The Healing Journey

September 10, 2024

In the introduction to his book, “The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing,” Kevin Young discusses his personal loss with the death of his father and the places where grief can take us on our healing journey:

“To lose someone today is to go into strange realms of ‘bereavement specialists’ and sympathy cards and funeral arrangements—things you suddenly realize have been going on for a good while, without you, in something of a parallel world. The world of grief can feel like that, a limbo realm that at the least gives you a strong perspective on the everyday world: Why are all these people walking around, oblivious to loss? Why am I still here while my loved one is not? Surviving any death can carry its own guilt. It also brings on a slew of clichés, often offered in lieu of sympathy, that can sometimes cause more anxiety than comfort. It is hard to know what to say. The poems here seek to avoid cliché, in order to say what needs to be said. And also to say that it is the everyday, not the epic; the unexpected, not the well-worn phrase that the modern elegy may find most comforting.

“In my own grief it was and is the smallest kindnesses that still stick with me: the man who gave me my father’s dry cleaning for free, refusing my repeated offers to pay; the dry cleaning I’d had to drive all over town looking for, using old tags found on other of his still-plastic-wrapped clothes as a guide. How to explain ‘I’m looking for my dead father’s clothes, things he’ll never need,’ yet that, duty-bound, you do? Death brings with it a duty and devotion that cannot be explained to those who don’t know it. Why, after all, would you keep his crummy plaid shirts and give his good suits away? Why do material things matter at once less and more? Why, in the void, does ritual, both inherited and invented, rush in?”

©Kevin Young

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