Grief-draped

Swamp lessons in how to live with grief

The rain had fallen like tears through the night washing over the face of the swamp. By this morning, those tears were mingled with the brown waters at my feet. Cypress buttresses stood their ground staggered in the muddy earth around the boardwalk. Their roots were drinking up the shallow pools of water that swirled and bubbled between them, their knobby knees rising for a breath.

Cicadas pulsed comfortingly in the background. The air was thick and my skin was sticky but I wasn’t sweating yet. We were walking down the boardwalk of Congaree National Park and pausing occasionally for writing. Cassie Premo Steele, our author guide, had just stopped us and asked us to share a word that was in our hearts. I didn’t want to be a downer, but to be honest, I was dealing with sadness, anger, and grief. The days preceding this class had been filled with painful reminders of people, ideas, and hopes for the future I had lost. I could not quite shake the sadness off of me.

“Grief-draped” was the word I spoke.

I glanced up at the Spanish moss draped from the branches of the cypresses. Not Spanish and not moss, the name of this plant was a nagging reminder of the Spanish who came and conquered the indigenous, a people who had found harmony with this land for generations. I thought of these beautiful natives who had once known this swamp like a mother and had lived abundantly from its resources. I swatted clumsily at the mosquito whose sharp needle had pierced my skin. Too late I thought as I wiped the blood from my arm. My mind drifted to the enslaved people who had escaped to these tannic waters for refuge. Refuge in a landscape swarming with mosquitoes, snakes, heat, and still waters. They brought with them hearts draped with unthinkable loss: loss of place, loss of people, and loss of human dignity. The call of a red-bellied woodpecker brought me back to the moment. I searched for the small bobbing head hammering into the trees nearby. Then my thoughts flew to the ivory-billed woodpecker, North America’s largest woodpecker, gone forever from this landscape. The Ivory-billed is possibly also the savior angel of this swamp. The hope of its presence in the 1970s led to public support for making it a protected space. A space now silent to the call of the Lord God bird.

This swamp was filled with the remembrance of loss and seemed to intertwine with the losses flooding my heart. This was a place of tears. Tears dripping from the canopy, swirling with the brown waters, rising to cover the land. I could see the high water lines in this swamp. Places where the water has risen and receded again and again. Reminders that the floods have been here and will come again one day. That is the thing about swamps though. They are made for this. This place has space to hold all the tears. It soaks up the waters and gives the land time to recover. The sorrows absorbed by this landscape must be innumerable.

But yet here was the light, golden and hopeful. The canopy above me glimmered. Last night’s storm had left the leaves littered with diamond prisms, drops of water catching the sun and dispersing it in rainbowed refractions. Sunlight fell in beams making spider webs look like they had been artfully woven from glass threads. Spanish moss glittered in the beak of a wren carrying it to its nest. Life was everywhere. My heart began to feel the floods of sadness receding. 

The grief will never be gone though. I don’t actually want it to be. I am not all about ‘getting over it’. Grief is the lingering presence of something or someone I loved deeply and lost. High water marks remain. The cypress trees hold their moss-draped branches in the light. Grief is like that. Flooding and receding. Haunting and beautiful. All at once. I want to become like the swamp and make space for grief to ebb and flow. I want to find resilience and beauty in the midst of it. I want the light to come beaming through, the owl to soar by silently, and joy to migrate in on warbler wings all in the same space where overwhelming sorrows have permission to flow. Let me be grief-draped and shimmer in the sun after the rains have fallen.