérez-Torres explains this lineage practice as a “an Aztec term for poetic expression that brings together two images (flower and song) to create a third meaning, floricanto poetry highlights the creative and transformative power of language to engender change.”

Xico encouraged us to write these poems as informal letters, using memories and details to bring them to our present minds and hearts and use these as an opportunity to have a dialogue together.  Throughout this piece and below, you can read some of the nichos that we wrote.

As participants turned to write, I experienced deep resistance to joining them. Despite its constant company, I still felt stickiness and discomfort about parts of my grief. I spoke to my mother and grandmother in my heart and mind all the time. But, my grief had become more of a ‘character’ in this sense than my matriarchs. By writing poems to them, I was not only inviting them back, but I was also inadvertently inviting in the anger, frustration, and confusion I felt in those early days of 2020 when I didn’t know which way was up and when I was robbed of grieving live and an in-person community. 

As we held our virtual floricanto and shared our nichos poems, it became clear that four years into my grief journey, I’ve reckoned with sadness, with loss, but not necessarily with other emotions – the siblings and cousins to grief that also need tending to. By not tending to them, I’ve stalled a little in my journey toward renewal. My story, the one that needs witnessing – by myself and others- and the poems that I need to write to my mother and grandmother, is not simply the ones I’ve already told about managing fresh grief while simultaneously being launched into a global pandemic. Managing isn’t metabolizing and while I was able to “manage” back then, the ‘helplessness’ that may need acknowledging now, relates to the many-layered experiences, emotions, and energies that would come after the newness of the grief had faded away. My journey has been more rooted in recovery. 

Attending to these new observations and making space for more renewal coincides with the onset of fall. Old ideas and feelings need to be harvested and pruned back. Soil needs tilling to get ready for winter and spring. As I manage it all, as we manage it all, I’m grateful to be in the community with so many others who are committed to our individual and collective healing, and working so hard to tend to their growth and create spaces to grow, grieve, and renew together. 

I deeply value the power of being in community and writing together as we did last January.  I hope you can experience the metabolizing power of writing your nicho. I still can’t seem to write my own nicho poem. And that’s ok: this writing, this reflection, however, has allowed me to explore why the poem writing has felt so difficult, and name where I am right now.

I witness you, and you witness me.