Portals.

alchemizing grief.

I latch onto words. I hear a lyric, read a passage, see an image or recall a phrase, and words materialize. Almost as if I can feel them, taste them, use my fingers to trace their shape, and hold their weight in my hands. I latch onto words and follow them, allowing them to take me somewhere. 

A couple of years ago (2022), a friend shared an observation about a series of photos I’d taken of my hand reaching through an ocean wave. She spoke about the contrast of solid and liquid textures, said it made her feel like I was reaching through a portal. And just like that, I latched. I spent days thinking about the word portal. Hearing it, within the given context, allowed me to make sense of something, connected some dots which I hadn’t realized were there and needed connecting. In the midst of my thinking, I remembered a 90’s cartoon I use to watch called Mighty Max. It was about a boy, Max, and this red cap. A “cosmic cap” that allowed Max to jump through portals, portals which would open with the specific intent of transporting Max to a particular time and destination so that he could complete a certain mission.  If my memory serves me correctly, Max didn’t always go willingly through a portal even though he knew it had opened for him and he was the only one who could carry out its mission. Regardless of his willingness, once a portal opened, it was inevitable that he would be pulled in.  

According to the Oxford dictionary, definition 1., a portal is “a doorway, gate, or other entrance, especially a large and imposing one.” I’d never referred to them as such but, upon further contemplation and as I mulled over the word, it’s feeling and meaning, I decided that there were portals that had been opening up in my own life. Preempted by significant events, these portals have felt, as the definition describes, imposing. Imposing, aggressive, forceful, and powerful. I recall again Mighty Max and the animated visuals each time a portal appeared and opened, the energy it expelled and the vortex it created.

Portals don’t just pull you in, they push you through. 

I imagine that a portal’s presence is indication that it is time for a particular passage. Time to transition, from one period, in space or time, to another.  

In 2017 my father died. We had been estranged for some time and for at least XX years prior to his passing, he had been battling leukemia. I still remember the morning my mother came to deliver the news. I knew something was wrong because not only had my sister come with her, the way they walked through the front door and entered the room was careful. Cautious. Leery. I remember the careful way in which my sister stood, the attentive look on my mother’s face as she guided me down to sit down, and the anguished silence. What I can’t remember is what my mother said. There are few moments in life as staggering and emotionally deafening as the intersecting seconds just before and immediately after you learn someone you love has died. As I write I cry because losing my father leveled me in ways that are still fresh, still visceral, still tender. His death didn’t just break me, it dismantled me. I became a kind of fragile I didn’t understand or know how to handle.

Despite its intensity and severity, I do not believe that grief comes with ill intention. Grief does not come to make shells of us, to hold us hostage and rob us of our light and our joy. Grief is not an enemy but for a period after my father passed, I considered it as such. It was me and grief in the ring, battling it out, round after round. I felt I had to fight it, master it, defeat it, and overcome it. I am still trying to decide if grief is even something you ever get past, let alone overcome, or get over. My mother would say that for some losses the grief never goes away, never dissipates. Instead it transmutes, changes form and changes you. So what of grief, as a portal? A force that shows up not just to pull us in but see us through. And what is the act of grieving?

As a portal, I think of grief as the way in to an emotional terrain unlike any other. Through grieving, we experience this terrain and through grieving, we are invited to navigate our way around and through. Not through to an end but through to another piece, part or weight of the terrain. This navigation is anything but easy or uncomplicated, most often shrouded in a medley of emotion and feeling, some familiar but amplified, and some, or even most, unfamiliar, difficult, discomforting and unsettling, I often found myself trying to refrain from grief, stave it off by forgoing feeling. Recognizing grief as portal has allowed me to make a kind of peace with grief’s presence. Even as I still find myself seated in the depths of it, I can sit a little more gracefully, a little more receptive to grief’s procession. 

Maybe recognizing grief as a portal is to see grief, and grieving, as a process of alchemy.