Grief by Victoria Chang

Grief
Victoria Chang

Grief—as I knew it, died many times. It
died trying to reunite with other lesser
deaths. Each morning I lay out my
children’s clothing to cover their grief.
The grief remains but is changed by
what it is covered with. A picture of
oblivion is not the same as oblivion.
My grief is not the same as my pain. My
mother was a mathematician so I tried
to calculate my grief. My father was an
engineer so I tried to build a box around
my grief, along with a small wooden
bed that grief could lie down on. The
texts kept interrupting my grief, forcing
me to speak about nothing. If you cut
out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky,
no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it
with a blue frame, place it faceup on
the floor of an empty museum with an
open atrium to the sky, that is grief.

SELECTED BY MANDY SHUNNARAH

Obit tells the story of Chang caring for her elderly mother and father, both of whom have terminal illnesses. This poem sticks with me because it discusses all the smaller daily griefs that lead up to the largest and most permanent grief––death––and the difficulty of trying to render these moments on the page. When colloquial wisdom is that a picture is worth a thousand words, what does an entirely blue painting placed on the floor of an empty museum, gazing at the sky through an open atrium, say about grief? I think the point is that our words fail us, our paint and canvases fail us; that some experiences are so severe they sever us into “before” and “after.” That grief, uncontainable, heart-rending grief, cannot be put into a box or calculated or made to pass more quickly with logic. Some things must be felt, even though the sensation is so strong that other senses and emotions are temporarily dulled in its wake. Grief is not meant to be “worked through,” only surrendered to.

On a craft level, the notion that grief can itself die many times is brilliant since grief, though not exclusive to death, is perhaps most often used to describe reactions to death. Chang so perfectly describes the sense of anticipation of future pain that comes like dropped breadcrumbs leading to the final, true death––after which, grief continues unabated, or is amplified in surprising ways despite the dropped breadcrumbs of more minor griefs leading to this inevitability. And she manages to capture all this in a poem that works as well as a standalone as it does in the larger context of the collection. This is the kind of poem that reminds me of what poetry can do and proves that an economy of language doesn’t mean skimping on depth.

ABOUT MANDY SHUNNARAH

Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer in Columbus, Ohio. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was released in 2024 from Belt Publishing, and their second book, a poetry collection titled We Had Mansions, is available now from Diode Editions.