Both Sides Now.

The gift of grief.

You know that odd thing when you hear the same song everywhere you go.

I’ve had it this week with Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. The final tune to Ricky Gervais’s maddening but addictively heart-warming series After Life on Netflix. The song swimming through my head all week, then suddenly playing in a shop as if they’d put my thoughts on loudspeaker. I’d walked into my own movie set.

It’s a song with that habit of undoing you.

Like grief does.

For some reason I’ve recently read four incredible books which explore grief – Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet ­and Ali Smith’s Artful (featured in 2021 treasures) – all four hitting their true notes in unique ways. Each author capturing the unshakeably cellular poison of loss.

And that trick grief has of snagging a thread in life’s most ordinary cloth to unravel you. Lipstick on a mug. Uninhabited shoes. Other peoples’ children growing up.

‘I've looked at life from both sides now’, sings Joni Mitchell. ‘From win and lose and still somehow / It's life's illusions I recall’.

Grief demands we look at life from both sides now.

Both sides of the veil.

Both sides of our own befores and afters in one glance.

What’s been beautiful about reading these books is that each one awakens you again to your own precious loves. Slaps you in the face. Wakes you up to appreciate.

And grief has a sense of humour.

It hides in sneaky places. Leaps out when you least expect it. Didn’t even realise you’d missed something, but there, throbbing away in you, lives the missing, a reminder that we are made of each other.

So this week’s writing, it seems, is an ode and a thank you to the gift of grief – whatever we may be grieving. Parts of our life we weren’t able to live. All that we did.

The love living on in us.

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Next week, my first interview with a beautifully inspiring human.

But for now, I leave you in Joni’s capable undoing, and wish you a very awake weekend…

Copyright: © Joel Bernstein 1970.

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