On Grief

Sing, and don’t stop singing, for this night is darker than wine...

I have been involved with Birmingham, Alabama’s Day of the Dead Festival since its inception in 2003. When it grew large enough to warrant an emcee, I was asked to fulfill that role. I was 36, newly divorced, and attempting to figure out a whole passel of things in my life. One thing I recognized way back then was that death and loss and grief are great equalizers. No matter how much or how little money you make; no matter where you come from; no matter where you went to school; no matter what language you speak, you will lose someone you love at some point in your life. Maybe you already woke up one morning to a loss like that. 

If so, I am so sorry. It's hard. 

It can feel so isolating when the funereal remembrances are all finished and you're back at work. Everyone goes about their daily life as if a catastrophic event hasn’t just upset the balance of your world. You stand there among friends and co-workers with an empty crater, a void in your heart that was once occupied by your loved one. A constant part of your world is suddenly nowhere to be found, and you are expected to just carry on as if the world is still the same as it ever was.

After my father died in 2011, I stopped counting how often I picked up the phone to call him and tell him about a song I heard, or ask him a question about something he was my resident expert on, or tell him about something he would have loved or laughed about, or I just wanted to share a moment with him. So many phone calls left undialed.

I stopped counting the times I dreamed he was in a room just down the hall, or how I would get so close to hugging him and then remember even in my sleep, he was no longer in this world. 

I stopped counting the times I saw someone who had the same silver white hair that haloed his head, and thought, “dad’s here.”

Death don't have no mercy, y'all.

How can we work through a loss like that? How do we find hope when the world seems completely hopeless? 

I wish I had a magic bullet to give you, but the truth is, loss is not a single day experience. It is not even a single year experience. Loss is a journey I will walk for as long as I am alive and my loved ones are not. Some days it feels like I lose them over and over and over again. 

Grief is hard. At times it has devastated me, but when I am able to realize that grief is knocking on my door to ask me to recall someone I loved … when I realize grief is saying to me, “hey, you were loved by your friend/parent/partner,” then I begin to remember the good times and the magic of all the extremely ordinary days I was able to spend with those I have loved and lost in this lifetime, then I begin to see the gift that grief can be. Then I am able to celebrate their good lives and the impact they had on me and the world. 

When my mind and heart turn to the sound of my father’s voice calling out my name, or I think about how upset he would be about the Crimson Tide’s recent losses, grief rings its iron bell and gifts me the opportunity to remember him and carry him with me for a while. 

When I think of my sweet friend, Bud Hopson, who was just killed in a landslide in Nepal this past September, I hear his laugh again, his delightful southern drawl despite having lived abroad for so long, and I remember his easy way of moving through this world and all the Grateful Dead concerts we attended in our well-spent youth. 

When I contemplate my friend, Scott Owens, who died of glioblastoma in October, 2023, I recall cruising the streets of Dothan on the back of his motorcycle; the way that warm south Alabama wind felt as we sped through the world way faster than 14-year-old boys should be allowed, and how it didn’t seem like anything in this universe or the next could ever slow us down. I think of how proud he was of his daughter, and how he treasured his friends, old and new.

All this is to say, as I have aged, grief has become less of a feeling to overcome and more of a reminder that I am here, and I have been lucky enough to be loved in this lifetime. Let us now praise those who have gone before us. Let us celebrate love and friendship and all those who have gone on before us. 

---

The Cabernet Hours

My friend is dead,
and I am without
words, so I seek poets
whose writing has carried
me through cabernet hours:
Cummings, Keats, and Clifton.
I read Doty, Porter, and Jones
but find no relief, no magic bullet
for the inevitable punctuation
at the end of every damn sentence.

Death baffles me.
How are you here, now,
Voice-reading this,
and then you are gone?
How can I hold your words
in my hand, but they silver slip
like minnows through my fingers?
How can you write in one moment
but be gone before the final line?

Constants blink out with a single keystroke,
and we are left with the pulsing cursor of memory.

This is not a poem for the dead.
The ears which hear are here.
The eyes which read are reading now.
The hearts who remember are now remembering.

My living friends,
write your truth in stone,
spit your words with fire
until your last breath is a memory of smoke.
Call out your God in fevered prayer,
shape-note drone your words like summer bees,
let the sound of your voice reverberate,
so we hang upon your last syllable
as your parents hung upon your first cry.
Sing, and don’t stop singing,
for this night is darker than wine,
and there is no comfort
at the end of this sentence.

---

“The Cabernet Hours” appears in Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022.

Miracle Strip, a poetry collection by Matt Layne, is a unique hybrid of the written and spoken word. Each piece of the collection has an end-stop embellishment QR code which, when scanned, transforms the reader into a listener. Layne has recorded each poem, often with the accompaniment of musician and poet, Ned Mudd. The first line of the book invites the reader to “tell me your story, and I will tell you mine,” in the campfire tradition. In Miracle Strip, the reader and poet embark on an experiential journey of memories and the ghosts who haunt us. 

Miracle Strip by Matt Layne is in print! Get your copy today!

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Poet, librarian, raconteur Matt Layne has been poking hornet's nests and looking under rocks for lizards and snakes since he was knee-high to a peanut peg. A founding member of the 1990s improvisational poetry collective, The Kevorkian Skull poets, Layne believes in the radical transformative power found in the intersection of poetry and art, and he wants you to write your truth and share it out loud. A multiple Hackney Award winning writer, he has also been recognized by the National Society of Arts and Letters and been featured in Peek Magazine, Birmingham Arts Journal, Steel Toe Review, B-Metro, and elsewhere. Look for him at your local library.

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