Here & there: Grief, loss, and moss in Ireland

Green leaves with water droplets, location unknown, June 30, 2019 | Photo by Supareg Suksai via Scopio, St. George News

FEATURE — It’s raining in Ireland. The first day in an otherwise gloriously weathered week my husband and I have spent frolicking green sheep pastures, kissing a magic stone perched under the overhang of a castle, and renewing our twenty-year old wedding vows on the staggering Cliffs of Moher.

But today, it’s raining.

Fine rivulets of rain drip from the window of our sixth-floor hotel onto the layer of moss that’s spread itself like chunky, green peanut butter on the stone ledge of the building. A few patches of stone peek out between the clumps of moss and small rings of white bird droppings dot the un-mossed stone.

Across Howard Street beyond the Kelly-mossed ledge, the mint green spires of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland hover. The spire and its church remind me I am in mourning. I am mourning the loss of a dear family friend, dead at fifty from metastatic ocular melanoma. She was brilliant, beloved, and gone far too soon.

Water droplets on glass window, location unknown, Nov. 26, 2018 | Photo by Omair Habeen via Scopio, St. George News

I wait for her funeral services to come linked in a text from a mutual friend – YouTube now a saving grace when distance disallows proximity – so I can continue in grief. As I continue in life, I watch the rain drip onto the moss in Belfast.

Life and death. Those are the things. Just like grief and love. Inevitable companions.

The clumpy moss in my gaze seems to read my thoughts and reminds me of the book crammed underneath my travel essentials in the worn black backpack at my feet. It is a book about, of all things, moss.

Nearly two dozen intertwining essays written by botanist and bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer about the tiny green miracles of nature – where they live, how they work, and how they survive – and her. But really, they’re about all of us.

I open Gathering Moss and read the essay entitled “An Affinity for Water.” In it, Kimmerer explains mosses’ relationship to water: “mosses have a covenant with change; their destiny is linked to the vagaries of rain.  [They] may lose up to 98 percent of their moisture, and still survive to restore themselves when water is replenished. Even after forty years of dehydration in a musty specimen cabinet, mosses have been fully revived after a dunk in a Petri dish.”

She continues, “holding water against the pull of the sun, and welcoming it back again is a communal activity.  No moss can do it alone. It requires the interweaving of shoots and branches, standing together to create a place for water.”

As part of their “covenant with change,” the mosses and their communities are not left unchanged by the change. In fact, nearly all mosses change their shape and color when they dry out. Even if only temporarily. As temporary as forty years can feel.

For a moment, I feel a little dried out. Despite the purpose of my trip to Ireland and despite the connecting, warm and treasured adventures I’ve had with my husband. Because it’s also been a year.  A year full of cancer, loss and of loss still pending.

Black tree under blue sky, location unknown, July 26, 2020 | Photo by Antony Trivet via Scopio, St. George News

Kimmerer says moss is incredible in the way that it prepares for its drying at the biochemical level by changing the cell membrane in a way that allows it to shrink and collapse without sustaining irreparable damage.

I want to be able to do that, too. I want to allow myself to shrink and collapse without sustaining irreparable damage. To sustain the drought of mourning and loss, and to be ready for when it rains again.

Social worker, humanitarian aid and author Amanda Held Opelt says, “grief makes a novice of us all.” She should know. She suffered a season of profound loss during her first-hand witness to war and in losing her grandmother, three pregnancies, and her only sister in the span of a couple of years.

In her grief, Amanda says she was at a loss. Throughout her life of academic and spiritual education, she’d “learned to serve, to pray, to worship, to study and to love. But [she’d] never learned how to lose someone.  [She] never learned how to grieve.”

So, she began a search for practices that could help her through the path of mourning and she discovered something profound: “generations past had a robust array of rituals surrounding death that allowed mourners to be fully present in the experience of bereavement. These customs and traditions carved out a path and led the mourner through the physical, emotional and spiritual exercises of saying goodbye.”

She writes about the rituals she found in A Whole in the World: Finding hope in the Rituals of Grief and Healing. The traditions she writes about are beautiful and expansive. Everything from keening (organized wailing) to telling the bees [the person is gone] and covering mirrors. They address anguish, fear and change, among other things. And they are mostly done in community.

But really, I think the book could also be called: how to be more like moss – in grief and in life.

I look again at the full, green moss on the stone ledge, unfurled and succulent in its fully hydrated state, knowing this is not always how it looks. This is not always how it feels. And I feel hope wet my soul.

Kat Dayton is a columnist for St. George News. Any opinions given are her own and not representative of St. George News staff or management.

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2022, all rights reserved.

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