Her daughter had terminal cancer. “I’m grieving,” she said. Then she said, “I’m also savoring.”

There are a lot of conversations about grief and loss lately. The child losing her struggle with mental illness; the limp suddenly revealed as bone cancer; the partner just diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. These are personal places of powerlessness and sorrow: if you add in Canada’s abandonment of climate goals, the blatant venality of the US administration, and the advent of trillionaires, well, that’s a lot of mess. There’s a lot of grief.

One way many of us deal with loss is to substitute anger for our grief. When hard things happen, we might choose to be mad at ourselves—“You idiot, why didn’t you go to the doctor?”—or enraged by the system—“There’s no mental health support in rural communities!”—or disgusted with life in general—“We’ve passed the tipping point, so to hell with everything.”

Anger is a great alternative to grief, at least for a while. It makes me feel like I’m in charge. It chases away that sense of powerlessness I feel when someone or something is lost, gone, destroyed. To rage against the machine feels productive; but honestly, I’m just trying to assert a little power. I’m just trying to avoid that dark hole I find in my chest when I let sorrow in.

I’ve heard this move, from grief to anger, characterized as “grief to grievance.” What the speaker implied was that if we don’t figure out how to grieve—to actually recognize what we’re losing—we will instead end up with a grudge. 

Let me be clear that grief can definitely inspire us to take action. Many situations really do call for us to change systems, to hold people to account. But if the action comes before we’ve become well-acquainted with our grief, then we’re just spewing. Saying “f….you” repeatedly doesn’t change systems: it hardens them.

Meanwhile, we need to find “savor.” 

The word savor implies time. It involves taste. It invokes pleasure. It invites presence.

When that woman said she was “savoring”—savoring time with her dying daughter—I understood that to mean that she was paying attention to life. She was noticing how lovely it was to be together, with no agenda. She was basking in her daughter’s presence and appreciating her very being.

I find that this same kind of savoring helps when I feel hopeless about our entangled world. Savoring revitalizes my soul: I stand at the cliff’s edge and listen to the creek roar, watch the air currents dance through cedars, taste snowflakes on my tongue, smell the cold north wind. I am restored and returned to sanity—i.e., a clear sense of what’s important.

Savoring gives me strength to live through the seemingly wretched future with integrity. If I can touch and recognize what is important, then that truth will ground my actions and responses to the mess. I can accept that while I’m not in control, I do have a part to play.

In this world of unprincipled wealth, unconscionable suffering, and indescribable beauty, I’m choosing to grieve AND savor.