On Prayer and Grief and The Summer of 2012
Luz Blumenfeld, 2024On Prayer and Grief and the Summer of 2012 is a reflective essay exploring personal and collective grief, survival, and the act of meaning-making through prayer, memory, and creative rituals. The writer revisits the loss of a childhood friend and navigates survivor’s guilt while examining the cyclical wisdom of ancestors and everyday acts of care. Interwoven with reflections on global tragedies and systemic inequities, the essay contemplates endurance, justice, and the emotional weight of staying to bear witness in a world marked by loss and ongoing crises.
[content warning: suicide, death, grief]
This was also the summer that Hannah died. An accident, though I still blame her shitty boyfriend who didn’t call 911 soon enough. A tragic accident–the tragedy being what is usually is–that it was sudden and unexpected, and that she was only 21.
Grief is adjacent to prayer–or maybe prayer is adjacent to grief.
I remember writing poems that summer about prayer, making work about grief. I made a series of self portraits that summer–self portraits that reckoned with how to hold the fact that of the two of us in this childhood friendship, I had always thought I would be the one to die first. I had been considering my own death for years. She, who at least appeared outwardly to be less depressed, had somehow become the one who got to leave, who had to leave, while I had to stay, got to stay.
I made two text pieces that summer. One said, “how you got to leave and how I had to stay,” and the other, “how you had to leave and how I got to stay,” because both were true, but the second one I made mostly because I felt guilty for thinking the first one.
Were these prayers? Was every Tumblr post I made that summer a prayer?
The self portraits, taken with a little point-and-shoot film camera on the self timer setting, found (and recorded) me in this time–
in the fog in a sundress on the beach,
I’m not sure that I know how to pray. I do know that I look to my ancestors for guidance. Who else knows what came before. Who else knows what is on the other side. What came before is what always comes–these big, old cycles.
I see my ancestors watching my life play out. There are moments of repetition, of overlap in the spirals, where my life reflects back onto theirs. We stand in those places together. They remember how it felt to be there before.
An herbalist friend taught me that the dreamworld is a space for connecting with the ancestors. So is the kitchen, actually–ancestors love to be invited into the kitchen.
I know that these things go together, I don’t know exactly how, but I feel them together–
the whales, the kitchen, my grandmother, the dreamworld, the altar, late fall and early winter, everything ancient and new at once like newborn babies and death beds.
The second day of the fall term, someone jumped off of the sky bridge, killing themselves. I don’t know who they were but I do know that they chose to leave in a violent way, in a way that made sure that their pain was felt by others, reverberated into the individual worlds of the people within that block who were going about their days. It was a choice, to pull people into that despair with them, to transfer it to others as they left their body behind. Most people do not make that choice.
Jenny Odell writes in Saving Time about how one person slowing down inevitably means that another person will have to speed up,
“This phenomenon, in which one adapts her temporal rhythms to those of something or someone else, is called entrainment, and it often plays out on an uneven field of relationships that reflects the hierarchies of gender, race, class, and ability. How much someone’s time is valued is not measured simply by a wage, but by who does what kind of work and whose temporality has to line up with whose, whether that means rushing or waiting or both. Keeping this field in sight is all the more important amid exhortations to “slow down” for which one person’s slowing down requires someone else to speed up.“
There will be people who have to stay and clean up.
I heard from a friend who watched someone hose down the sidewalk. We are being asked to continue again and again after unspeakable horrors, unprecedented events– we watched an entire year of the genocide in Palestine on social media. A year. In a window in my car I taped up a poster that reads, “CEASEFIRE NOW NOW NOW END THE OCCUPATION.” The poster was neon green and pink when I taped it up, now it’s faded from being in the sun. It shouldn’t have gotten to fade, it shouldn’t continue to fade. It’s been a year. Last fall I wore my anti-zionist social club shirt to the elementary school I was working at as part of my graduate program. A community member saw it and complained to the administration. I was asked not to wear it to the school again. My shirt didn’t say this is a genocide, it didn’t say Israel is committing unspeakable horrors, it didn’t say CEASEFIRE NOW NOW NOW END THE OCCUPATION.
There are people who died from the hurricanes. There are people who lost everything. It’s an emergency. There are people who could stop everything but they won’t.
I set my alarm, I go to work, I continue. At work I soothe babies when they cry and I think about the babies in Gaza who stopped crying because they knew no one was coming.
I have to stay, I get to stay.