Contemplating collective grief through the essays of Mary Oliver

During times of distress, I always return to Mary Oliver. Though I’m a homebody at heart, Oliver’s work propels me into the outdoors, sometimes deep into the woods. I cast off the concrete convenience of the city where I live in favor of buggy, damp terrain.

As the pandemic stretches on in the United States, we must shift from the short-term crisis mindset of spring to a toolkit of strategies for coping with the virus’s prevalence for the long haul. Maris Kriezman’s tweet about her realization that she’d soon be seeing people wearing holiday masks went viral. In her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris mentioned being prepared for “the next one,” meaning the next pandemic. Exhausted parents rush to make contingency plans to support an entire school year of online learning for their children with little to no outside help.

Anna Wiener wrote in the New Yorker about the wildfires raging across California. She notes that people close to these fires cannot leave their homes because of the smoke, but they cannot hold gatherings indoors because of the pandemic. She then notes that as the weather grows frigid in other areas of the U.S., this situation will be widespread. 

We are desperate to believe there is an end in sight, but many of us are mentally preparing ourselves for that end to be quite a distance away. In between mulling over the grimness of holiday masks and Wiener’s mention of hundred-year-old redwoods blackened by uncontainable blazes, I return to Mary Oliver, specifically her essay collection Upstream. She has a way of revering the natural world for its beauty while also accepting its indifference to humanity, and in a time when the bleak threatens to overshadow hope, I am seeking a way to reconcile the two. 

As noted in this article from NPR, Oliver’s poems have a way of comforting without condescending. Her optimism is measured, and it seems that for every mention of the Earth’s beauty, she includes an acknowledgement of its cruelty. In her essay “Wordworth’s Mountain,” she writes, 

In my view, her gaze upon this duality never veers into blissful naïveté or hopelessness. She maintains a quiet respect for the natural world throughout her various receptions of it.

Every day, I go through a mental litany of gratitude. I am alive and healthy. My loved ones are alive and healthy. I have reliable access to food, housing, and healthcare. I have stable employment during an economic recession. I am able to work from home and take precautions to protect myself  from the virus. I am luckier and more privileged than many. 

Given that immense privilege, I think, does applying Oliver’s dual respect for the world’s calm and its chaos border on disrespectful during this time? How can I reconcile the solemnity of one hundred and eighty thousand lives lost to a deadly virus in the U.S. alone with a theoretical peace in spite of that despair? 

Oliver writes in “Staying Alive” that she takes responsibility for her life and that she will “give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.” It’s the “without bitterness” that gets me. For all the horrors of this world that seems at worst hostile and at best indifferent to human existence, Oliver accepts her mortality without bitterness. Is is possible, and if it is, is it just to let go of our bitterness about the immense loss this virus has caused across the globe? Do the “wild and weedy dunes” she describes begin to encompass anything as ferocious as this pandemic?

Oliver acknowledges that accepting one’s own mortality is easier than accepting the mortality of one’s loved ones. She writes in “The Bright Eyes of Eleonora: Poe’s Dream of Recapturing the Impossible,”

I feel that I have loved more fiercely and asked questions more urgently in the past five months than ever before. In the context of her essay, Oliver is making the argument that Poe’s horror is so effective because of how he taps into this collective fear. We are as afraid of losing our loved ones as we are certain that it will happen. That is, the fact that we know it will happen does nothing to diminish our fear. It is our “inescapable destiny,” Oliver writes. Now, perhaps more than ever, that fear is at the forefront of our daily lives. We do not need to read Poe to be reminded of it. Oliver recognizes how formidable this fear is, and I was hoping to find within her words some kind of instructions for how to tame it.

In her poem “After Reading Lucretius, I Go to the Pond,” Oliver describes witnessing a heron eat a green frog. The frog, the speaker comments, was her small brother, and the heron was her tall, thin brother. The final two lines read: “My heart dresses in black / and dances.” Here, Oliver is exploring what it means to celebrate and mourn simultaneously—to experience both loss and triumph as a result of the natural way of things. When I read this poem, I want to be able to conclude that celebration and mourning can coexist even during a pandemic. However, I get stuck when I consider that in the woods where Oliver walks, the heron is meant to eat the frog as a condition of its existence in this ecosystem. By contrast, the loss caused by this pandemic feels preventable. It was not meant to happen in the same way the heron was meant to eat the frog. At least, it feels that way to me.

While reading the essays in Upstream reminded me of the joy of being in nature in a way that was much needed after months spent mostly indoors, it left me with more questions than answers regarding how to reconcile the immense loss caused by the virus with the wonders of the natural world that engendered it. In the same way we are searching for ways to make the logistics of our quarantined lives sustainable long-term, I am searching for how to manage grief without being swallowed by it in the months ahead.

In the poem “Good Morning,” while observing various animals, the speaker muses, “It must be a great disappointment / to God if we are not dazzled at least ten / times a day.” When you consider hummingbirds and foxes and water lilies, sure, it’s hard not to be dazzled. It’s not the dazzling alone that gives me pause. Rather, it’s what happens when you are so overwhelmed by tragedy that dazzlement feels inappropriate. Amid the injustice of so many preventable deaths, what could the water lilies possibly have to say for themselves?