Grief lives next door.

This past weekend I directed an amazing performance by with caregivers of severely wounded warriors from WWP’s Independence Program. I crafted the script from their words, written in four weeks of virtual writing workshops and prompts. It was one of the more challenging collaborative performance projects I’ve undertaken this way (and I think by now I’ve done dozens), because after spending time with the writing they sent, I had the sense that instead of a poem that wanders, the performance should have a very clear narrative structure. I should say–I had two weeks from receiving their words to writing the script. They had 24 hours from seeing the script to performing it on stage. During these past two weeks, it was always in the back of my mind. I printed out their writing and carried the thick stack of pages with me everywhere. I put big paper up on my office wall and mapped out the arc. And then it rushed up, rushed past. And then afterward, on Sunday morning, I woke up and it was over.

The day after this kind of big emotional work, the witnessing and the holding, the pressure and excitement, I feel deeply deeply sorrowful, deeply deeply deeply grateful, deeply aware of the precarious position I’m in. Somehow the immensity of my joy at this life and work I love, of the love in my life, is almost directly correlated to the potential energy and power of the possibility of loss (Jeannette Winterson: Why is the measure of love loss?). I’m not a stranger to loss, of course. But we are old friends who haven’t seen one another in a while. And moments like these–thinking of the stories of these caregivers who are not different from me in any meaningful way–I am reminded of how close loss lives. Grief lives in the house next door, and I am just hoping not to run into her today or tomorrow, but it is inevitable that I will, and that scares me until I convince myself to forget (again).

And from Friday’s writing:

The freewrite: What do you wish you’d never outgrown?

The poem: “Wishing Well” by Gregory Pardlo

The prompt: “Though I no longer believe…”