Picture a Girl: A Piece for Hav
Author: Myra Sack, Founder of E-Motion Inc., a non-profit committed to transforming how the world shows up for each other through grief and loss, so no one grieves alone.
Read the full piece or listen to it below. Please consider sharing this with others in your life who might benefit.
A note:
We envision bringing Movement Communities to neighborhoods everywhere, so no one grieves alone. Are you interested in joining a Movement Community or getting trained to bring one to your hometown? Click the button below to explore our locations and learn more about our movement-based grief groups.
Picture a girl who loves sports. This girl is 13 or so.
Picture a girl who stays out in the side yard with a ball on her foot until she’s called in for dinner.
… who gets picked first by the boys in a neighborhood basketball game, that boy is often her brother.
… who loves to hear ‘I want the girl on my team’
... who hates bullies and sits with the loners at lunch and shares her mom’s turkey sandwiches with them
… who is embarrassed by the duct tape on her mom’s minivan, but is proud of her family’s humility.
...who gets asked to the school dance only to learn during the first slow-song that she served as the “friend decoy date”, not the pretty, romantic one.
… who blasts Rascal Flatts’ country music before heading off to school with unbrushed hair.
… who wears umbro shorts with unshaved legs and a sweatshirt with a hood on to school every day.
… who loves Philly soft pretzels and ginger ale and trades them for extras at Thursday night Hebrew School.
…. who eats coffee ice cream after school with Full House on in the background, and her textbook open next to her in case mom walks in.
… who wasn’t allowed to watch the Titanic because it was too tragic.
… who rode the school bus and sat in the front seat, chatting with the bus driver, Larry Brothers, about whether or not the Eagles would ever win the Superbowl.
… who wins middle school class president but wishes she was pretty and popular instead.
That girl is me. And that girl gave birth to her own baby girl, who died four years ago today. She was two years, four months and sixteen days old. Not even close to thirteen years old. Her name is Havi.
And so, today, like on so many other days, I try to picture who she’d become. But I can’t. It hurts too much. So instead, I share this with you. This incredible story from one of our movement communities, so you experience the power and the strength of her essence that lives on in so many beautiful and broken-hearted people. This story is from E-Motion’s Movement Community in Boston, MA. Please share with anyone who might benefit from joining a movement community in their neighborhood.
We arrive in our running gear. It’s wintertime in Boston so everyone is bundled—base layers, tights, gloves, hats. Sixteen of us, every Sunday morning.
Some of us are more experienced than others. Pace doesn’t matter. Some of us are in our sixties, some in our thirties. Age doesn’t matter. Some of us have been grieving for forty years, some less than a year. Time doesn’t matter.
We gather in a circle surrounding tables displaying Nike running merchandise. We roost at a running store: Heartbreak Hill Running Company on Commonwealth Avenue in Newton, MA (at “mile 21” of the Boston Marathon). Dan Fitzgerald, the owner and co-founder of Heartbreak, said “yes” to us. The Center for Healing and Justice through Sport did, too. Not everyone does.
We start every gathering with our rituals. Sukie Miller calls rituals the “antidote to helplessness.” And they are because they anchor us in “right-sized” experiences that let us face what we don’t want to see, or what we fear we won’t be able to see. They are right-sized in that they invite us to enter into a holy space in a controlled and predictable way. Performing a ritual gently nudges into consciousness what we’ve buried in our subconscious. And we know that what molders in our subconscious wreaks havoc on our immune system. So, ritual, whether public or private, offers an entrée to self-healing. Ritual pre-dates language. We can count on it.
We intentionally don’t stay in our circle for a long time. And we don’t sit. We stand and we sway.
And circle, drawing from ancient ritual tradition, is powerful because it meets our “intimacy-barrier” needs; we are close but not uncomfortable. We stand shoulder to shoulder, parallel to those physically next to us; and when we look into the eyes of another, that person is far enough away to temper any self-consciousness.
We continue in circle and we breathe. We take three deep breaths: a deep inhale through the nose, with an extra “sip” at the top; and then a big exhale through the mouth. These breaths effectively remove excess carbon dioxide that builds up when we take shallow breaths, or under-breathe, a common response to feeling overwhelmed, paralyzed, or out of place.
We then name ourselves and our people. The people we name have died.
“Maria, Jairam’s Mom.”
“Jairam,” the group echoes back.
“Diane, Peter’s Sister.”
“Peter,” the group proclaims.
“Jesse,” Ken’s Son.”
“Ken,” the group exclaims.
We aren’t quiet; our responses are emphatic and passionate. We name our people so we can move them into the foreground of our moment and into community with others. They are palpably with us, and we become more complete with the power of that integration. People who have died have a cellular relationship with us; they are part of us. When we name them, we reaffirm our identity and heighten our self-awareness. Self-awareness leads to self-trust, and that is life-affirming.
One of our community members, a bereaved mom whose son Felix died at birth, shared with me: “I never hear his name. No one ever calls me Felix’s mom. And damn it feels good.”
After we sway and name, one person, who has already signed up weeks in advance (predictability) shares a story. And then we run. Adding running to community is one application of the organic E-Motion model because movement of all kinds is a biological necessity, like food, water, and sleep.
Every run includes a quiet mile. This is an opportunity for us to turn off music, podcast, or conversation and move in quiet. Quiet can be scary for grieving people, so we do it in motion to benefit from its regulating effects.
Diane, Peter’s sister, shared what came to her on our quiet mile. “I haven’t played the piano in forty years. I stopped when Peter died. It was too painful. But on this run, I heard a song. It came to me. “You’re once, twice, three times a lady…” It was the song I used to play with Peter on my lap when we were kids. I heard it so clearly. When I got home, I walked downstairs, opened the piano bench in my basement, and took out the piece of sheet music that was on top of the pile. I played it again. I played piano for the first time since he died. Forty years ago. I recorded it for you all.”
These are moments of ‘moral beauty,’ moments when we are in community with people whose courage, compassion, vulnerability and kindness astounds. We also bear witness to mystical awe as we share stories of life and death. Each of those, moral beauty and mystical awe, according to Dacher Keltner’s research, are two of our greatest sources of awe. And awe, as Keltner puts it, is the number one contributor to happiness. No wonder we leave our gatherings with a bounce in our step.
Helping us move through life with the most painful personal narratives, E-motion draws from both ancient traditions and current bereavement-science, lived experience, and neurophysiology. It enables us to face and feel what is real—both the lowest lows and the highest highs--to inhabit the full sweep of human emotion.
We envision bringing Movement Communities to neighborhoods everywhere, so no one grieves alone. Are you interested in joining a Movement Community or getting trained to bring one to your hometown? Click the button below to explore our locations and learn more about our movement-based grief groups.