“This Very Weird Process of Loving Somebody”

An exploration into the complexities of grief, and the community because of it
 BY  Gib Manrique

Grief is a funny thing. It’s not one of those emotions you’re taught when you’re young.  

It’s not like happiness, which adults try to show children through laughter or describe it as similar to feeling the sun dance against your skin. It’s not like sadness which you can learn early on from crying, or dropping ice cream. It’s not like anger or fear or disgust. 
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Before you feel your first twang of shame or embarrassment from being picked on at school, or your first choking sensation of deep jealousy, you’re far more likely to grieve.

Grief from when your childhood pet died. Grief from when your grandma left one day to the hospital and just never came back. 

Before any of the milestones that you may experience when you’re older, that cold feeling seems to settle itself in your bones and make a home there. It becomes part of your life, your daily routine and you. It’s one of the most intense feelings you may ever experience in your life, besides maybe the feeling of love. 

But no one ever seems to tell you how to deal with it. You can assume how. Whether that is from self-help books or guided mediation videos on YouTube or stories people tell you. But what is it? What do you do with it? Is there anything to do at all? 
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I have no idea. I’m just a journalist. But I did speak to poet Alex Dodt, creator and writer of the zine, “The Grief Commune,” and that seemed as good of a place to start as any. 

“Well, I mean, everybody has experiences with grief, obviously,” Alex said during our interview. “It was really when my sister passed in late 2021…that I now had that deeper experience with grief.” 

Alex described how this experience was alarming to him, and seemed to grip onto him in a way other instances of grief never had, like deaths of grandparents. 

“Grief is the result of our entanglement with each other and the way our lives and our whole identities are intertwined…but the actual experience was profoundly alienating and isolating,” he said. 

Alex said he noticed that in our society, grief is seen as a private occasion. It’s something that has been ingrained in our culture as something to just “get over.” Something that makes you take a few days off of work and then move on. 

“Going through those experiences is where I started becoming really interested in just grief work in general,” he said. “That eventually led me to talking, like I said to other people about their grief stories.” 

Alex’s experiences with grief and the desire to connect with others and their stories all accumulated into his first proper introduction into the world of zines: a collection of eight stories detailing different people’s experiences with grief, primarily related to death, through poetry and prose. This act of an attempt at gaining a community through a loss so profound is called “The Grief Commune.” 

He chose a zine as his medium to convey what he wanted without restrictions.  Growing up in the punk scene introduced him to zine culture, and the nature of zines having a community was important for this project. 

“My mind went to the way people kind of communicate to each other directly, without some sort of medium, you know, not having to go to a publisher or or some sort of intervening group or force that kind of decides how the communication happens,” Alex said. “The zine is very democratic…very accessible and maybe like a more genuine form of communication.” 

The zine consists of what Alex calls “mini manifestos,” explicitly tying our own grief to politics, as well as visual pieces to accompany the writing. There are even interactive spaces within the booklet, prompting the reader to contribute their own stories to the zine. 

The conversation ended with me asking Alex something a bit more personal. I wanted to know his own definition of grief. 

I explain to him how I see grief in the words of author Jamie Anderson, “Grief is just love with nowhere to go.”  He agrees with my sentiment, but tweaks the wording a bit. 

“I think maybe I would put it, that grief is coming to new terms with that love relationship,” Alex said. “I approach it with grief being this emotional experience surrounding this very weird process of loving somebody who's no longer embodied among us.” 

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Gib Manrique (he/they) is a writer poet and journalist occupying a space in the Arts District of Downtown Phoenix. He has written for several student news publications and independently published his own work. He also refers to himself as transgendermexican4000, as a lot of his work is related to those identities within his life.
You can follow him on his social media with @gib.nky and listen to his comedic queer history podcast on Spotify titled “That’s Gay!”

Gib is an intern with Wasted Ink Zine Distro and will be writing monthly for our blog through 2025 and into 2026. ​