Practice Makes Possible

Creating a personal grief practice enables new possibilities

You won’t the surprised to know that I am a reader. As much as I find meaning in the writing process, it is reading widely that feeds my love for words — their origins, their juxtaposition with other linguistic snippets to form deeper meaning. Because my attention tends to wander as I read, I typically have five or six books all in process simultaneously. Currently my reading table includes a mystery, a naturalist text about the biome I inhabit, a historical narrative about the CIA’s cold-war era “book club,” and a memoir about a guy’s move to the Midwest.

At this stage of my life, I’m also reading books about the grief experience. As you might expect, some are helpful (perhaps too “helpful,” when they offer bullet-pointed directives with little thoughtful insight) and others are highly personal (detailed descriptions of the particular author’s grief journey, with too few broad insights to help other grievers). I have just started a new book in this genre, and already it feels like it will be more helpful than most. The title, in my opinion, is rather banal (Can Anyone Tell Me? Essential Questions About Grief and Loss), but the content looks to be helpful. The author, Meghan Riordan Jarvis, is a Licensed Clincial Social Worker, trauma-trained and specializing in grief and loss.

Within the first few pages of the book I can tell she knows what’s she talking about. She is clear that no two grief journeys are identical and that the task of each griever is to create a plan for healing. She calls this a “grief practice,” which she defines:

A grief practice is a collage you create out of a series of hypotheses and experiments that eventually results in a flexible, bespoke collection of resources and tools that help you learn to process and carry your grief.¹

I like the idea of a “grief practice” because it opens the doors for new possibilities in our lives. A practice allows us the flexibility and freedom to discover “what works” for us in a particular moment of time, while also allowing us to shift the practice as we need to do while moving forward. A practice affirms our need for autonomy when life-shattering loss seems to rob us of any choices.

Like many hackneyed phrases, “practice makes perfect” is one that I have learned to disregard as meaningless. Practice might make perfect if we lived in a static world where variables never change: in that scenario we could “get it right” once and for all and then continue, like a cog in a larger machine leading to perfection. But life isn’t like that at all, as unexpected and traumatic loss demonstrates. We live not in a static world but in a dynamic world, where situations continually change and where no two days are exactly alike.

My grief journey is not a quest for perfect resolution or brighter tomorrows: by its very nature it cannot be. Instead, I have been and will continue to define my personal grief practice. It will not result in perfection, but it does offer me multiple possibilities as I stretch forward. I’m not sure what those possibilities are, but they seem more welcoming to my grieving soul than a determined, hapless pursuit toward perfection could ever offer.

Thank you for being a part of my grief practice. My hope is that through what I am learning and sharing here, you will also be empowered to discern your own grief practices. I’d love to hear what your grief practice looks like. Comment here or email me at ballenfletcher@gmail.com.

1. Meghan Riordan Jarvis, Can Anyone Tell Me? Essential Questions About Grief and Loss (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2024), 9.