For Grief — Brook Mitchell Portfolio

For Grief September 2024 - Website
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In John O'Donohue's poem For Grief, he conveys the disorienting and transformative nature of loss, portraying grief as both a deeply personal experience and a journey toward learning to live with the sorrow it brings. Communicating this poem through a website allows for participants to experience these feelings first hand as they navigate through a series of mazes as a young girl. Grief can sometimes lead you back to the vulnerability of childhood represented by the character, and the evolution throughout the poem and mazes shows that through loss we still hold on to the people we love.The mazes expand on feeling lost after losing a loved one, as the character is both physically and emotionally finding her way through loss. The addition of notes that become puzzle pieces signifies finding peace in the experience of loss, and as a resolution when the user arranges them in the end.

For GriefJohn O’Donohue

When you lose someone you love,

Your life becomes strange,

The ground beneath you becomes fragile,

Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;

And some dead echo drags your voice down

Where words have no confidence

Your heart has grown heavy with loss;

And though this loss has wounded others too,

No one knows what has been taken from you

When the silence of absence deepens.

Flickers of guilt kindle regret

For all that was left unsaid or undone.

There are days when you wake up happy;

Again inside the fullness of life,

Until the moment breaks

And you are thrown back

Onto the black tide of loss.

Days when you have your heart back,

You are able to function well

Until in the middle of work or encounter,

Suddenly with no warning,

You are ambushed by grief.

It becomes hard to trust yourself.

All you can depend on now is that

Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.

More than you, it knows its way

And will find the right time

To pull and pull the rope of grief

Until that coiled hill of tears

Has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance

With the invisible form of your departed;

And when the work of grief is done,

The wound of loss will heal

And you will have learned

To wean your eyes

From that gap in the air

And be able to enter the hearth

In your soul where your loved one

Has awaited your return

All the time.

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