A Catalogue of Ordinary Grief by Jane Butler

Anne Shirley once said, “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.” She was the first literary heroine that I identified with. I wanted so much to be her—to be as dreamy and innocent, as hopeful and lively. Everyone's life is a graveyard of sorts. We leave so many pieces of ourselves behind, burying the parts of ourselves that would hinder us from being whoever others decided we should be. What struck me the most was the wording she uses: “ a perfect graveyard.” There is something so poetic about suffering. Anne found comfort in the romantic nature of change and roads untaken. Perhaps that’s the silver lining of loss: the beauty that comes from renewal. 

I have been a reluctant guest at a copious number of tiny funerals. Experiences, journeys that should have lasted a lifetime, cut short suddenly. I buried them all. The piano lessons I quit when I was eleven. My childhood best friend whom I never spoke to again. The languages I never finished learning. The ballet classes I stopped after I threw up one too many times. So many things I loved, adored even, that filled me with so much joy and awe, just to end after I inevitably lost motivation and drive. Passion comes and goes like water, and I feel like I am drowning, searching for something to hold on to. I don’t come from a family that believes in me, and slowly I found myself shrinking all of my dreams into something I could believe in. 

We are constantly surrounded by people’s grief. An inescapable tragic undercurrent to our everyday lives. It permeates the fabric of life: these constant, inescapable reminders of everything we could have been but never became. I cannot live a day without knowing that somewhere, there is a girl who practiced piano every day and became a pianist. I will never be her. I still remember poring over sheet music and scribbling transcriptions of pieces I heard on the radio. There is someone who performed on stage just one more time until one more time became worth it enough to stay. I hear it so clearly: the sound of rosin being crushed under pointe shoes, lipstick notes scrawled onto mirrors, that feeling of anticipation when the curtain rose, and the lights turned on. Parts of me die all the time, and I mourn them by myself. 

Plath imagined the future as a fig tree, each fig a different life waiting to be chosen. What worried me wasn't choosing, but watching the unchosen figs rot. There were a multitude of lives that I could have inhabited, and, instead, I watched them slip away one by one. All the versions of me that could have existed were disappearing, and I was left wondering who I was without them. 

This grief felt hopelessly lonely. I felt as though no one understood me, understood that there were indeed things that I would have liked to have become, lives I had wanted to live, but simply could not. I could either allow these losses to destroy me slowly, or I could move on. Alfred, Lord Tennyson once said, “It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.” Though versions of me are dying all the time, it was worth it for them to exist. In those moments I felt wholly and completely alive, and that is worth any amount of grief necessary.

Now, I imagine my life as a museum with an enormous archive beneath it. People only see the surface, what I have chosen for them to see, the most beautiful, curated parts of myself, but few know what lies under the surface. There is so much depth to a person that goes unseen, and a life is not wasted simply because it is not permanent.