Love and Grief: Behind the Veil
I recently heard a definition of trust from Dr. Rachel Botsman as a “confident relationship with the unknown”. I love this frame for understanding what it is to be human and to live in relationship to uncertainty. Especially when it comes to the biggest unknown we all face, the death of our physical bodies.The fact of our mortality is a subject many of us have learned, at least here in America, to turn away from, to deny or to avoid. This began in earnest 140 or so years ago when the industrial revolution in American culture began to remove death entirely from the home and into hospitals and morgues. In my early childhood, we had at least an occasional visual cue of our eventual destination through the Hearse vehicles that populated the roads, reminding us that our stay here is temporary, our lives fleeting, each moment a precious opportunity that may or may not be followed by another.
Still reading? Cool. Maybe we’ve created this denial of the decay of our bodies as a natural process because we think it would be too hard to move forward in our lives while fully comprehending the reality of death. As a result, so many of us place our fear of death neatly away in a drawer, ostensibly to get on with the business of living. Maybe we label that drawer with certain concepts or spiritual beliefs about what happens when we die as a way to compartmentalize it, to turn it into something we know and can therefore control. But does this approach actually support us in embracing the fullness of being alive?
I had my own drawer neatly filed and labeled, informed by a spirituality influenced by many ancient traditions as well as my own intrinsic mystical leanings. That is until actual death showed up and I lost someone close to me. In August of 2018, my mother died unexpectedly. She was 76, and had lived a full and courageous life. Still, I experienced every drawer in my psyche spill over, drowning my heart and mind in incomprehensible grief. How could someone so full of life and vitality be gone in an instant? I had no choice but to let the crushing reality of losing a loved one break open my heart, allowing myself, perhaps for the first time, to be lived by my life. By that I mean I was no longer trying to control or map out my experience in an effort to avoid pain. The pain was there and it was simply undeniable. And in the face of that rawness, that brutality, something amazing and also quite ordinary began to happen.
I experienced moments in which I was overcome with the phenomenal beauty of being alive. I could let life in in a way I never had before: and as I allowed my heart to be opened by the experience, my environment also expanded in depth and dimension: the sun warming my face, leaves that swayed in the breeze became imbued with meaning. What surprised me then and continues to shape my being to this day is the freedom that can arise when I surrender to the experience of life as it is. This was the gift of grief once I allowed it in.
This hasn’t come without moments of confusion and misery. There is no wrong way to grieve, and I can recall times, especially when the loss was fresh and so disorienting where I also numbed myself with food and Netflix just to get through a day. I still miss my Mom enormously. I feel her smile so deeply in my bones at times I cannot believe she is no longer here. I long to laugh with her on the phone, to hug her in real time. She gave me so very much, to the end and beyond, and I trust it implicitly.
David Kessler is a renowned author on the subject of grief, and a collaborator on Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s seminal work, “The Five Stages of Grief”, which they describe as denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, though not necessarily in that order. Grief is not a linear process but a cyclical one that often has somatic symptoms such as insomnia, loss or gain of appetite, a heaviness or tightening in the chest...these are just some of the ways our bodies may require us to slow down and pay attention when we are grieving.
During this difficult and tender moment, when I could manage to stay with the sensations happening in my body, there were times I was touched by an understanding that goes beyond words. A visceral comprehension of the vastness of existence, a felt sense of the unknown. After years of privileging cognition, of believing (without quite realizing it) that the locus of control should rest in the mind’s capacity to interpret my experience through reason and logic, a new balance of power came into my being. One that honors my intuition as much as my thinking brain. One that pays attention to the sensations in my body as cues for everything from danger to hunger to pleasure. Not that this is an either/or: our thoughts, feelings, and sensations all play an integral role in living our most authentic life. As I was able to release the desire to grasp and control my reality, however, I got a taste of this “confident relationship with life”, that allows for greater levels of trust in myself and in my relationships. In Kessler’s most recent book, “Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief”, he adds an additional stage to the grief process that can produce greater healing from loss, and that is meaning. As I allowed the reality of death to reveal itself to me, in all of it’s shades of sorrow, beauty and complexity, I glimpsed the possibility of finding meaning in this devastating loss.
Maybe you haven’t yet lost someone close to you or maybe you have. I believe we are all in a process of collective grieving from the losses incurred by COVID 19. See if you can allow yourself to acknowledge the losses of this past year and notice the sensations in your body. Be gentle. Be kind. Be open. Ask for support. Don’t turn away.
Resources for grief related support services: https://modernloss.com/, https://www.covidgriefnetwork.org,
SAMHSA’s National Helpline – 1-800-662-HELP (4357),
https://zencaregiving.org/2019/08/grief-support-resources/
https://www.amazon.com/Finding-Meaning-Sixth-Stage-Grief/dp/1501192736
https://rachelbotsman.com/speaking/