What We Don't Name

There is a kind of grief that nobody hosts a service for. The big losses, the ones marked on calendars, are handled. There is a procedure. People bring food. The work is hard, but the road is at least a road. It is the other losses, the unmarked ones, that leave us out in the field with no map. The friend who slowly drifted out of the calendar. The version of yourself you outgrew. The future you had planned with a person who is still alive but no longer reachable. The home that stopped feeling like one.

Our culture is not very good at small grief. It treats grief as a single event, large and finite, with a beginning and an end. So when the small ones come, we do not always recognize them as grief. We call them moods. We call them stuckness. We tell ourselves we should be over it by now, because what is the it that we would be over, exactly, when nobody else has named the loss for us.

I think a great deal of music exists to do the work that culture is not doing. To name the unmarked. To say, out loud, that the thing you are feeling is real, and old, and shared. A song is in some ways the smallest possible grief service. Three or four minutes long. Open to anyone who walks into the room. No tradition required.

One of the songs in this catalog, Bigger, reaches for something larger than the day’s noise without picking a name for it. It does not call the thing God. It does not call it the universe. It does not call it anything. It just reaches. The reaching is the prayer. The reaching is also, I think, where most people actually live, regardless of what their official answers are. We reach, on most days, for something we cannot name with confidence. The reaching does not require us to know what it is reaching toward.

Another, Thank You Mama, is a song of small grief disguised as a song of gratitude. The thank-you is real. So is the loss. The catalog of small things a parent did that you only understood after they were no longer around to thank in person. The fact of the thanks being late does not make it less.

These songs do not promise resolution in the form of an answer. They offer resolution in the form of company. The person you are listening to has been where you are. The thing you are carrying is not invisible to them. That is the whole of what a song like this can do, and it is more than nothing. It is, in the right moment, almost everything.

If you are in a small grief right now, here is what I want you to hear. You are not making it up. The loss is real. You do not have to belong to a tradition to mourn it. You do not have to name it correctly to feel it correctly. You can sit with it, and let it pass through, and not require yourself to be done with it by any particular date. The grief will revisit. That is not regression. That is how grief works. It comes in waves of decreasing height, and one day, without ceremony, you will notice it has been a while since the last one.

That noticing is the resolution. Not an absence of pain. A new relationship to it. The thing you lost is still gone. You are no longer organized around the loss. You are organized, again, around your own life. And the lost thing has become, in some way that you may not be able to articulate yet, a part of how you love what is still here.

This is what songs that reach for something bigger are reaching for. Not an explanation. Just the company. Just the small room where the unmarked losses get to be named, for a few minutes, by someone who is not going to ask you to defend them.