Everything I Feel Returns to You Somehow: Sufjan Stevens on Grief
Ten years ago, Sufjan Stevens released the incredible album "Carrie and Lowell." Written in the immediate aftermath of his mother's death, the album is an unflinching, brutally and beautifully honest record of songs about grief, trauma, and trying to find hope in the midst of all of it.
"In the moment, I was stoic and phlegmatic and practical, but in the months following I was manic and frantic and disparaging and angry. They always talk about the science of bereavement, and how there is a measurable pattern and cycle of grief, but my experience was lacking in any kind of natural trajectory,” He said of in a 2015 Pitchfork interview. “I would have a period of rigorous, emotionless work, and then I would be struck by deep sadness triggered by something really mundane... It’s weird."
He puts this even more plainly in the song The Only Thing, when he sings, “Should I tear my heart out now? Everything I feel returns to you somehow.”
So much of grief work is about helping clients deconstruct unhelpful cultural ideas about how we are supposed to grieve. The idea that grief is a process you eventually get through and overcome after X number of predictable, linear steps does little but add shame to the pain grievers are already feeling. “I usually find that such persons are well acquainted with the grief map and can locate their experience in relation to it,” says Michael White, the father of Narrative Therapy. “They clearly understand that they have failed, in their grief work, to reach the appropriate destination.”
The truth is we don't get rid of grief, but it does evolve. It's not about moving on, but moving forward with the grief. This is the basis of both Continuing Bonds Theory and Michael White's brilliant idea of "saying hullo again,” in which grievers are invited to consider how they might carry forward their relationships with those they’ve lost. “I have consistently found that, through the incorporation of the lost relationship, those problems defined in terms such as ‘pathological mourning’ and ‘delayed grief’ are resolved,” he says. “Persons arrive at a new relationship with their self. Their attitude towards their self becomes a more accepting and embracing one, and they come to treat themselves with greater kindness and compassion.”
Sufjan seems to get this. “Time is a salve, but it offers no solution really, especially in dealing with pain and suffering and death,” he said in a recent interview with NPR. “And I think what I realized is that grieving is eternal and you never really get over it. It just moves around within you and transforms you, but it never goes away.” Both his lyrics and his recent interviews reflecting on the album's 10th anniversary embrace the messiness, unpredictability, and evolving nature of grief in incredible ways. Give it a listen.
