Tessa M. Smith, Ph.D. Student, Educational Studies, College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University I’m sitting with Dr. Nicolazzo’s astute reckoning of grief as unmetabolizable. “Metabolize” is a word that feels so wholly connected to the body. Although our brains are of course parts of our bodies, the cerebral nature of how we, as a society and as educators, acknowledge grief certainly seems insufficient. I can feel a sick pit in my stomach from the incredible losses of the last two years especially. Plagues of gun violence, hatred, white supremacy, and the coronavirus have devastated the country. Meanwhile, many of us are chugging along, trying to find the “new normal” while so many deaths settle into the background of American life, the pits in our stomachs chugging along with us. I’m not sure if grief is something that can be metabolized, changed into something useful for the body, but perhaps that’s worth exploring. If grief were metabolizable, it se...