In 2009 a dear friend moved to live 450 kilometres (280 miles) away. In honour of our friendship I began to weave a cloak of feathers I had found while walking in my neighbourhood. She had always collected feathers. The cloak grew into a large wall hanging – there were a lot of feathers that year.
As the weaving grew, I came to see the feathers as teardrops running down the wall. I stopped adding feathers in March 2011. Ten days later my mother died suddenly from cardiac arrest.
Grief is like that. It starts in one way and grows into something else. It can start months or even years before an actual physical loss, and it never really stops.
My husband of 41 years died in 2016.
I sold my home in 2017 and moved the feather wall hanging to storage. When I unpacked it to hang in my new home, it had unraveled. I started again and rewove the feathers.
Grief is like that. It sits there in one form for months or years. It disappears into storage, out of sight. It unravels. It reforms in a different way.
I still find feathers to add to the hanging. The ravens have been generous this year. It is the same and it changes . . .
. . . grief is like that.
Meet Mago Contributor Kaalii Cargill
So beautiful. I love how the weaving of the human hand with elements of Earth Community can take on a magical life of their own – in this case the sacred evocation of loss and grief.
Thank you for this post. It has helped me see grief in new ways.