Anna DeForest: Grieving Lessons, on Victoria Chang’s ”Obit”

We have been surrounded now, for a long time, suddenly, by death and threats of death—we walk in it, hide from it, fight it, fail at fighting it, watch it happen—on a scale that is larger than our minds can grasp. Walking home from the hospital where I work, I pass a novelty: a drive-through funeral, the family under a square pop-up tent and the cars just slowing by, giving their regards behind masks, through windows. But where and how is our grief fit to scale? It is a good time to develop, if you haven’t already, practices for bearing unbearable things. I tend now to deal only in extremes, to prefer fully engrossing escapism or violent over-exposure. Because I am a doctor, the nature of the current crisis has forced me more toward the latter.

“I want to complain to the boss of God about God,” writes Victoria Chang. “What if the boss of God is rain, and the only way to speak to rain is to open your mouth to the sky and drown?” In no regular way a reader of poetry, I was brought to Obit, her most recent book of poems, by my love for this image of shouting mutely into the sky. I feel it in my body in a time when it is hard to feel anything. The book, thin with wide margins and heavy as lead, is a collection of losses: a father, aphasic after a stroke, a mother’s death from pulmonary fibrosis. A collection of poems in the form of dozens of obituaries, for parents, for selves, for language, Obit is easily the most apt and soothing (soothing like chopping wood, like carrying water or yelling into a well) work I have read since before the world upended.

Here I will admit that I have spent my life imagining various catastrophes, but living through this pandemic has taught me the utter failure of imagination. I underestimated how much a global disaster would speak itself out on my body, the way that fear is on the body, and how in time it all would be, hard time, like in prison, or like a body in an ICU, vented for weeks and then finally, hopelessly dying. Or this is just what experience is and feels like, like David Berman of Silver Jews singing: “Realizing is how it feels inside when it happens to you.”