Guest Essay: A Sunday morning reflection: When words carry grief

Former congressional candidate Aaron Woolf now makes Elizabethtown his home.

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By Aaron Woolf

This morning I joined an informal annual ritual in Elizabethtown — the gathering of friends and neighbors to take stock of, and then pitch in on cleanup after the Otis Mountain Getdown, an almost indescribable, multi-day, multi-stage, multi-genre festival of music, art and bicycles, held on an old ski hill just south of town.

The event and the setting merit far more words than I can assemble here now, but today I’ll just speak briefly of the aftermath and the thoughts it provoked in me.

Something as simple as a cleanup can lead to reflection about so many things in life - and death.

After coffee with friends, I grabbed a garbage bag and gloves and headed for the periphery of the family camping area. The sun was bright but the light and air felt more fall than summer, and a breeze bent the grasses browned by August dryness and the stampedes of the hours before. Among the half-collapsed tents, the echoes of music still hanging in the trees, and a kind of sweet impermanence to it all, I thought of the psalm: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.”

The late Rev. Peter Gomes, longtime minister at Harvard’s Memorial Church, once called the Book of Psalms the most secular part of the Bible — a kind of “been there / done that” compendium of human emotions. Everything from despair to exaltation can be found within these songs, and the effect is that whatever it is you feel, there is a psalm that assures you someone else has felt it too. In the sharing of these feelings, there is comfort. And there is perhaps no moment when that recognition matters more than in the loneliness of grief.

Two recent essays in this newsletter addressed grief in strikingly different ways — but each carried that psalm-like quality of using words as a conduit to reach out and dissipate, at least in part, the solitary experience of loss.

The first was Ken Tingley's eulogy for his lifelong friend, told through decades of shared jokes, rituals, and absurd adventures. The second was Will Doolittle's dispatch from the weary trenches of Alzheimer’s caregiving, its details sharp with frustration, tenderness, and fatigue.

On the surface, these essays could not be more different — one written in the aftermath of death, the other in the middle of an ongoing decline. Yet both are bound by the same impulse: to use words as a conduit for grief. Words that cannot cure or explain, yet make sorrow bearable by giving it shape, by offering it to others to witness, to carry in part with the writer.

In Ken's eulogy, words preserve. They restore Craig to life in the imagination of the reader: two teenage boys fumbling over a Friendly’s restaurant bill, a skinny Santa in Queensbury, a driveway luau in February snow. Ken admits he cannot fully describe his friend, yet persists. That persistence is itself the tribute: each anecdote is a vessel, carrying memory forward, making absence visible. Humor is woven into loss — not to deflect grief but to lighten it, to remind us that a life is best remembered whole, in its absurdities as much as in its triumphs.

In Will’s essay, words process. The writing holds the immediacy of anger and tenderness in the same frame: a Betty Crocker apple pie, shoved to the floor; glass shards swept and vacuumed; the vexation of shouting at a spouse already slipping away; then the fragile reprieve of coffee and doughnuts the next day. Here the function of language is not to preserve a finished story but to endure an unfinished one. Words keep the caregiver moving, carrying grief through the grinding attrition of Alzheimer’s. They name what is otherwise chaotic, they offer temporary scaffolding for a collapsing world.

Together, the two essays reveal a truth that feels both obvious and astonishing: grief makes us storytellers. Words are both insufficient and necessary. No sentence can equal the enormity of loss, yet silence would be unbearable.

Isak Dinesen said, “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”Perhaps story does not erase pain, but it disperses it — offering it into the open where others can witness, where the burden becomes, if not lighter, at least shared.

Loss is individual, but attending to it collectively is a long tradition that has deep value. Neither this eulogy nor this caretaker’s lament are private diaries; they are public offerings. By putting grief into words, Ken and Will each transform isolation into solidarity. Their stories remind us that suffering belongs to all of us, that mourning is not only an inward act but also a communal one. The Psalmist’s grass still withers, the flower still fades. Words cannot stop the vanishing. But they can give loss a form, a voice, a place to rest.

The fact that these two pieces were written by lifelong journalists seems especially notable. For decades they employed language as a professional instrument — to inform, to clarify, to strip away bias in service of the public record.

Now, in retirement, the same words are turned inward and offered outward again, not as reportage but as witness. No less faithful, no less true, but more vulnerable. These words don’t track the world’s events so much as hold the contours of their own grief. In that shift we are reminded: words are not only how we stay informed, they are how we stay human.

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Aaron Woolf is a filmmaker and community developer based in Elizabethtown, New York. Best known for directing the Peabody Award–winning documentary King Corn, he has also been deeply involved in local projects that strengthen Adirondack communities. His work includes reopening the historic Deer’s Head Inn, serving on the town planning board, helping to found the Adirondack Community Recreation Alliance, and leading the redevelopment of Elizabethtown’s historic pharmacy building into a multi-use center promoting small businesses and community life.