Grief Has No Distance
“her cot a map of the world, her death the north folding in on itself.”
—Dallas Hunt, Creeland, 2021
Dallas Hunt’s poem “Rueful” (2021) recounts the death of his grandmother amid stanzas that reference the state of the world, the news, tenderness, and violence. In describing the moment of her death, Hunt turns to land, the world, the cardinal direction; in so few words he expresses how scale can shift when you lose someone. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion wrote, “Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”1 Distance allows us to see others and be seen by them. Distance connects two points across a straight line. And so, it makes perfect sense to me, this simple declaration that “[g]rief has no distance,” because grief can feel at once ever-present and also nowhere to be seen. In her lecture “Remarks on Letters,” Mary Ruefle asked, “For what is a letter, but to speak one’s thoughts at a distance? Which is why poems and prayers are letters. The origin of poems, prayers, and letters all have this in common: urgency.”2 I would go a step further and say that the human need to create poetry and prayer comes from an existential awareness that one day, the distance between oneself and another will be replaced by space, by loss.
When my dad died in early 2020, a
