Screaming, Crying, Throwing Up (Literally)

Snot, salt, sorrow, and sacredness

Kaitlyn Kessler

Apr 18, 2025

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I haven’t taken a bath in months. If you know me, you know that’s… unheard of. Historically I take a bath nearly every day. My default setting is dying grass—desperate for water.

But, there was something about the stillness, the intimacy of it, that felt too risky—like it would invite everything I’d been avoiding. The silence, the warmth, the weightlessness… it would ask me to let go, and I wasn’t ready for that.

“If she goes under, it’s a baptism” and all.

So I stayed away, not out of logic but out of instinct. Some part of me knew:

Submerged, I would finally feel it all.

Eventually, I did go back—and everything I was avoiding came rushing to the surface. As I lowered myself into the warm water, instantly, the tears came. Not the quiet kind. Not the single, cinematic drop down the cheek. It wasn’t beautiful. I wasn’t the weepy heroine in a bathtub scene—I was feral. These were the sobs of pain, of anguish, of a grief so deep I couldn’t find the bottom of it. The wails that contorted my face, stole my breath, left my vision blurred and my chest heaving. I cried the way animals grieve—loud, guttural, and from somewhere deep beneath language.

I read once that elephants mourn their dead. They gather around the body, touch the bones with their trunks, and let out these deep, echoing rumbles—sometimes even trumpeting. It’s wild and physical and deeply reverent. They don’t grieve quietly. They grieve together. And it’s understood as sacred.

Maybe I’ve been grieving this entire time.

(hindsight’s a bitch.)

Before the bath. Before the words. Before the collapse.

There were signs I didn’t know how to read—tightness in my chest that wouldn’t leave, sleepless nights, a nervous system that never really let down. I thought I was just anxious. Thought I was overwhelmed. But looking back, it feels like my body knew before I did. Like some part of me had already begun to mourn what I couldn’t yet name.

Maybe grief doesn’t always arrive in black. Maybe it wears the clothes of awake-at-3:30am, of fog, of quiet dread. Rolling in slowly, rearranging your insides until one day, you finally notice it and it can no longer be contained.

We’re taught to be quiet, even in our grief. That there’s dignity in composure. That there’s something noble in holding it all in, keeping it neat, keeping it private. Especially for women—who are so often praised for their strength when they don’t fall apart. Who are applauded for being “so strong,” for not making anyone uncomfortable.

But the truth is, I’m not strong—not in that way. And I don’t want to be.

I don’t want to be praised for swallowing pain.

I want to scream when it hurts.

I want to sob into someone’s chest and not feel the need to apologize for it.

I want my love to be loud when it loses something.

Grief doesn’t disappear just because you refuse to let it take up space. It doesn’t dissolve in silence. It waits. It presses against the edges of your body, desperate to claw its way out. It clings to the body like smoke. And when it finally gets an opening—when you let your guard down, or step into the bath, or hear a song you weren’t prepared for—it comes rushing in, louder and fuller than ever.

When it came for me, I was held.

When it comes for me now, I am held.

Not just metaphorically. I mean truly held—in my grief, in my mess, in the ugliest cries I’ve ever cried. No one turned away—not the professionals or the personal support. No one asked me to quiet down. No one asked, why does this hurt so bad? There was something beautiful in the way they didn’t flinch. In the way they let me wail, gasping between sobs, my face wet with tears and snot and salt. They didn’t ask me to be okay. To calm down. They just stayed. They witnessed.

And that felt like love.

Those moments reminded me that this kind of grief is not new. It’s ancient. It’s older than language.

In Ireland, there were women called keeners—bean chaointe—who would wail at funerals. They weren’t trying to hold it together. They weren’t quiet. They screamed and sobbed and sang and chanted over the bodies of the dead, calling the sorrow into the open, giving it shape and sound and permission. Their grief wasn’t just emotional; it was spiritual. It was ritual.

Keening was considered a sacred role. These women were often hired to do what no one else could—to express the collective grief that others couldn’t articulate. They stood at the edge of loss and said the things no one else could bear to say. And in many ways, they didn’t just grieve for the dead—they held space for the living.

Maybe in a past life I was a keener.

There was power in that. There still is.

And I think about Mary Magdalene.

Not the sanitized version. The real one. The woman in grief—wailing, undone, reaching for the body of someone she loved. With wild hair, sunken eyes, a face twisted in anguish. She was not composed. She was not dignified. She was not palatable.

She was grieving.

And she didn’t care who saw.

I see my grief reflected in that.

Mary Magdalene was there when the others fled. She stayed. She wept. She anointed. She returned to the tomb in the early morning, heart broken wide open, and became the first witness of resurrection.

Not in spite of her grief—but through it.

Maybe the reason women are told to keep their grief small is because there’s something threatening about a woman undone. A woman who isn’t performing strength or grace, but is simply feeling—fully, unapologetically, and honestly.

The feminine has always been tethered to the wild. To water. To moon. To chaos. And when she grieves, it is not quiet. Mary Magdalene knew this. The keening women knew this. My ancestors knew this. My blood and bones know this.

But somewhere along the way, we were taught to swap our instincts for etiquette. To choose stillness over shaking. To be graceful in the unraveling.

And I think that’s a real loss.

Because the wild feminine in grief isn’t weak.

She reminds the world—and herself—that something mattered.

I don’t know any rituals around grief.

There are funerals, maybe a few days off work, a card in the mail. And then? Life carries on. I smile politely when someone says, “you’re so strong,” as if strength should be the goal. As if silence is synonymous with healing.

Grief hasn’t made me wiser. But it has started to make me more aware.

More tender. More attuned to the undercurrents in everything.

It’s shifting how I see time, inviting in even more presence.

I ask:

Did I feel the truth today?

Did I honor what hurts?

Did I let myself be a little more real?

Maybe that’s my ritual.

Grief has begun to strip me of my prettiness. My polish. My performance.

And what’s left is something wilder, softer, stronger.

And while I still wish for what was, I can’t go back to who I was before.

Not because I enjoy this pain—but because something in me has been revealed.