Coping With Grief

I never thought much of them. To me, they were just some tall and ugly wildflowers in my least favourite colour. Orange. But my father

As the driver pulls into the ambulance bay at the hospital, a wave of relief washes over me. Now that we have arrived, I can

It cowers in the corner, newly born. I turn my spite-soaked back, riddled with resentment and pull the thin veil to sink beneath its cover.

Editor’s Note: Earlier this year, the book Seasons of Grief: Creative Interventions to Support Bereaved People, edited by Claudia Coenen came out.  It included a chapter

Don’t change the channel when I’m grieving. It’s in people to want to protect us and make us feel better. But I put this on

Golden streams journey to Earth from the sun aiming for blooms in the fields where they run rising and shining with pigments that stun growing

To write about grief is not to compose
for there is no way to structure the messy meanness of ‘friends’
who avoid me, say you would be dead if it wasn’t for me,

A month today, how is that possible?

I wash your floors clean your loo then sit in your māra

the one we replanted yesterday thinking of you soon I will

be gone from here with only memories of you in this place

How can I go without knowing where you are, other than in the box of ashes I carry?
I have no compass for this path but oceans of tears

and landscapes of kōhatu sit in my puku a dreadful dead weight

wedged between two chests of drawers, I sit
bereft, a rākau stripped of leaves…

So many everyday expressions refer to death in different ways. We insert them into our vocabulary because it is a part of life itself. “My