“The world asks of us

only the strength we have and we give it.

Then it asks more, and we give it.”

— Jane Hirshfield

In the past, when I heard people talking about “connecting with ancestors,” the primary image that came mind was someone going on ancestry.com.

Looking back, this is a bit sad. Believing that the only way of interacting with the dead is by penciling their stats––name, date of birth, and date of death––into a family tree? It’s a bit limited.

We all needed this very badly. That was the consensus that emerged again and again during our weekend together this past October. After two and a half years of varying degrees of pandemic induced isolation, we all needed time like this together in person very badly.

There were ten of us––three facilitators, two cooks, and five participants––gathered for the weekend at a remote cabin on a lake a few hours north of Edmonton. What had brought us together was simple: a common desire to feel more connected.

*** This blog posit is an excerpt taken from the concluding chapter of my thesis. In it, I reflect on liberation, whiteness, and the winding road my own grief journey took during the year that I was writing my thesis. The excerpt begins and ends with a poem.

For most of us, the last 8 months have been marked by significant uncertainty and loss. Maybe we feel adrift and useless, or overworked, overwhelmed, and at the very end of our rope. Some of us have lost a loved one, lost a job or lost our health. And on top of whatever personal loss we face, we are all experiencing the grief of witnessing suffering on a mass scale.