Grief Rituals (Sam Richard, 2022)

I read most of Sam Richard’s collection Grief Rituals in a hospital room and then hospice, waiting for my mom to die. I didn’t seek it out for the occasion—it was the only book I had on my phone. My sisters and I sat together for a week, huddled on our phones, not saying much. (We never say much.) I split my screen time between Tetris (I completed 400 levels) and Sam’s book. We’d go out to the parking lot to smoke in shifts, always leaving one person to sit in the room, listening to our mother struggle to breathe. I finished the book the night she died. Sobbing on a rapidly deflating air mattress in my older sister’s basement, I needed to finish it. I needed to finish the ritual.

Jonathan Janz tweeted recently that writers mean so much to us because their books are there when we need them. He mentioned reading Brian Keene the night his grandmother died, and Stephen King after he almost died in a car accident. Sam’s book was there for me when I needed it—a great, warm bear hug that said it understood the un-understandable thing that I was going through. 

Don’t get me wrong: this is not a comforting book by most measures. It’s by turns disgusting, thrilling, terrifying, and anxiety-inducing. It’s also frequently beautiful, hilarious, and inspiring. Richard wrote it to process the grief he felt (and will feel for the rest of his life) after the death of his wife. Each story thus deals with grief, although they’re not monotonous—I was constantly amazed by how different the stories were, using comedy, surrealism, dread, and body horror in exciting combinations. But the grief is always there, even in a gonzo “killer robots unleashed at the mall” story like “Shopping Maul.”

Standouts included “Black Teeth,” which plays on the utter discomfort of making small talk at a funeral; “Reborn of Ash,” about a radical group therapy method; and the absurdist masterpiece “We Have Always Lived in the Jiffy-Lube.” But there’s not a weak story in the book. I don’t usually read ebooks, but I’m glad I had this one electronically, because I would have dog-eared the shit out of a paperback. Richard’s prose is frequently gorgeous, and I used the highlight function a lot, marking passages that were beautiful or insightful (or, quite often, both). 

Through it all is the grief. I would never read a nonfiction book about grieving (that’s not a boast, but an admission of deficiency), but Grief Rituals helped me through the hardest thing I’ve ever been through. I think about it often, like when I’m having a good day and suddenly the realization that my mom is gone hits me like some new affront—and Richard is there with this passage in “Strømtatt”: “No one thinks about the numbness, the guilt, the resentment, the anger, or the ugliness deep in your soul that robs you of the first moment of joy you’ve felt since your loved one died.” Or when I listen to my mom’s last voicemail because I’m afraid I’ll forget the sound of her voice, and Richard is there with this passage in “We Have Always Lived in the Jiffy-Lube”: “She’s like the ghost of a dream, or the shadow of a memory. I have to fight for every scrap I have; I have to hold onto it as tightly as I can. She never fully forms anymore.” A bear hug, a comforting voice telling you that whatever crazy, horrible, despairing thing you’re feeling is the correct feeling, because there is no correct feeling.

This isn’t really a review, at least not one that many people will find helpful. But some people will find it helpful. Grief Rituals is for both groups.