My heart is very tender. I've been in a lot of grief recently. There is the death of the adult child of old friends, who I loved as family. There are the ravishes of the late stage alcoholism of my former husband, the father to our sons. There is Gaza and the horrors of our government's continued funding of genocide. There is homelessness and poverty and racism and injustice. There are the ever growing climate disasters and the continued failure to act collectively to save ourselves and preserve a habitable planet. There are extinctions happening each and every day and so much suffering of our human and nonhuman earthly family. Right alongside the profound gratitude and grace which are imbued in my life today are these layers of grief. And I am so incredibly grateful to feel! And I find myself returning to the tender-brave, compassionate, and wise writings of those such as Joanne Cacciatore... which nourishes my heart and soul... and maybe yours, too. đź’ś Molly
In a culture like our own that is addicted to the relentless quest to feel happy — perhaps as an unconscious attempt to bypass our disavowed misery — grief is taboo, pathologized, and aggressively avoided. Grievers are advised to “look on the bright side,” “think positive,” and “count your blessings.” When such empty platitudes don’t work — basically always — people who experience anguish may often be numbed with drugs. And this leaves victims of loss and grief guilty or shame-ridden about their sadness and without the resources to handle their pain.
REPRESSED GRIEF ravages individuals and dismantles families; its tragic effects seep like groundwater into communities and societies. And the emotional economics of grief denied its rightful place are grim.
“Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer; the secret to redemption lies in remembrance." — RICHARD VON WEIZSĂ„CKER
Grief violates convention: it is raw, primal, seditious, chaotic, writhing, and most certainly uncivilized. Yet grief is an affirmation of human passion, and only those who are apathetic, who stonewall love, who eschew intimacy can escape grief’s pull.
Grief is not a medical disorder to be cured. Grief is not spiritual crisis to be resolved. Grief is not a social woe to be addressed. Grief is, simply, a matter of the heart — to be felt.
No intervention and no interventionist can “cure” our grief. And we are not broken — we are brokenhearted.
When we love deeply, we mourn deeply; extraordinary grief is an expression of extraordinary love. Grief and love mirror each other; one is not possible without the other.
“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer." — VIKTOR FRANKL
Grief by its nature is poetical, elegiac. And poetry, like grief, is subversive, unbridled, and disobedient. Poetry violates linguistic norms because it must. Poetry helps us feel. And when we allow ourselves to feel that which is legitimately ours to feel, we rebel against the rigid grief-denying structures of society.
Others may tell us that it’s time to “move on” or that this is “part of some bigger plan” — because our shattering makes them feel uneasy, vulnerable, at risk. Some may avoid us, others pity us. But this grief is ours. We have earned this grief, paying for it with love and steadfast devotion. We own this pain, even on days when we wish it weren’t so. We needn’t give it away or allow anything, or anyone, to pilfer it.
WE PAUSE to be with grief, joining the rebellion against a hedonistic culture of happiness-at-all-costs and reclaiming our rightful feelings. We learn to just be without needing to tame, alter, or displace our emotions. This is radically countercultural, even revolutionary, when all other social forces merge to quell, overcome.
When others call into question our grief, defy our perennial relationship with those we love who have died, treat us as anathema and avoid us, and push us toward healing before we are ready, they simply redouble our burden. It almost seems that the only way to eradicate our grief would be to relinquish the love we feel — to disassemble our loved one’s place in our lives. But checking in with the wisdom of our heart, we see that is impossible. Grief and love occur in tandem.
The invitation to surrender to grief is about the middle path, straddling both worlds — life and death.
But when we are frightened and in pain, we need others with whom we can be honest. We need others who can enter the abyss with us, sometimes again and again. We need to reach out to someone who is safe, who will not judge, who will not shut down or shun our pain. And, when we are hurting this much, we may need to borrow, muster, or scrape up the courage to reach out to others. And we need these things for an indefinite period.
Find those who are willing to join you and walk with you nonjudgmentally. Steer clear of those who claim to have a cure for your grief.
Whatever comes, we let it be as it is. When we do this, we come to see, in this moment or the next, our emotions always moving. The word emotion has its roots in the Latin movere and emovere meaning "to move through" and "to move out." Our emotions move in us, move through us and move between us. And when we allow them to move freely, they change, perhaps scarcely and perhaps gradually - but inevitably.
This is grief's piercing message: there is no way around - the only way is through.
STAY MINDFULLY CLOSE to the sensations of early grief because it is a memorial to the raw pain so ubiquitous in the newly bereaved; I find that my attention to it directs and intensifies my sense of what I think of as fierce compassion. Fierce compassion is another artifact of fully inhabited grief.
Is it painful? Oh, yes — beyond all words. Yet we slowly learn to stay with our own pain. We learn we don’t have to check out to endure.
Sorrow and contentment, grief and beauty, longing and surrender coexist in the realm of sameness. This is called the unity of opposites, and it liberates us from a myopic, dualistic view of our emotions as either/or.
“There are two kinds of suffering,” Ajahn Chah told him, “the suffering we run from because we are unwilling to face the truth of life and the suffering that comes when we’re willing to stop running from the sorrows and difficulties of the world. The second kind of suffering will lead you to freedom.”
To fully inhabit grief is to hold the contradictions of the great mystery that loss shatters us and we become whole. Grief empties us and we are filled with emotion. Fear paralyzes us and we lend courage to another. We mourn our beloved's absence and we invoke their presence. We cease to exist as we once were and we become more fully human. We know the darkest of all nights and in so doing can bring the light of our loved ones into the world. We are the paradox. We are the bearers of the unbearable.
The world breaks us all, and afterward some are stronger in those broken places.
“To love means to open ourselves to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and thus an intensity of consciousness that before we did not know was possible." — ROLLO MAY
Suffering endured becomes compassion expressed. Grieving becomes giving.
“Our loss, our wound, is precious to us because it can wake us up to love, and to loving action." — NORMAN FISCHER
Being the mother of a child who has died is a tragic privilege — one for which I never asked and certainly never wanted. Yet here I am — and here you are — unbearably wounded. It is the bereaved who are awakened from the slumber of self-satisfaction. It is the bereaved who can heal our world.
And I surrender because long past the early days, grief’s shadow still remains. It lurks and lingers. It is both feared enemy and beloved companion who never leaves. Grief calls for us to give ourselves back to it. To remember. To reclaim. To re-grieve. And for all those things, even when they sting, I am thankful.
I am present with life because I am present with death. I know joy and peace because I am present with grief and suffering.
"May there be such a oneness between us that when one weeps the other tastes salt." — KAHLIL GIBRAN
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