Themes on Grief, Part 1
One of the ways that grief can deceive us is by making us — the griever— feel that what we are feeling, what we are subject to, is ours and ours alone. We are pulled under.
No one has ever felt what I feel.
No one will ever understand.
No one…
But grief is both the most deeply personal experience and a universal invitation onto an ancient pilgrimage, which has no purpose other than the holiest one of all: to sanctify the quiet moments of our lives with a myth that is ever larger than we are, so that it can hold what we may not yet know we can hold.
When we speak here about myth, we are talking about all that has been, all that is, and all that will ever be. We are talking about a way of being in relationship to time and space, to the dead and the living and the unborn, in a way that emerges from us as if it has always been there, quietly ready for this moment. A seed long before our birth planted and now germinating effortlessly in words and songs and stories and images we can marvel at but can’t take credit for.
One of the biggest mistakes of contemporary psychology is to not see grief as an ever-present doorway, invisible to the eye, now made visible and thrown open to us.
Where that door will lead us, we cannot yet know.
What unique mythic stories and rituals it will awaken in us, only walking the pilgrim’s path can reveal.
We are on our own now, and yet, we who grieve, are walking with the whole of the sleeping and waking world.
Grief is an evershifting co-arising of so many welcome and unwelcome friends including regret, sadness, anger, resentment, disappointment, gratitude, awe, tenderness, love, hope, guilt, yearning, denial, capitulation, and surrender.
Grief lets us know that some part of our hopes and dreams for our lives ended too soon or never got to happen at all, and that we will never be the same again in some primally vital way. We wish it hadn’t been so. Whatever is now happening, if only we had been given a larger role in scripting how it all turned out. A longing from across time to somehow sculpt our own lives without the absences we now grieve.
If there is one ask of grief, it seems to be this one: don’t try to shut it up, don’t try to hide it, to pretend it’s not there, to overmedicate it, to project it onto others, to run. There is no way around grief. At some point, if grief doesn’t coerce it of us first, we must choose bravely and stupidly and full of a faith we don’t yet fully have, to plunge toward it face-first. And, sadly, there does not seem to be a way to live fiercely, lovingly, wholly without figuring out some kind of way to let grief make a home inside of us.
We may be fooled, but grief will not be fooled. Grief will remain, rising up and returning, increasingly unbidden, if we do not turn to meet it.
Be curious about where it wants to take you, what it wants to show you, who it is beckoning you still to become.
