I keep religious icons in my house, and my friends sometimes ask why because they don’t see how it fits with the rest of my personality. I came to Canada as a child, fleeing the Yugoslav War. The grief I carry about displacement, about the war, feels like a half-completed archaeological dig. My icons serve as markers of that grief, and my family is an entryway into it. My aunt was struck by shrapnel in the neck, and my father refused to go to the army when all the men in the country were being called to join. I find it difficult to describe the depth of loss involved. My grief creates an atmosphere in which my thoughts and emotions drift and spiral.

Cultural bereavement seems like an ambiguous loss. A parent with dementia may be physically present but emotionally absent. After a stillbirth, a mother may feel emotionally attached to her child but physically disconnected. Moving beyond cultural grief is particularly difficult because we don’t know exactly what is lost, as nothing is completely gone. Grief is often portrayed as a response to a specific event, especially the death of a loved one, but another aspect is the adjustment. People are woven into our lives in complex ways, and we don’t always notice their importance when they’re alive. After they’re gone, we have to rearrange everything, including our schedules and our emotional worlds.

We build our lives around people and places that are not eternal, but when they disappear, we’re forced to confront the fragility of our own identity. We must reckon with how our values are connected to those people and realize how tenuous the threads are that hold us together.

But today, when someone appreciates my icons, I lightly say, “Yeah, they’re cool.” Not everyone recognizes them as markers of war, splintering, and inchoate loss. Each of us is historically formed in ways that are clumsy and fortuitous. Our task is to accept that and to become real to ourselves.