We're a Severely Under-Grieved Culture

The Joy of Grief

In search of the enduring human spirit, one unsuspecting place is around death—a portal into what we all know absolutely nothing about. The death part, that is. Yet there’s a part that we all know with certainty—we will all lose people, relationships, and things of importance, we will all grieve, and we will all die.

On February 25th, a few homies and I are putting on this experimental event that we co-created called The Joy of Grief.

This strange, fun little thing started when my friend Chelsea, an accomplished artist and just a whimsical, glittery angel of a person, whom I’ve reconnected with after 20 years, reached out to me with a budding idea and a soft proposition.

It went something like:

Hey, I’m thinking of doing an event to launch the second edition of my book. I don’t want it to be a typical author talk. Do you want to create something with me?

Two months of planning and three other collaborators later (Akilah, Katrina, Rebecca)—count four with the beautiful space of Sub Rosa—this co-creation has been a meditation and exploration of the different tendrils of grief that we’ve all personally experienced.

We are a severely undergrieved culture. Outside of someone dying and the acknowledgment through a celebration of life or funeral, that’s basically the duration that grief is allowed. But what about grieving a failed democracy? A body that no longer works as it did? A long-standing friendship that dissipated? The years we “lost” during Covid? A deep romantic love that was thought to be enduring, but wasn’t?

And, beyond a celebration of life or a funeral, there are very, very few places where it’s appropriate to express grief, let alone to grieve collectively. And there are dire consequences to that.

Like many things that are emotionally hard, difficult, challenging, it’s part of our dominant culture to not only push those things down, but to full-on ignore them because of the inconvenience of dealing with them while we’re individually barrelling forward forcefully to build our future, produce outcomes, buy more shit to fill the void, etc.

On the flip side, grief is finally in the cultural zeitgeist! People are talking about it more. We are beginning to yearn and crave these conversations, and yet, what even is grief?

I realized that months into losing my dad and my cat in quick succession, I still wasn’t sure if I was grieving. Was there some indicator that I’m doing it, and doing it right? I was waiting for intense despair to come over me, and that weight of sadness that you see depicted in movies, where the main character is slumped down at the foot of the bed, crying in agony.

But instead, I was bogged down with death admin for well over a year. The shit you have to do when your deceased parent had no will, about $17,000 in some weird account that we had to go through the probate process to transfer to my mom. He did have a really smart life insurance policy that he took out when he made only $7000 a year in 1992, but was willing to pay $200/month for. That gave my mom about $100,000, but his death also meant that my mom would no longer receive social security benefits, because she was a federal employee, working in food services at the local University for two decades. And since she barely speaks English and had never paid a bill in her life, and wasn’t sure how a credit card worked, all of that was shit that I had to figure out how to set up for her as well.

You get the picture.

My experience of grief was insurmountable overwhelm, intense resentment (not even of my dad, but at this needlessly cruel system), and fucking rage, that I couldn’t even get to the sad part! So in my estimation, I was doing grief WRONG.

No surprise, burnout ensued. That was a wack time for my husband, I’m sure. I wasn’t a great person to be around. Every time I saw my mom, it was to go over more paperwork. That strained our relationship and made it pretty unenjoyable. I was beginning a new business. I had no capacity for creativity, the key ingredient to formulating a new venture. I’m sure I was a bitch to my business partner.

Around this time, I reconnected with my dad. I was going through the 200+ paintings that he created within the last three years of his life. Before that, no one had any clue that he had any artistic proclivities. These pieces were luminous and alive, soothing and expansive. They were mostly landscapes of Western Mass, a place where I grew up, but never saw through his eyes until now.

He came of age during the Cultural Revolution in China, in a bustling big city undergoing bouts of famine. Shortly after the murder of his dad, he moved to the U.S. (this is a whole other story to tell, because how he came here was so wild, and includes the Christian Science Monitor). Landing here, the experience of sprawling nature, space, and access made him feel like he was in a literal paradise, and he maintained this view throughout the rest of his life here. This is despite the dire poverty of navigating work on a student visa, and the bizarre displays of racism, like when his first host family named him Peter, because it was “easier” than his real name. Bruh, my dad’s Chinese name, ChangAn, literally means eternal peace. That is so much fucking cooler than Peter. I literally CANNOT still to this day! But I digress.

As I was going through his paintings, I saw this place through his eyes for the first time, and became present to, and moved by, what bringing my mom and me here meant to him. Like many families, our visa applications were denied again and again, so once we finally arrived, we were an inseparable family unit. And like many families, our reunion took a tremendous amount of sacrifice. After my dad’s death, and going through his archives of paintings, old clothing, and old stuff, I started to have an embodied understanding of that for the first time.

He painted for three years. Three years. Those three years transformed him. He went from a reserved, humble dude to an exuberant, proud artist who showed his work to anyone who would humor him by checking out his iPhone gallery of all of his new works. He convinced local dentist offices and banks to display his pieces. He joined a national painters’ association. He made new friends who were local artists. I had never seen him so alive and on fire.

So when he passed, when I was in the depths of my rage and burnout, the only thing to do was to reconnect with my dad, through his paintings, and create for him the thing that he never got to experience when he was still alive — a solo art show. A two-month public art program of Awing and Honoring was what I called it. And five of my great friends joined as guest artists, each delivering a program where their work was in conversation with my dad’s.

That was the medicine that I created for myself to expand my experience of grief. To add to rage, resentment, despair, and sadness, there was also exploration, curiosity, mischief, connection, creativity, joy, and, and, and…we’ll keep on adding. Maybe grief is the whole spectrum of the human experience, and it’s an opportunity bust out of numbness to feel alive!

I recently took down the website because it was no longer active, but here are some artifacts of it.

The Joy of Grief is an extension of that exploration for myself. But this time, it connects and integrates with the medicine that each co-creator has formulated for themselves to digest the grief that they are living through. The culmination — I have no idea what exactly is going to happen, but it’s going to be a one-time only collective experience for only those in the room. A magical alchemy that only occurs in very intentional IRL containers. This one happens to be about collective grief.

Will report back after the 25th.

Boyuan