My friend Carri Munn asked this at dinner the other day and stunned me: “What if we can’t stop the madness because if we stop, we’ll have to face all the grief of what’s happening to our world? What if we’re just afraid, because we know we can’t hold that much grief?” She later shared a Substack article that was written from the perspective of a grandmother elephant’s point of view, telling us humans how forgetful our recent behavior has been and giving us some candid feedback. The matriarch implores us to sit down and listen; her first corrective lesson is that we must learn to grieve properly.
Elephants Hold Their Dead
With toes and trunks, elephants gently touch the bones and bodies of their dead. They return year upon year, sometimes for decades, to be present in the places where their loved ones last laid down. The elephants’ rituals of mourning are less elaborate than those of the humans, yet they last far longer than the modern American custom of ‘getting on with things’ and severing ourselves from the loss, lest it be contagious.
Though the article wasn’t written by an elephant, I enjoyed the experience of seeing through the eyes of a creature whose generationally-transmitted culture is rooted in slowness, remembering, and the willingness to stay close to loss. The elephants’ practice of returning and remembering holds wisdom that the dominant economic culture of “fast food, fast sex, fast resource extraction, fast forgetting” is not ready to hear.
Grief has been bubbling up in my heart-mind since I attended a 40-year remembrance ceremony for the families and survivors of the “Mount Hood tragedy.” In 1986, nine people, mostly young teenagers, lost their lives through a school-led climbing trip that met with severe weather. The musical observance gathered us to contemplate the effect of their loss on our community and to comfort their families. We would hear Gustav Fauré’s requiem sung in Latin, interspersed with poetry and readings, and supported by a full orchestra from French horns to timpani drum.
Crossing the Threshold
Walking into the cathedral, I felt an emotional shockwave, realizing I’d last set foot there during my high school graduation ceremony. What was I doing here now? I felt strongly called to attend this remembrance event—but that wall of thick emotion before the service even began made it clear I wasn’t being unconsciously drawn to relive warm memories of those high school years.
The organ piped its jaunty processional and prayers ceased, leaving a heavy layer of silence. In that space, the orchestra strings tuned and the choir shuffled in, filling row after row until a hundred were present. As voices rose, and the punctuated cascades and ripples of sound began to expand through the room, there was a starkness in the peaking intensity of the song. “Look at what is here.” Like shining a headlamp in someone’s face after hours in the warming glow of a campfire. “Look and see clearly what is in the present, now.”
In this moment I can feel myself letting go into the spaciousness of what’s actually here inside me. The music’s sound is so big, it’s encompassing—I feel held by a container, a magnetic field of sound that is the product of much labor by this community—now holding all of us together.
I would never have anticipated the depth of feeling that flowed through the massive room; the hundred-voice choir and orchestra filled every inch of it with pulsating, shimmering sound, and flung open something vast between us. We were together in that pouring forth—it was a consecrated container where the wild and unacceptable could make its presence known and begin to emerge.
That river of grief was a potent transformative force, even though it was decades old and mostly didn’t belong to me. I arrived with only the most distant impressions of characters I recalled from my childhood…the soccer stars, the girl who survived. Unexpectedly, and unbidden in this shared field, images tumbled in of my friend’s older sister who I used to play with: I saw her shelf of grown-up L’Occitane perfumed soaps and her curly-bangs underbuzz haircut that would look especially stylish today. I thanked her spirit for that time she came to me in a dream decades after the accident, to advise me on a community land situation I needed to shift. Was it really her spirit, I wondered, or just a mental archetype with exactly the right kind of authority to tell me “get out now” in a way I would listen? Either way, she was the one who came with the force of wisdom saying “Do not let yourself be misled.” She, the one who went up the mountain and never came home.
Accepting Loss, Revealing More
Before coming to the ritual, part of my mind quietly wondered if it was somehow indulgent to hold a ceremony forty years after the accident. Yet sitting there, feeling the memories and grief moving vivid through the hundreds assembled, I knew it differently. This act of grieving was not about reliving the past. It was about making space to listen to what the past had made possible—the living potential that this tragedy brought forth in every single one of us. Our capacity to be with what IS. Our willingness to face the starkness of what had taken place and to turn toward life instead of peeling back from the direct knowing that it all will end.
Listening Backward and Forward
Perhaps this is part of what grieving together can reveal when we give ourselves permission to stay present long enough. The losses themselves do not only leave wounds. They alter trajectories. They reshape the unfolding relational architecture of entire communities in ways that are almost impossible to perceive while we are still rushing forward through our lives. Pausing to follow the vibrations of grief slows us enough to listen backward and forward at the same time.
Within the requiem, tears emerge as I realized that had those high school sophomores made it down from the mountain storm, there wouldn’t have been a path for the person who became my closest lifelong friend to come to my school; we wouldn’t have known one another. And I knew it wasn’t just within my own story; every person who had been called to that cathedral was there in some way honoring the weave of pathways of relationship, identity, love, and meaning that had unfolded downstream from that event. There was something in the weave of magic that became visible, felt, and appreciated profoundly through the simple act of pausing to ritualize; the making of space for grief and love and change, and whatever came with it.
Receiving What Grief Brings
Grief and loss of our anticipated outcomes give to us as they take from us. That truth overturns the default story of what society says “should” happen in loss. We open to receive what grief can do only when we stop trying to rush through it, building a relationship where we revisit it again and again to receive its gifts.
Personally and collectively held, grief creates the conditions for forms of listening that are otherwise unavailable to us. The kind of listening for the deeper current that stretches beyond the curve of the ocean’s horizon. Deeply enough to go beyond the mind’s grasping and, in that open space, to begin to sense and embody truths which were already there, yet which speed, assumptive certainty, and forward momentum usually prevent us from noticing. Grief calls us to live beyond the illusion of the individual body-self. In the short story of flesh scarred with time, we may come to see the proof of our own interdependence —“a web from which we cannot fall,” as Joanna Macy would say—even in death.
We who are living amidst the metacrisis know something of this: what we face exceeds what any one solution or strategy can address. Coralus recently shared an animated poem from artists Azul Carolina Duque and Kara Sievewright asking: “What if the metacrisis is not a problem to be solved, but rather a living entity who is asking a living question?” I encounter that inquiry very differently after the experience of the requiem, and Grandmother Elephant’s invitation to slow down and listen to the mystery of what is actually here.
We have lost so many of the rituals that invited us into stopping together and collective remembering, unmoored from the rhythms that once opened us to the land, the unseen, and the ancestral. In their absence, the dominant culture prescribes action: brainstorm, plan, fix, move on. In that urgency, the deeper roots of what arose, and the wounds beneath them, often go unmet.
Gathered Within the Music
This medieval custom of singing a requiem for the dead has survived the centuries because it carries something far beyond. The soaring and cascading energy, the resonant valleys of the chords, the strings, the horns; then the lone human voice among the hundred, edging through fragility and transcendence. All of it sings straight into the heart of the space beyond the mind’s knowing. The vibration travels through our bones and lungs, as our breath mirrors the tensions and releases, the aching movement between suffering, hope, meaning, devastation, and love that every human life eventually walks.
The music does not resolve the grief. It gathers us inside it, and in that mysterious place both far beyond and within us, we might receive what we most need to hear.
In this historical moment of ongoing loss, accelerated change, and even faster forgetting, reviving rituals like these may matter more than we can understand. They slow us down to listen to our own grief and to be present in the field of our collective loss. Making space for grief to make space within us expands our range of feeling and listening. These rituals may, as Grandmother Elephant already knows, be part of how we find our way through this liminal shift, and toward life’s thriving.
Pausing to follow the vibrations of grief slows us enough to listen backward and forward at the same time.
