Wherever You Are Grieving by Alice Walker

Wherever You Are Grieving

©2015 by Alice Walker

It does not matter to me:

Wherever you are grieving

Whether Paris, Damascus, Jerusalem, Bamako,

Mexico or Beirut or New York City

My heart, too, is bruised

And dragging.

There used to be such a thing

As melodrama

When feelings could be

Made up,

But now there is bare pain

And sorrow,

A sense of endlessly missed

Opportunities

To smile and embrace

“The other”

Before the change.

We mourn the loss

Of goodness

That was so divinely

Ordinary:

Babyhood

Youth

The blessings of maturity

And of old age.

All sacrificed now

Almost predictably

To the same Greed

Our histories

-Every one of them-

Could have warned us against

If only we knew them.

Alice Walker
Photo taken by: Virginia DeBolt
October 2007

Although this was written in 2015, I feel it more keenly after the pandemic year of 2020.  There are lives that were lost--that will continue to be lost, while we strive to combat COVID-19.  It articulates an anger, too, based in the idea that there are people out there who believe that making money is more important than someone's life.  How many people have chosen not to have children because they couldn't afford to raise them?  How many lives have been cut short due to lack of safety measures?  How many deaths lie at the feet of chemical and petroleum companies set on doing business instead of looking to the needs of the communities they have impoverished and cancered?  How many people have died because we cut back on the necessary funding that would help to not only prevent diseases like COVID-19, but also lessen its impact by creating a storage of medical equipment and research on vaccines to diseases currently found in animals that have not (quite) yet found their way into humans?

And so I understand that bruised and dragging heart--that anguish that no amount of money can buy back.  And perhaps in this past and present of suffering, there can be found comfort when, in future days, there will be suffering still.  Comfort in the knowledge that we do not suffer alone.  Comfort in the hope that we can curb the excesses of greed.  Comfort in our common understanding of the forces of grief--an emotion that we all share at some point in our lives.

We have all lost something in our lives; we all know the ravages of suffering--some far more than others.  But we do not grieve alone.  Your pain is not forgotten or lost or unremarked; for, Alice Walker shares in our weariness, our heartache, our soul-sickness.  And in reading this, in relating to it, in reflecting upon it, we, too, are joined with her in our shared human suffering.

In the end, though, she does not offer us her own comfort, but the comfort of our past--histories that "If only we knew them." would offer us armor and a shield with which to gird our loins and fight back.  We are not helpless in our grief and our suffering.  We can choose to create each moment, each opportunity 

To smile and embrace

“The other”

 so that, when it is lost to us, we will have done everything we could to make sure there were not so many endlessly wasted opportunities.

I love that this poem galvanizes suffering into frustration and anger.  I feel as though there is a longing in those final words for us to rebel against the ever-present and ever-past greed that has shaped so much of our lives.  But I also love that our suffering is a shared one--that Alice Walker acknowledges that, shares in it, and makes us a part of it in turn just by our own reading of the words.  Suffering is universal, she says, but we can stand against the forces that create it together.