DEATH - Oct 2010
Our capacity to experience grief is deep, if we allow it. Most of us don’t. Most of us resist it with a fierceness deserving of a battle zone. Our fear of grief, not the grief itself, can cripple us, shut us down, turn us into zombies, unable to feel anything at all. Grief can arrive in all sorts of ways. The loss of anything can trigger it; leaving a job or home, losing a special object, a friend moving away, and of course death. It can be the death of someone else or our own pending death. Grief comes through many doors and doesn’t usually knock.
I had a beloved church member in my prior church whose father died after a long illness, and then his mother a few months later, after her own long illness. My church member was exhausted from all the care giving and didn’t have time for grief. He figured he would get to it after they both died. But on the day of his mother’s funeral his wife was rushed to the doctors where she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She had already survived breast cancer, but the brain tumor took her life 14 months after her diagnosis.
My church member was numb; his grief escaped in small gasps of vented relief. We all feared for him and with him. How could anyone survive this experience of unrelenting death? He showed us. Over the next three years he showed us how to express grief, sometimes slowly, sometimes in great waves, sometimes gracefully and sometimes in stumbling, awkward outbursts.
There are two lessons I’ve drawn from his experience and that of my own with grief. One: there are times to let the grief out when alone, but we should never grieve by ourselves. For example, my church member already had communities of people surrounding him. He had fellow church members, neighbors, friends and his family. He embraced their love and accepted their sustaining energy, knowing that they shared his grief. He also created the space and time to cry when he was alone, knowing his communities of love were a phone call away.
Two: the more we embrace our sadness the more we can experience joy. This may not appeal to reason, but what we all witnessed in our friend, and what I’ve observed personally, is that the more we allow ourselves to experience one emotion, the more we can experience other emotions. Or to say it negatively, when we shut down our ability to experience grief, we shut down the rest of the show. It doesn’t help that some of us feel guilt if we have moments of happiness after a loved one dies. But this is life, the full experience of emotional connection from grief to joy. It demonstrates to others the fullness of living. The most eloquent testimony we can give at the moment of death is to inspire others to live.
Blessed be.
My church member was numb; his grief escaped in small gasps of vented relief. We all feared for him and with him. How could anyone survive this experience of unrelenting death? He showed us. Over the next three years he showed us how to express grief, sometimes slowly, sometimes in great waves, sometimes gracefully and sometimes in stumbling, awkward outbursts.
There are two lessons I’ve drawn from his experience and that of my own with grief. One: there are times to let the grief out when alone, but we should never grieve by ourselves. For example, my church member already had communities of people surrounding him. He had fellow church members, neighbors, friends and his family. He embraced their love and accepted their sustaining energy, knowing that they shared his grief. He also created the space and time to cry when he was alone, knowing his communities of love were a phone call away.
Two: the more we embrace our sadness the more we can experience joy. This may not appeal to reason, but what we all witnessed in our friend, and what I’ve observed personally, is that the more we allow ourselves to experience one emotion, the more we can experience other emotions. Or to say it negatively, when we shut down our ability to experience grief, we shut down the rest of the show. It doesn’t help that some of us feel guilt if we have moments of happiness after a loved one dies. But this is life, the full experience of emotional connection from grief to joy. It demonstrates to others the fullness of living. The most eloquent testimony we can give at the moment of death is to inspire others to live.
Blessed be.
