There is real pain in loss.
Real pain in being lost.
Real pain in bleeding wounds and burning skin.
Real pain in unrealized dreams and broken families and hunger and rotting,
Untreated wounds of the flesh and of the emotions/psyche.
Life brings us pains – lick them.
(The Rocca Family, in Pleasure Activism, pg. 333)
Grief sits in the body like a weight.
My therapist asked me to write about death and grief this summer. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fragility of my own mortality and that of others. I also know that grief and death are around us all the time, not just in the ending of a life, but also in destruction and dissolution – of land, of families, in war. I Googled, “Philosophers who write about death.” This didn’t clear things up much, except to prove that forever, humans have been obsessed with the question of death—a phenomenon that cannot exist without life.
What are the things that make a life alive? Is it the ability to sense rain? Is it pulling air into our lungs? Is it hot tears rolling down our cheeks? Is it the electricity we feel when our exposed skin softly brushes against another’s?
What makes a life alive involves, in one way or another, being a body. Our bodies are where we feel our privileges and our oppressions; where we hold both our joy and our trauma. Polyvagal theory addresses this reality of life being experienced through the body.
Polyvagal theory was introduced in 1994 by researcher Stephen Porges.It speaks to the effects of trauma and grief on the body, which can be felt in the brain, heart, stomach and even the intestines. Polyvagal theory investigates how we can feel safety and healing through connection and touch. Some therapists, Dr. Van der Kolk notes in The Body Keeps the Score, are incorporating physical therapies and activities like massages, yoga or breathwork into their sessions as an acknowledgement to this theory.
Touch and pleasure can be healing.
adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good was published in 2018. This anthology changed my life and how I see pleasure, pain, grief, life and death. All of these are political, because we live in a world where some have easier access to pleasure and life than others. Some are confronted with grief, pain and death more than others. brown writes: “Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy” (13).
Polyvagal theory and pleasure activism both support the healing potentials of pleasurable touch and connection. Pleasurable touch is not inherently sexual, and it doesn’t necessarily require the presence of another. What these theories are saying is that when grief and trauma pull us away from the sensory knowing of our own bodies, pleasurable touch can help us return to it.
Everybody knows it hurts to grow up
And everybody does – so weird to be back here
Let me tell you what
The years go on
And we’re still fighting
We’re still fighting it
(Ben Folds, Still Fighting It)
I held my sister while we smoked under the stars listening to this song by Ben Folds. We cried, and she sang the lyrics in her broken voice “and you’re so much like me, I’m sorry.” She told me that she sings this song to her newborn baby, Charlie, in the early morning light while she cradles him close to her chest. It’s the same song my brother-in-law danced to with his precious mother on his wedding day, exactly two years before she passed.
Death is only part of life
Grief cannot sit in the body without love. The latter is the reason for the former. It’s not a sad thing that Charlie will likely be like his parents; they are wonderful at doing this thing called life. Rather, this song speaks to the inevitability of feeling pain and loss, alongside beauty and mystery.
Holding my nephew against my heart and listening to his tiny cooing breaths feels like seeing everything again for the first time. He is a visceral reminder that death is part of life, like birth. We co-regulate and breathe together, and I feel my body calming, healing.
What is this week’s column even about? That death is inevitable; that it can serve as a reminder to acknowledge our bodies, how we can, while we are here. That death and life are political, like access to pleasure and healing. That grief reminds us of the truth of all of this. That pleasurable touch can heal us and bring us back to ourselves, in the midst of the chaotic beauty and destruction of being a human being here, on this earth, right now.
And I think of each life like a flower
As common as a field daisy
And as singular
And each name a comfortable music in the mouth
Tending, as all music does, towards silence
And each body a lion of courage
And something precious to the earth.
(Mary Oliver)
BIO:
Madeline Rae (she/her) is a sex educator and writer living in K’jpuktuk, Mi’kma’ki. Rae holds a BFA honors and a BA in Psychology from Treaty 1 (Winnipeg, Manitoba). She is completing her Clinical MSW at Dalhousie, with plans to work as a certified sex therapist. Rae is trained in client-centered sex education, pro-choice reproductive and sexual health counseling, WPATH gender-affirming care, and harm reduction. Her work investigates the therapeutic potentials of BDSM, the ritual space of performance, and the sensual reclamation of bodily autonomy. She previously published Mother of Goo through the University of Winnipeg’s Uniter Newspaper.
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