Tag: healing

In Grief — You Are Not Lost

Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. you must let it find you.

 –David Wagoner . Collected Poems 1956-1976

A friend of ours died last week of FTD . . . Fronto Temporal Dementia. FTD is an awful disease that steals yourself – who you are, your personality, your values — and leaves you with your memories fairly intact (unlike Alzheimer’s dementia).  It was awful to watch him lose himself as the disease took hold.  Scary,  heartbreaking, unreal . . . almost like he was possessed by some spirit that took over his body.  His wife and son and daughter-in-law cared for him at home, eventually having to install locks on the refrigerator and cabinets to prevent him from ravenously eating everything — literally.  He wandered and they had to follow him or distract him every moment.  This man who had been a well known photographer and collector became unable to hold his camera still and uninterested in his art.  He was unaware of others’ feelings and uncensored in what hurtful things he said to his wife and son.  

Hospice came and helped with his care a couple of times during the week, and offered one week of respite care so his wife could leave his side and try to escape for a brief time the nightmare that was closing in.

After 10+ years the nightmare ended with our friend’s death.  But for his wife, it continues.  She lost her husband long before he died.  She felt her grief had already overtopped any measure and that after he died there would be relief.  Instead, waves of grief accosted her relentlessly.

When she called me panicked at the myriad of feelings she was experiencing, I was able to reassure her that she was not going crazy.   I, too, had grieved the death of a spouse and knew the terror of uncontrollable and unwelcome feelings that come after the death of a loved one. . .sadness, emptiness, anger, confusion, restlessness, inability to concentrate.  All of them normal, and all of them horribly uncomfortable.  And all of them making the griever question one’s sanity and whether there is enough strength and energy to withstand the waves of feelings.

What surprised me as her friend was not the intensity of her feelings, but my realization that I knew at a gut level that this was not the ending of her ordeal but the beginning.  She would be in for a difficult and painful ride that no one could take away. 

Grief takes us and wrings all the energy and hope out of us, leaving painful empty spaces that we can only fill over time.  Over time, the aches of those empty places fill with new friendships, experiences, goals, hopes that soothe and nurture our emerging self.  And we reclaim and integrate into ourselves “old” parts of ourselves that fit whom we have become.  It is not a painless process but a kind of re-birth/resurrection that comes of the grief process.  

It helps to understand grief as a dual process oscillating between a painful letting go of what was and a dawning of new identity and energy.  It is not something we can “manage” except by allowing the waves of letting go roll over us (knowing they will not last forever) and enjoying the moments of energy and joy (knowing they will come more frequently and eventually become a new normal).

Blessings on all who are in grief this day.  Although a part of you has died — yet a part of you is being reborn.  I promise you.

 

Grief

Grief

I need someone who believes that the sun will rise again, but who does not fear my darkness. . . Someone who can stand in thunder and watch the lightning and believe in a rainbow.    (Fr. Joe Mahoney)

Grief is one of the loneliest experiences one can have in our “I can handle this — I’m OK”, death-defying American culture.   Many of us run from the grief of a friend and even pretend that we haven’t noticed their pain. We try to distance from the grieving by making sense of it with one of many inanities: “She’s better off now and isn’t in pain”, or “Don’t cry.  He’s in heaven with God,” or “Your little girl is a flower in God’s garden now.”  Our corporate culture gives us 3 days of bereavement leave and assumes we should be all over our grief after that. 

Not at all!   Grief opens a trap door into deep darkness where we search desperately for the path that will return us to the life we knew — but we cannot find it.  And indeed there is no path back to the life we once knew.  That life is gone forever because of our loss.  We want our dinner table to have the same faces around it — but someone is missing.  We want our self-confidence back after the loss of a job, and yet when we bump into a former co-worker at the grocery store, we turn down another aisle hoping that she hasn’t seen us.  We feel an urgency to make a friend more comfortable by reassuring him that we are just fine even though our sad eyes betray the lie.

I need someone who believes that the sun will rise again, but who does not fear my darkness.

Yes, I need someone who can allow my tears to flow.  I need someone who doesn’t feel the tug to cheer me up.  I need someone who can just hold me safely and firmly in a hug that lasts long enough for me to relax into it and trust the closeness.

I need someone who has faced the darkness of loss in their own life, who knows the pain is deep and real, and yet who knows — at a cellular level — that however long the darkness of grief lasts for me or for anyone, healing will follow, and I will laugh again.  It is only someone who has felt the numbness and darkness of loss suck them  into the dark, bottomless pit. . . one who has waited, longed to find, yearned for the path that travels toward light again . . . only that one can truly bear witness with their presence alongside another’s grief that joy will come with the morning (Psalm 30:5).

. . .Someone who can stand in thunder and watch the lightning and believe in a rainbow.

The path toward the light and toward life again is not backward toward restoring what was.  The path toward the light is a path toward a life that is different in some way.  Grief changes us.   Loss (whatever has been lost) has taken something from us.  Over time as healing comes, we can learn something about our resilience, creativity, faith, hope, love.  Love will connect us forever with what we have lost., if we wish that.  Memories will remain.  But we will need to move forward with our lives, looking for a way to use the lessons of loss and survival in ways that may help others.  We can create meaningful action from the hard won struggle that heals.

I pray that when we heal from our own losses, we may become persons who, having heard the thunder and seen the lightning, still watch for the rainbows.  May we be the ones who can be present in another’s darkness without fear, knowing the sunrise is just over the horizon.

Jane