What I Learned About Grief from The Odyssey

Grief has a way of slipping into the everyday, not as a problem to solve, but as a thread you keep discovering in your own hands. I watched the movie Odyssey with a fairly neutral reaction, yet one thing stayed with me: how clearly it portrays mourning as something communal, honest, and deeply human. That portrayal opens a fresh way to talk about bereavement, spiritual care, and what it means to carry love after loss. 

We walk through The Odyssey’s grief scenes with care: Odysseus weeping as his past is sung back to him, Penelope’s decades of waiting as a form of loyalty and resistance, and Telemachus living inside ambiguous loss without the certainty of a body or an ending. Along the way, we notice how the epic treats storytelling, meals, hospitality, and shared witnessing as part of survival. The takeaway is simple but countercultural: isolated grief can be more dangerous than shared grief, and community can help us bear what we cannot fix. 

Then we pull on the episode’s central image, weaving. Penelope’s shroud becomes a living metaphor for how mourning often works, making and unmaking, hoping and doubting, trying to shape meaning without rushing into false closure. That thread leads to a parallel story from 2 Samuel 21, where Rizpah keeps vigil in sackcloth for months, refusing to look away. 

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ELECTRONIC BOOKS:  1000 IMAGES OF JESUS  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F2SFH4Z6

Music and sound effects today by:   via Pixabay

Transcript

Welcome To Solace

Candee 0:37

Welcome to Solace, Soul + Grief. I'm glad you're here. My name is Candee Lucas. I'm a Jesuit trained chaplain and spiritual director. We established this ministry in hopes of reaching out to those who are grieving, whether it be new fresh grief or if you've been on this trail for quite some time. We've created a catalog of various topics that may be of interest to you at various times along the trail. So please take a look. After listening to this episode, remember you're always welcome in our circle of healing, love, and support.

Grief In The Odyssey

Candee 1:26

It seems like everyone has an opinion about the movie Odyssey these days. I sat through it and my reaction was rather neutral. I neither liked it nor disliked it. But what I did hone in on is the depiction of grief in the story. And so I want to talk a little bit about that. Because it it illustrates another way in to the subject, and also talks about how universal it is and what a universal theme it is. So here are my thoughts on the Odyssey. The Odyssey treats grief as something almost woven into the fabric of the world, constant, communal, and deeply tied to memory and storytelling. Characters in the Odyssey grie openly and extensively. Weeping is not shameful but expected, even honorable. Odysseus himself weeps multiple times throughout the poem, and a few times in the movie. Notably when the bard Demodocus sings about the Trojan War, hearing his own past turned into song, brings Odysseus to tears, and Homer treats this not as a weakness, but as a natural human response to having survived immense loss and guilt. Penelope's mourning, for her presumably lost husband, spans the entire twenty years of his absence. Her grief isn't just sadness, it becomes a form of resistance and loyalty, expressed through her weaving and unweaving of Laertes' shroud, her tears at night, and her refusal to fully accept that Odysseus is dead despite immense social pressure to remarry. Her grief is inseparable from hope. She mourns without fully surrendering to the idea that mourning should end in acceptance of loss. In Book 11, Odysseus travels to the underworld and encounters the shades of his mother, his old comrades, and the great warriors of the Trojan War, including Achilles. This scene in the movie is one of the most moving, as the dead move through a fog and are represented by people who look like them but not quite. People who are shadows of themselves, yet not quite so. This scene is one of the most direct meditations on grief and mortality in the poem and in the movie. Achilles Shade famously says that he'd rather be a poor laborer alive on earth than a king among the dead, which reframes his glory and heroism against the backdrop of grief for one's own mortality. Odysseus' grief here is also personal. Seeing his mother's shade and learning of her death from longing for him is one of the poem's most quietly devastating moments. Telemachus experiences a different kind of grief, not for someone confirmed dead, but for the unresolved, ambiguous loss of a father he barely remembers. This grief without a body, not knowing if Odysseus is alive or dead, is treated as its own distinct and painful category, tangled up with his anger at the suitors and his anxiety about his own identity and coming of age. Throughout the poem, grief is processed through storytelling and song, sharing one's losses aloud, being cared for and fed by hosts, and having one's suffering witnessed by others all are treated as a crucial part of healing, at least lessons in bearing grief. The poem suggests that isolated grief is more dangerous than shared grief. Community and ritual, feasting songs and hospitality are vehicles through which some people survive loss. Overall, the Odyssey treats grief less as something to overcome, in a modern therapeutic sense, and more as something woven permanently into a heroic life, or as I would say, into any life, and separable from love, memory, and the passage of time, perhaps science and meaning, and evolution as a people has brought us full circle. Even triumphant returns, like Odysseus's, are shadowed by decades of loss that can never be fully undone, just endured and eventually folded into story.

The Weaving Thread Of Loss

Candee 6:57

It's worth pulling on the thread, being woven. Because the Odyssey actually gives us a very literal thread to follow. Weaving isn't just a metaphor, it's one of the poem's central devices. Penelope's actual weaving, working on Laerte's burial shroud by day, then secretly unraveling it by night to stall the suitors, is the most direct literalization of the idea. She is quite literally making and unmaking the same fabric for years, which mirrors her psychological state, that she can't move forward into acceptance, finishing the shroud and remarrying, and she can't fully hold on to the past either. Odysseus never quite comes back, and she has no proof that he's alive or on his way to her. Her grief exists in that suspended cyclical motion, creating and dissolving, hoping and doubting over and over. The shroud is grief made into a physical object she can work with her hands, but never resolve. In Greek thought more broadly, and echoed in the Odyssey, the issue of spinning and weaving is tied to fate. The fates are imagined as spinning the thread of a person's life and cutting it at death. So when grief and loss show up throughout the poem, they're often implicitly tied to the same imagery. A life is a thread, and mourning is what happens when a thread is cut short, or when you're waiting to see whether a thread will be cut at all. As with Telemachus not knowing if his father's thread has already ended. There's also a linguistic layer here. The poem itself is oral poetry, and Homeric bards were sometimes described in ways that evoke stitching together or weaving a song from traditional material, moving from one episode to another the way a mover moves a shuttle back and forth. So when Odysseus weeps listening to Demodocus' song about Troy, there's a kind of double weave happening, his own past being rewoven into art in front of him, becoming something he has to sit with rather than to control. Put together, this is why the phrase woven into life, rather than something more static like attached to or part of, is used. Grief in the Odyssey isn't a wound that closes or a chapter that ends. It's threaded through the ongoing fabric of the characters' identities, their households, their sense of time passing. Penelope doesn't stop grieving so much as she keeps weaving that grief into daily existence. Right alongside hope, patience, and endurance, inseparable strands in the same cloth, rather than something finished and set aside.

Rizpah And A Long Vigil

Candee 10:28

A striking parallel to Homer's epic is Rispah in 2 Samuel 21, a lesser known story, but one that mirrors the weaving image. Rispah was a concubine of King Saul. After Saul's death during a famine, King David hands over seven of Saul's descendants, including two of Rizpah's own sons, to be executed as a way of atoning for Saul's earlier violence against the Gebanites. Their bodies are left exposed on a hill, unburied, which in that culture was a profound dishonor. Burial mattered enormously, and an unburied body was thought to leave the dead without rest. Rizpah takes sack cloth, coarse woven cloth of traditional garment of mourning, and spreads it out for herself on a rock besides the bodies, and then she simply stays there, from the beginning of the harvest until the rains finally came months later. She keeps vigil day and night, driving off birds of prey by day and wild animals at night, refusing to let anything touch her son's bodies or the bodies of the other men killed alongside them. It's a quieter, harsher story than Penelope's, but the shape is remarkably similar. A woman holding open an unbearable in between, using cloth and time and refusal to let go as the very substance of her mourning, until grief itself becomes an act powerful enough to change the world around her.

A Poem On Not Letting Go

Candee 12:31

Because to finish it is to let you go. I take the thread of you and pull it through the loom of ordinary hours. Morning tea, the creak of stairs, the way the porch light still remembers to click on at dusk. By day I work you into something whole, a shape, a story, something I could almost finish. By night I find my fingers undoing every row, because to finish it is to let you go, and I am not yet done, not being done with you. So the pattern never closes, it only deepens, thread over thread, grief and love pulled taut on the same quiet frame, until I can no longer tell which strand is holding up the other. Only that the weaving is how I keep you close enough to touch, far enough to bear. Because to finish it is to let you go, and I am not yet done, not being done with you.

Closing And Where To Listen

Candee 13:53

That concludes another episode. You can find us on Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Spotify. A new episode drops every Friday morning. Stay gentle with yourselves this week. Be gentle with others. And always travel with God at your side.