I remember when Josh told me about a concept he envisioned months ago, in regards to creating a platform for people to discuss and engage with their stories of loss and subsequent grief as a way to not only implement catharsis, but also to allow them to explore and relate to the experiences of others, I jumped at the chance to participate. Having lost 4 family members in 6 years I was incredibly enthusiastic about the idea, as western culture doesn’t provide many avenues for us to communicate our vulnerabilities, grief can be extremely isolating. However, when I went to write I found myself stuck, almost overcome with a paralysis of fear. Did I want to talk about the places I have endured for so long to be able to live with? Could I bear a light shining on my darker places only to make me have to feel them again? And after a while my perception shifted from me wanting to hide, to me feeling an overwhelming sense of motivation to love myself into light, into expression and into visibility. So let me now leave a little of my heart with you.
The thing that strikes me the most about this human dance of existence…is how much we celebrate it. We talk of the fullness of life in its chronology and cycle from birth, even trafficking in conversation of old age and retirement, but yet we all shy away socially from talking about death and our own mortality, as if it were the awkward elephant in the room. Or as if we didn’t talk about it maybe it would prevent it from happening. This level of covert denial, although widely accepted, isn’t effect or preventative and in fact it somewhat harmful when it comes to its inevitability. Death is perhaps one of the more traumatic experiences that can occur to us as human beings and yet we rarely ever discuss it. It is also one of the more natural occurrences, but often it comes into our lives forcefully and unexpected and we are caught grasping at straws to try to navigate our way through it.
I’ll never forget the day my mother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and we were sitting in the doctors office and waiting for him to come back with the results of her most recent scan. The headaches had been getting worse and worse for a year, but denial provides a safe and welcoming shelter sometimes, but the truth was now felt in the heavy and cold silence that filled the room as we waited. When he came back in and said the sentence “Inoperable brain tumors, 90 days to live”, I felt the surreal nature of his words take on a quality of their own, and I was no longer living my life, I was more so watching it. I squeezed my mothers hand as we asked basic questions about care and other resources and the mechanical nature of our transaction left us both with an even more worrying prospect, which was that death was totally uncharted territory. My initial stages were that of coping and care taking, so I didn’t much indulge myself in sadness and rage, but at the end of the 5 month long witnessing of this disease slowly steal away the body of my mother, there was an array of emotions that I had to contend with unlike any other felt before or since.
Before my mother passed, at my age of 26, I had had 2 relatives pass away previously, both my grand fathers, at my ages of 15 and 25 respectively. One of sickness and one of old age, and I suppose I was able to compartmentalize their deaths, as the world would have wanted. I put it away in a nice little box, because old people die and that is to be expected, and I can go to the funeral and then carry on with my life. This is more or less the simplistic narrative of existence that we are handed as acceptable.
So when the rug of life got violently pulled out from under me and the person that I loved most in this world, my best friend, my mother, the only person that I felt truly saw me in this world, who gave me a safe place to harbor my heart, was diagnosed with cancer and withered away slowly before my eyes…. I did not have any place to go. Any one to go to with my sadness. Any pamphlet to read about my fear. Any one to wail with in the night as I clutched her sweater. Any one to hold me up, as I would slump over crying in the shower. No one to tell me that the wailing would exhaust me so much I could barely move, that I could almost feel my heart breaking, or that even now as I type this seven years on, I do so with a face bathed in the saltiness of my tears.
Grief is like the wind…it has no beginning and no end. It isn’t linear, there is no appropriate time to stop or to start, there is no tidy or clean way to express it and it certainly will never be a comfortable conversation topic. Grief puts you directly in contact with the deepest parts of your emotional being, and pushes you to the edges of your capacity to feel pain. It renders you raw in a world that tells you to guard yourself, it leaves you broken down and confused and bewildered, it leaves you searching and grasping for truth and for answers, all the while screaming questions into the abyss. It leaves you face to face with the reality that you had been trying to out run until that point, which is that you too will one day depart your body, and you aren’t in control of the how or the when. This is more terrifying still.
That when you experience the power of loss, you are also experiencing the great truth of life- it is a fleeting experience.
In the years that have passed my relationship to the trauma of this loss has evolved as I have in its clutches, first wanting to suppress everything to appear “normal” and then developing habits and patterns that would affirm this denial of reality, to an overtaking and submission of emotion, to a much healthier place of surrender now where I realize that I am a different person now because of this experience and THAT IS OK. I was able to reach a lot of my milestones with grief, by finally allowing myself to talk about it. I saw a grief counselor a few times, which was very beneficial, and I also persisted in my personal relationships to be honest more and more when I was having a bad day. It is far easier to admit to having a broken heart then to pretend it is already mended. When I would gap out and be forgetful and feel like I was living in a fog, and do external things that used to make me happy, yet I couldn’t actually feel any real and true joy for years, it was only through the act of at first acknowledging that was how I felt, that began to undo the ties of this extreme weight. I have had family members pass since my mother, and I have found the awareness of this within myself, to submit as opposed to resist to my feelings, and to not have to compartmentalize or categorize them, has given me so much more freedom to move through things as they come up. The secret gift of
grief I suppose in some way, is that it has taught me this, which I apply to my life in totality now, and that has greatly benefitted me in ways I could not have imagined.
Our emotions are our truth tellers in our lives, as we cannot run or hide or pretend away what we truly feel. Pain creates an incredible relationship to our experiences and as such much learning comes from it. I didn’t always have this perspective, I am by no means a person in possession of that much fortitude, and even now some days I lament on all of the moments I thought I would have with my mother that I won’t and I feel twinges of resentment, but I also know that ultimately we are not in control of all elements of life. That I have to be in the presence that this is what happened to me, and I try diligently every day to honor the memory more than the loss. Sometimes I feel a heaviness that I cannot explain and every year on the day of her passing I feel somber and weighted and depressed. I worry that I won’t be enough for her, that I am not going to do what she wanted, and that I won’t make her proud. And then I remember the nature of our love and those feelings pass. Grief has bestowed me with a very clear understanding of the fragility of my heart, and has taught me inadvertently to be more prudent and careful with it. Not in a way that s distrusting, but in a way that is respectful.
The experience of loss has given me a window into the magnitude of unconditional love, and how it defines our human compass. Love is the very thing we are made of the very thing we prize most, and when we feel a loss of it in body, it touches every part of our souls. It breaks us down to give us an insight that no other experience can give us, which is that we should not take our relationships to ourselves or anyone else for granted, because we know not how long we can enjoy them.
So please, even though it might be unflattering, even though you make sounds like that of a wild animal when you break down and wail, when you hear certain songs and you feel your stomach in knots as the memory of that moment floats to mind…even then be brave enough t admit where you’re at and recognize that it is all part of the process. It HAS TO BE FELT to be dealt with, and we have to allow it no matter how vulnerable it makes us. In the loss of love, we give others a chance to love and support us, which fortifies the greatness and bounty of even more relationships still.
We are never alone in our pain, as we are never alone in our bliss, and it doesn’t have to look or feel or sound or act any particular way. Trust your heart will lead you back to it, even amongst the gauntlet of its broken pieces, and will put itself back together in a way that leads you to an even greater perception of its importance.
