Grief Season (and what we can learn from fungi)

It’s grief season again.

In my family circle, the final days of the old year and the first days of the new year will forever be marked by profound loss. On January 1st, 2011, my best friend’s niece, Kate, was brutally attacked and mortally wounded, together with her fiance and several of his family members. She died on January 6th, 2 days after her fiance. She was 25. Five of her future family members died with her in that first week of the new year. 

Towards the end of that same year, 2011, my coworker and dear friend, Corey, resigned from his job as my administrative assistant for a mental health agency, left town for an extended cross-country road trip, and jumped off the New River Gorge Bridge (a beautiful and extraordinarily high structure known as a popular suicide spot) in West Virginia on December 29th. I will forever remember the call from his aunt coming into our office, and the photograph of the bridge where he died displayed at his memorial. He was 33.

Flanked by murder and suicide, the transition time between the old and the new year has become heavy and contemplative for me. It’s already a natural time for inward reflection - the darkest days, the longest nights, cold weather and bare trees, the end of the lunar calendar year - and also, winter solstice, daylight slowly beginning to linger again, holiday celebrations - on Dia de los Muertos we honor our dead - and the anticipation of a fresh start into a new revolution around the sun.

In recent years, grief season has extended a bit. This may just be a normal side effect of getting older. Loss has a way of finding you, over and over again. A life-long friend of my husband’s died from cancer on December 15th, 2013, the same day as a young girl from our neighborhood who used to babysit for my daughter, succumbed to the disease. In 2020, my former brother-in-law died by suicide on January 29th, and lung cancer took my mother-in-law on November 29th. 

The truth is, of course, that it’s grief season all year long. Death doesn’t keep a calendar or make appointments. We all experience many losses throughout our life. Sometimes it is a physical death, and sometimes it’s simply the end of something. It still hurts. Grief is not a competition - my loss isn’t bigger or smaller or more or less important than yours. All our losses add up, and they all matter. They continue to shape who we are, because it is true that love and loss are two sides of the same coin. 

So I light a candle in the dark. I remember; I cry; I tell stories; I laugh; I celebrate. I listen to music. A lot. I do this alone and with my fellow humans, because we are all connected, through this mycelium network of grief, love, and loss. Like the mycelium, the awe-inspiring underground web of fungi, with its soft tendrils growing in the dark places, it heals and sustains us, breaks us down and transforms us, nurtured by our tears. 

The word “mycelium” is derived from New Latin and Greek. It means “more than one”.

More than one. That’s us.