In her poem Salt I, Qolati (Black Somali co-researcher, age 27) writes, “every september a ritual for you,” where she invites the reader to “press your palm into the waning tide, let the salt sting the papercuts and kiss the torn skin at your nails.” water, in this invocation, becomes a site of intimate ritual, a place where pain is tended to. Reed (Indigenous & queer, age 30) reinforced this understanding in her interview: “Tears are medicine” too. These relationships between water and grief were especially visible in Session 2 of the Good Grief program, during a check-in on memories of rain. Melanin Monroe (Black co-researcher, age 28) shared, “I've cried a lot by water, but as a kid, I was always by it during significant moments.” Her story opened space for others to speak about the comfort and emotional resonance of rain. Ivy (Black co-researcher, age 28) reflected on the day she learned she was moving from London to Penticton, a memory described earlier in this chapter. She recalled that it rained through the night, and she cried alongside it, feeling as though her grief was mirrored in the sky’s downpour. She described, “Rain just makes me wanna cry. I love it. It's like the sky's crying.” 

Water, in all its forms, becomes both witness and ceremony, a relational force that receives grief, carries it, and helps it move. I also hear the voice of water in Simpson’s Theory of Water (2025), where she describes Nibi, as understood within Nishnaabeg thought, as “the one that cleans the world. The one that does the unglamorous, underappreciated, unseen labour of washing and tidying up, the work that no one else will do” (p. 22). Simpson reminds us that water is sacred in ways that exceed comprehension, doing the everyday work of care, cleansing, and renewal.

Simpson, L. B. (2025). Theory of water: Nishnaabe maps to the times ahead. Haymarket Books.

See all the spaces where bodies of water hold grief.