I wish I could take credit for the “March Sadness” title, but I actually borrowed it from this amazing essay contest* I learned about while at AWP.

March, like most months at this point in my life, includes a death anniversary. My beloved cousin Eileen died on March 19. This is also the death anniversary of my good friend’s father. So one date, two sadnesses. Also, March 17 is the birthday of my friend A.’s sister, who died last year. Or is it two years now? Time marches on.

So I think of my loved ones this month and worry about them. I hope that they are acknowledging their grief and dealing with it in healthy ways. I think about it because I know that I didn’t always deal with it in healthy ways.

In the years since my brother William died in 1990 and my sister Julia died in 1997, the calendar was like a minefield. Depending on my state of mind, I either purposefully threw myself on the grenade in order to explode in my grief. Or I jumped over it and pretended that date didn’t affect me. Neither option was healthy. Especially if I wanted to, I could make every month sad.

June - The month Julia died

July - Julia’s birthday month

August - The month William died

September - William’s birthday month

October - The month Julia intentionally overdosed, sending her into a coma

November and December - THE HOLIDAYS - UGH

And so on.

Here’s one way I mourned Julia’s death. In my twenties, while living in NYC, I would lock myself in my apartment bathroom, don my yellow Sony Walkman, cue up Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work,” drink large quantities of whatever I had on hand, smoke butts, and stare at myself in the mirror and bawl.

I should be crying, but I just can’t let it show
I should be hoping, but I can’t stop thinking
Of all the things I should’ve said
That I never said
All the things we should’ve done
That we never did
All the things I should’ve given
But I didn’t
Oh, darling, make it go
Make it go away

Geez, that song. It makes me tear up Every.Single.Time. Maybe listening to a sad song (minus the copious amounts of alcohol) isn’t a bad way to grieve? At least it let me tap into something I wasn’t allowing myself to feel in my day-to-day life.

For that answer and more about how to handle death anniversaries, let’s turn to Elizabeth’s Substack’s resident grief therapist, Katie Morgan.

Katie Morgan is a counselor, writer, and founder of The Grief Ritual, a space for people walking with grief of all kinds: death-related, identity-changing, loss of role or rhythm, and life that no longer looks the way it once did.

Liz: Since I brought it up, what do you think about me listening to sad songs to tap into grief? Healthy or harmful?

Katie: I think that using art, of any modality, can be a wonderfully accessible way to connect with those emotions that linger just below the surface. It can be a difficult thing to “simply” access the capacity for emotional vulnerability on demand! Our senses (and music, in this case) are a way to bypass our incredible psychological defenses, if you will, and connect right to the amygdala (emotional center!).

Something I also love about songs, in particular, is that they have natural boundaries (start and end); in this way, your nervous system can take comfort in knowing that the space where emotions may flow more freely will not last more than a few minutes. This can actually increase the capacity to tolerate the discomfort of those griefy feelings!

Liz: I talk about the calendar feeling like a minefield — some months I’d throw myself on the grenade, other months I’d pretend the date didn’t exist. Is there actually a “right” way to mark a death anniversary

Katie: What a poignant description of what this experience can be like for you, Liz. I have good news: there is no single right way to approach dates, months, or seasons of increased grief. There are, perhaps, methods of acknowledging and coping that are more aligned with our overall (or holistic) health than others, AND (I’m a big fan of ‘AND’) there is such wisdom even in the coping we gravitate towards that may not serve us most. It can tell us a lot about what protective responses the nervous system is most relying on to keep us safe, and we can then attune to other ways to provide an assist to this work. Here’s an example: if someone finds that staying chronically busy around death dates or birth dates feels necessary, and they experience suffering because of the ways this is adding to overall fatigue, we (therapy, as one modality) can practice other more supportive ways to help their system complete the “flight” response.

Liz: People always say it gets easier with time, and honestly, sometimes it does, but sometimes year twenty hits harder than year two. What’s actually happening when an anniversary ambushes you after you thought you’d made peace with it?

Katie: Oh, grief is SO strange in this way, isn’t it? I have experienced this phenomenon myself, so I’m feeling this one in my bones. To this, I would offer that “easier” is relative, but what I can say with certainty is that grief shifts with time. The difficulty with this is that even though there will be easier seasons of grief, as shifting is part of our human experience, we can rely on there being some iteration of less-easier moments, days, or seasons again, at some point too.

I equate making peace with a loss, to sound more like “I have learned to integrate this loss into the ways I know how to go on with normal (what a complex word!) life” and less with “I have completed these feelings.” Not to harp on the nervous system (but that IS kinda my jam), but since it helps to protect us in the trauma of losing a loved one (yes, even deaths that do not meet a clinical definition of a traumatic death, is still trauma for the people who remain), it tends to slowly reveal layers of complexity over time, rather than totally flooding us with processing all at once. So, this means processing, in some ways, can just keep keeping-on. I am grateful for this, AND, feel the disillusionment when there is a grief ambush!

Thank you, Katie, for answering my questions. Please subscribe to Katie’s Substack, The Grief Ritual: Where Grief Is Met, Not Managed, “a space for slow thinking about loss...where ritual means staying, listening, and learning how not to abandon ourselves.”

* March Xness is an annual, literary, and musical tournament that functions as a March Madness-style bracket for music fans and writers, operating on the Substack platform and at marchxness.com

Disclaimer: To err is human. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors. I employ Grammarly, but mistakes happen. In this world of AI, they're my way of keeping things delightfully human.