🗣️ Keening: the art of grieving in community

Happy holidays, creator! Our last newsletter of 2025 is a little different — I took December off after a series of emergencies, including a death in the family. Today, I’m sharing how grief showed up in my life this season and how self-expression helped me muddle through in the form of an ancient Irish “keening” ceremony.

Those of you who follow me on social media may know that our family suffered a shocking loss earlier this month.

My cousin, Melvin “Trace” Lothridge, passed away suddenly at 41 following a drug overdose, leaving behind his mama, fiancee, and 4 children.

Y’all may also know I live in Ireland, an ocean away from my family back home in South Carolina. The homesickness, by itself, is rough on a normal day. (And let’s be real, “normal” days were hard to come by in 2025, a year that’s seen countless people, myself included, prohibited from returning home if we dare to speak out against fascism in public.)

While I wasn’t close with Trace in recent years, his grandmother was my Aunt Becky — who was like my mama, my aunt, and my best friend all in one. Aunt Becky’s death 2 years ago remains one of the biggest losses I’ve ever endured.

Since 2018, grief has dominated my life. Several of my loved ones have died, struggled with life-threatening addictions, or declined so much, so agonizingly slowly, that they’ve become a shell of their former selves.

To say these tragedies have “gotten in the way” of my life, my dreams, and my goals (Joyful Creators Club very much included) would be an understatement.

I don’t have to tell you how hard that is, because you’ve been through it in your own life, with your own people.

We humans so often treat our grief and spiritual practices as a solo journey — something we “deal with” in private, individually, on top of everything else, because no one else could ever truly help us or understand what we’re going through. And then we beat ourselves up for not grieving “appropriately”, or not healing “fast enough”.

As is the case for so many modern ways of living that go against our human nature, we can look to ancient creative traditions for holistic paths to healing. One of those traditions is “keening”, or expressing grief through sound in community.

I attended a keening ceremony at a local art gallery here in Ireland shortly after Trace’s death. Read on to learn more about the history of this ancient practice and how my experience with it changed my life.

“A vocal lament for the dead”, keening is a tradition in ancient Celtic Ireland and Scotland that involves expressing grief through sound.

Led by at least one “keening woman”, these ceremonies historically involved sean-nós songs performed acapella in the Irish language. Mourners would join in with their own cries and movements.

Once a standard part of Irish funerals, keening was later outlawed by the Catholic Church.

Creative scholars like Oonagh O’Sullivan, who led the ceremony I attended, are reviving and expanding the practice, making it more accessible to the general public.

Unlike so much of modern society, keening allows us to embrace the primal parts of ourselves.

It gives us a safe space to let out that scream we’ve dammed up inside, as off-key and wince-inducing as it may sound to the trained ear. To exist, wholly and imperfectly, in our vulnerable, grieving state. To hold, and be held. To air out whatever unfinished business we might have with the dead.

I wept so much, my eyes were sore for days after. I wrapped myself in scarves and blankets and swayed as one of the musicians showered me with gentle drum beats.

For the full 6 hours, I felt every mile of that ocean that separates me from my roots — every inch of its depth, its darkness, its crushing weight.

What a blessing and privilege it was to have that space, that freedom. What a relief it was to let it all out, in a world that stigmatizes most forms of emotional expression. What an act of resistance it was to revive an ancient spiritual practice extinguished by the endlessly problematic Catholic Church.

I encourage you to carve out your own spaces to heal, mourn, and grieve in community. The ceremony I attended with ~20 other souls is all thanks to “just 1 woman” (a dear friend of mine named Nicola Spendlove) using her influence to create the spaces that humanity so desperately needs.

So whether you take yourself down to the nearest body of water to sing a quiet song or let out a loud wail, or you consult your local officials about hosting a creative workshop, I hope you can find some inspiration in our family’s story and experience.

If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, please seek support from local community groups. Churches, shelters, and rehabilitation facilities have saved the life of more than one person I love and hold dear, and they can help you and yours, too.

You’re always welcome to reach out to me for support, guidance, or simply a listening ear. Some of us creatives might be business owners, but we’re always humans first.

Until next year, and with all my love,

Mel
Founder, Joyful Creators Club

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