Our Grieving and Our Staying

Wendell Berry speaks of death in ways few of us can express

“The loved ones we call the dead . . . live now in the permanent world,” Wendell Berry writes in November, 2025. “We are the absent ones.” Reading his words I almost weep: At last someone knows how I feel.

I first came to Berry’s poetry after my daughter Jess was born in 1988. Over the decades his voice has been a companion through many seasons of life, as cyclical as farm work, the good and the bad. I still keep his collected poems permanently downloaded on a handheld device, always in reach for moments of great need.

It wasn’t until Jess died in 2015 that I realized Berry speaks of death in ways few of us can express. I revisited “Grief” that summer. It was like looking in a mirror.

The morning comes. The old woman, a spot

of soot where she has touched her cheek, tears

on her face, builds a fire, sets water to boil,

puts the skillet on. The man in his middle years,

bent by the work he has done toward the work

he will do, weeps as he eats, bread in his mouth,

tears on his face. They shape the day for its passing

as if absent from it—for what needs care, caring,

feeding what must be fed. To keep them, there are only

the household’s remembered ways, etched thin

and brittle by their tears. It is a sharp light

that lights the day now. It seems to shine,

beyond eyesight, also in another day

where the dead have risen and are walking

away, their backs forever turned. What

look is in their eyes? What do they say

as they walk into the fall and flow of light?

It seems that they must know where they are going.

And the living must go with them, not knowing,

a little way. And the dead go on, not turning,

knowing, but not saying. And the living

turn back to their day, their grieving and staying.

My first reaction is recognition. Sensing the presence of our dead is common among mourners, observes psychologist Richard Tedeschi with the University of North Carolina. This may be why Berry’s insight is similar to that expressed by another poet, bereaved father Friedrich Rückert. But while Berry focuses on the harm that these two mourners must endure, looking from the outside-in, Rückert looks from inside his pain out to his two dead children, Ernst and Luise:

Oft I think, they’re out and about,

they’ll be home soon no doubt.

The day is soft, not to worry,

they are strolling, in no hurry.

Yes, they’re out and about,

coming home now no doubt;

not to worry, the day is still,

they stroll up ahead to the hills.

They are only out and about,

and will not look to come home;

we will catch them up on the hills

in the sun, where the day is still.

It’s difficult to know if Rückert expects to sense his little ones or if he is speaking of a reunion in the afterlife. Either way, the day seems less foreboding and more welcoming for a father’s confidence that his children wait for him in the hills.

Both poems are reminiscent of a passage from Augustine that is frequently used in consolation literature. Johannes Teutschmann, pastor of St. Bernhardin in the Silesian city of Breslau, lost his young son to an outbreak of smallpox in February of 1621. Later that year, on July 20, he delivered a funeral sermon that features the first recorded use of Augustine’s quotation: “We have not lost those who have left this life, we have merely sent them on ahead. They do not die, but they go away.”

Which returns me to Berry’s “Grief.”

Consider the age gap between an old woman and this man in his middle years. We know little of their relationship or their loss. Did his wife die? His child? A sibling? Her husband and his father? I suspect Berry left this question open because in not knowing we may recognize our own communal and universal sorrow.

For example, while the pair clearly has many tasks ahead of them each day, they are not tethered to drudgery, nor do they perform them out of a sense of “duty over despair,” as one interpreter suggests. Rather, through powerful and poignant example Berry demonstrates a key aspect of lifelong grief: Our daily work was before us, is before us, will be before us; it may be a joy, a torment, or both. Toil, as with life, love and grief, is cyclical.

The pair needs care and feeding. Prosaic concerns demand their attention. Yet bereavement may temporarily disrupt ordinary functions, identity, roles, self-care, and daily routines, leaving grievers dependent on the structures and relationships of ordinary life even as they mourn. This seems to be part of what Berry is getting at: One household’s remembered ways become an external support for two people whose inner world has been shattered.

Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut with Ultrecht University call this the dual process model of dealing with loss. In a groundbreaking 1999 paper with the professional journal Death Studies, they suggest that traditional “grief work” simply isn’t working. Instead, they note that there is a continuous connection between coping with a death and facing the practical realities of living. Adaptive grieving, they add, acknowledges that coping and facing exist simultaneously.

Grief may re-emerge later and sporadically over many years, rather than being confined to an initial period, according to Michael Caserta and Dale Lund with the University of Utah. They applied Stroebe and Schut’s insights to interviews with 163 widows and widowers. The combination of coping with loss and facing daily tasks resulted in improved self-care, living skills, and personal growth. Caserta and Lund observe that the overwhelming grief that dominates early bereavement may return at unanticipated times throughout our lives.

This is why it seems Berry’s poem is not necessarily about “acute grief;” that is, onslaughts of sorrow usually experienced in the first year after a loss. Waves of weeping, even while we boil water or eat bread, may come and go over many years. They certainly do for me. Some days it seems like my daughter died only yesterday. Or maybe last week.

“No one tells us that grief is going to physically hurt,” writes Mary-Francis O’Connor with the University of Arizona. “The pain of grief—I hate to say it, but it is true—is normal. There is nothing wrong with us.”

In a similar way, we may misunderstand Berry if we think the woman and man are emotionally detached. They are overwhelmed, to be sure. But they are far from disinterested. The woman mourns while preparing breakfast. The man weeps as he eats. Life goes on, as does loss.

Kate Bennett, Suzanna Mackenzie-Smith, and Kerry Gibbons note that functioning does not demonstrate grief’s absence. There is no specific time frame or progression from an early stage to a later one. Rather, healthy mourners report a restoration of daily routines alongside ongoing intrusions of sorrow.

It occurs to me that the final lines of “Grief” may be quite literal. Berry refuses to imagine death as an ending, a cessation. Our loved ones “must know where they are going. . . . the dead go on, not turning.” The poet does not have them spin round to offer Hollywood-style sentimental reassurance. Instead, he suggests that the dead know something we do not.

Yet in an extraordinary act of hope, we follow them anyway. When like the pair in “Grief” we at last turn back to our day, our grieving and staying, we are not healed of pain. We stay because we must.

Reactions similar to those described in “Grief” present “a complex picture of the role that continuing bonds play in coping with bereavement,” observe Briana Root and Julie Juola Exline with Case Western Reserve University. Individual responses are often dependent on perceptions of whether an ongoing relational connection with our dead is positive or negative, the nature of a mourner’s pre-death relationship, and belief in an afterlife.

Berry demonstrates such beliefs in “Grief.” He returns to them in one of his final poems, published with The New Yorker in November of 2025:

The Loved Ones

The loved ones we call the dead

depart from us and for a while

are absent. And then as if

called back by our love, they come

near us again. They enter our dreams.

We feel they have been near us

when we have not thought of them.

They are simply here, simply waiting

while we are distracted among

our obligations. At last

it comes to us: They live now

in the permanent world.

We are the absent ones.

The two poems are nearly forty-five years apart, but their conceptual continuity stuns me even now. Berry’s insights are developed in quite different ways at two ends of his career.

In “Grief” the living turn back while the dead go on, “knowing, but not saying,” possessed of knowledge that we lack. In “The Loved Ones” they live in the permanent world, and to our astonishment, it is we who are absent. Berry seems to see the same thing with new eyes.

As do I.

I often sense my daughter is near. But I also feel, as our Mad Farmer writes, that somehow I am absent from her. It is as if our loved ones know we’re blind to their presence but don’t mind, certain in ways we may forget that love never dies. When Berry writes that our dead “come near us again” and “enter our dreams,” he confirms what grief experts have been investigating for decades.

In 2024, Helen Hewson, Niall Galbraith, and Claire Jones with the University of Wolverhampton, and Gemma Heath, Aston University, reviewed seventy-nine studies involving some 13,366 mourners. They found that continuing bonds with the deceased may contribute to comfort, meaning reconstruction, identity processes, and spiritual understanding. This sense of presence has led contemporary research away from measuring healthy grief as a reduction of distress. “Like a Pandora’s box of human struggles,” says respected authority Robert Niemeyer with the University of Memphis, “the grieving heart pours out a vast and varied torrent of troubles.”

Berry said much the same in 1980. We don’t grieve and then stay. We grieve and stay. Another day dawns; we warm the skillet, eat some bread. And weep. We would follow our dead a little way if we could.

Then forty-five years later Berry surprises us. We need not follow our loved ones after all. They remain with us. It is we who are unaware, oblivious. I am one of the people Berry writes about. No longer absent, maybe Wendell is too.

__________

“Grief” is from A Part by Wendell Berry. © 1980 by Wendell Berry. First published by North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, Inc. All rights reserved. “Oft I think, they’re out and about” is from Songs on the Death of Children: Selected Poems from Kindertotenlieder by Friedrich Rückert, translated and annotated by David Bannon, © 2023 David Bannon, by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. The poem “The Loved Ones” by Wendell Berry appeared in The New Yorker online on November 17, 2025, and in the print edition of the November 24, 2025 issue. © 2025 by Wendell Berry. All rights reserved.