Kirtana: Singing the Grief Before Silence

Mirabai sang. Her kirtanas (devotional songs) were not pretty or controlled; they were raw, ecstatic, full of longing and complaint and love. Kirtana is a communal call-and-response practice that transforms inner experience into witnessed sound. In anticipatory grief, many of us go silent—afraid to voice what we fear, worried we'll jinx it or burden others. We privatize our mourning. Mirabai's kirtana invites another way: to sing our grief, to voice it, to let it be heard and held by community. This is not about performing emotion but about refusing the isolation that anticipatory grief imposes. Whether literal song or metaphorical testimony, kirtana asks: Can we speak what we fear? Can we let others witness our love and our terror? This practice honors the person we fear losing by declaring publicly how much they matter. It also prepares us: grief voiced early becomes less catastrophic later. By singing our anticipatory grief now—in conversation, in writing, in art, in ritual—we ensure that when loss comes, we will not be meeting it for the first time in silence and alone.