Contributor’s Marginalia: Chelsea Woodard responding to Callie Siskel’s “Mourner’s Logic”

Callie Siskel’s “Mourner’s Logic” describes so accurately and beautifully the way that grief can seem removed and almost noble when one is a child. For me personally, it recalled the ways that the solemnity of synagogues and churches during the rituals surrounding the deaths of grandparents and older loved ones felt grown-up in a way I didn’t fully understand at the time but longed to. Now, as an adult who has experienced acute losses, Siskel’s contrast of her speaker’s changed understanding of death from childhood to adulthood really resonated with me. I re-listened to a version of the “Avinu Malkeinu” prayer before drawing the image below and was transported into the otherworldliness of ceremony. I imagined the speaker’s past and present selves being joined in the space of the synagogue, reconciled, and perhaps finally understanding each other. The sword of grief that “knights the living” lies below them in the frame––one of many ornaments decorating the interior scene. I was thinking about how grief­––itself such a pure expression of love––can be beautiful when observed from the outside.