“Certified” by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths (rachelelizagriffiths.com)

In her book “Seeing the Body,” Rachel Eliza Griffiths navigates her grief over the death of her mother through a series of black-and-white photographs and searingly intimate poems.

The book’s title evokes the gut-wrenching shock of confronting death in its physical form — but while Griffiths’ poems don’t shy from the visceral presence of “the body,” she also moves us beyond that first shock and through the many intricate layers of mourning.

In fact, one of the most satisfying elements of Griffiths’ work is that it doesn’t try to fit her experience into a tidy arc or a collection of recognizable stages. Instead, like real grief, her poems contort through a kaleidoscope of sensations and emotions, intimate and pensive in one moment and reckless and expansive in the next. These transitions are dizzying but graceful, giving the reader a sense of intimacy, as if we’re trapped inside of this divine chaos with Griffiths herself.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Credit: rachelelizagriffiths.com

In her poem “Certified,” Griffiths moves deftly between the ethereal and the mundane. Drawing in from the book’s wider perspectives of loss, family, and resilience, she explores death through its more trivial details. The poem contrasts the unknowable hugeness of losing a loved one with the impersonal facts, terms, and forms that can accompany such a loss.

A piece of paper signed by a woman named Nathalie.

A simple statement of the body ceasing.

A cavity of boxes, a necessary form without breath.

We had to wait until the certificate got signed

by who & who & who to say

she would not come back.

In a sense, the poem reads like a collection of seemingly ordinary details, haphazard memories stirred up in a moment of grief. Though Griffiths has pared down her usually vivid imagery in “Certified,” her lyrical tone is still present, and the progression of details has a feeling of desperation — a grieving daughter’s attempt to hold onto her mother’s presence. Through the pieces that Griffiths strings together — her mother’s birth and death, details from her mother’s childhood, Griffiths’ own memories — we feel the way these pieces cannot replace the whole.

When I looked down there was no paper.

Just her dead face trapped under the glass

casket that I inscribed with what

I was trying to remember.

When I turned to look over my shoulder

there was no body, no mother, no,

nothing but cobwebs of words.

Griffiths’ poetry is an eloquent but candid expression of what it means to lose someone who has always been in your life — who is, in some very real sense, a part of you. “Certified” beautifully reflects our complicated relationship with what death leaves behind: It is never enough, but it gives us something to hold onto while the world reconfigures around us.