On Grief

I’ll admit it, I’ve always been more than a little fascinated by death and the rituals we build around it. There's something hauntingly captivating about how different cultures make space for grief, how they honor the ones who’ve left, and how they let the living sit with their sorrow. They create a safe space to hold loss, to name the pain, and move through it intentionally. It’s like every society has its own ways of saying, “We see your pain. We acknowledge your loss and here’s how we hold it.”

So naturally, when I heard that Videobet was screening It’s Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection as part of its Black Independent Cinema series, it was practically calling me to its front seat. Throughout the film, you can sense the weight of grief, thick and hanging. It was the kind of grief that lingers when we’ve avoided confronting our pain, when we let it hollow us from the inside out, leaving behind only a shell of a person.

Here’s the thing though, I don’t believe we ever move past grief. I’m not naïve enough to think you can experience loss and just walk away unmarked. No, I think grief stains us. But that stain doesn’t have to stay dark. With time and a little bit of grace, I think, those dark colors can soften. They can shift into lighter, more brighter ones, into memories that feel like gifts instead of a burden.

I’m a firm believer in life after love. (Throwback to Cher’s voice echoing in the background.) That line, cheesy or not, has always stuck with me. Because there is life after love. We don’t necessarily have to betray the memory of our loved one to let joy quietly return to our lives.

Now back to the movie… there was this one line that stayed with me where a character says, “It is your choice what you do to your grave”. Because it’s true, isn’t it? Loss might not be a choice, but what we do with that loss is. Whether we stay buried in it, or let something new grow from it, that’s on us. Grief strips away our illusions, confronting us with life in its rawest form, and it’s up to us to use that in a transformative way. We are not helpless in our sorrow. We have the power to have received something tragic and change it into something less tragic, even resurrect something beautiful from it. 

That, to me, is what the movie whispered through every line: you can choose to rise, to resurrect from the grave we dug inside our heads.

What have you done with your own grief? Have you buried it, or have you found a way to rise?

“To grieve is to have loved, and that is something sacred”