The Multiple Deaths of Living: Reading Victoria Chang’s Obit

If I were to say, “My friend is experiencing deep grief right now,” I suspect that most people would assume that my friend is in grief because of the death of a loved one. However, the understanding of “grief” in the collective conscience — especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 — has rightfully expanded so that grief includes the loss of varying life circumstances. We grieve that we longer believe in the faith tradition we had practiced since childhood. We grieve after realizing our spouse isn’t the person we had believed them to be and we can’t save the marriage. We grieve over not being able to attend in-person classes without the constant worry of potentially spreading COVID. We grieve that our current lives don’t reflect the hopes and dreams we once had for ourselves.

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” as Elizabeth Bishop famously remarked in her beloved villanelle “One Art.”

In April 2020, amidst the start of worldwide safer-at-home orders, Obit by Victoria Chang was released. The poems in this collection were written after her mother died of pulmonary fibrosis on August 3, 2015. Instead of opting for the traditional form of the elegy to explore her grief, in her poems, Chang chooses to engage in hermit crab writing by using the one long and skinny rectangle form of obituaries to inspect the multitude of deaths that unfurl in a human life. Though she does write about the literal death of her mother, she also writes about how her mother’s teeth metaphorically died after being pulled out. Other deaths that she writes about include her own ambition, optimism, and friendships. Interspersed in the book are tankas that Chang writes her children about subjects like death, hope, and love. In addition to obits and tankas, a lyrical poem spread over several pages is a part of the collection.

Grief is an inextricable part of our human existence. Though the specificities of individuals’ experiences with loss may differ, every human being will go through some sort of significant loss (should they live for enough years to eventually go through it). Just as universal as grief is, the need to have one’s grief be attended to is as common. I have acutely witnessed a multitude of metaphorical deaths and a literal death throughout my life, and I always felt that not even attempting to verbalize the ramification of those losses would eventually result in overwhelming agony. The first epigraph in Obit is “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak wispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break,” from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. After that epigraph, Chang goes on to share 81 heartrending obits. Considering how many people prefer not to talk about their grief, the wisdom in the Shakespeare quote and the high number of obits in this book make me believe that most people don’t talk about grief as much as they should in order to find some healing, and there are perils in denying and avoiding the deep pain that follows a loss.

While I intellectually know the psychological benefits of speaking about loss and grief, I do recognize that speaking about loss and grief is really hard. As I examine the poems I’ve written over the past two and a half years, it has only been within the past year that I’ve mustered the courage to transmit the emotions of my grief experiences into poetry. I also noticed that, like most of the poems I write, those poems about grief were written in a free verse lyrical style. Writing more poems about painful experiences, such as grief, is an important goal of mine, and I am fascinated by the forms that Chang uses to write about her mourning. The obit poems are not only in hermit crab forms, but they’re also prose poems, which is a form that I’m easing myself into also practicing. The tankas that Chang writes also captivate me because they’re only five lines with a total of 31 syllables, yet they are filled with rich images infused in profound statements like “I tell my children / that hope is like a blue skirt, / it can twirl and twirl, / that men like to open it, / take it apart, and wound it.” As a lyrically-inclined writer, my writing can come off as rambling, and I’m gleaning from her effective directness.

Though most of Obit addresses the losses that she undergoes in her personal life, Chang ends the book with an obit that addresses shootings in Florida, particularly at Stoneman Douglas High School. This obit also addresses her mother as it begins with “America-died on February 14, 2018, / and my dead mother doesn’t know. Since her death, America has died a / series of small deaths, each one less / precise than the next.”

I’m so appreciative that, by addressing the deaths from shootings and the death of her mother in the same sentence, Chang reminds us that our willingness to explore the darkness of our own grief can nurture our attentiveness to the grief that occurs in other parts of the world. Our personal grief is inevitably bound to collective grief, and both types of grief are worthy of belonging in the same sentence. 

Like Victoria Chang and many fellow writers, I like to write about dark topics such as suffering and sociopolitical matters. I’ve never tried to write about my personal grief and sociopolitical events within the same poem, but I’m inspired to give that more of a try, especially as I become more keen on contributing to the creation of more peace in this chaotic world while simultaneously accepting the wildness of my heart and making peace with it.

As I read Obit and as I push my way through completing this essay, I struggle with the question of “What’s the point?” as the COVID-19 pandemic worsens and 2020 continues to serve one traumatic event after another. 

I suppose it’s worth giving words to those feelings,

the grief.