I’ve heard of several deaths recently, more than usual (is there a usual amount of death?) among friends or relatives of my friends and relatives. People far enough from me that I don’t know much more than their names or identifiers (like her uncle or her son), but close enough for me to feel sympathetic waves of sadness from their sudden absence and the wrongness in their passing. Because most if not all of these deaths have not been peaceful, expected or the culmination of a well-lived life.
When my dear mother died, at age 69 and after nearly 10 years of dancing back and forth with cancer, I was gut-shakingly sad. One of the best gifts I received at that time was hearing from someone who described grieving the loss of her own mother as “primal.” It was a feeling I could fall into yet somehow not drown in. Profoundly painful, but not horrifying. I even had moments of wonder, experiencing her death as the natural and mysterious flip side of her birth.
But these deaths from violence or trauma, accident or mistake? There's less sense to be made, and wonder is elusive.
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After my mother died, I wanted to find instructions for grieving, maybe a guidebook to the foreign land of motherlessness. My therapist said: No. Don’t read anything for the first few months. Just let yourself feel whatever you feel. That was not the guidance I wanted, but it was good, helpful advice. I don’t remember much from those first few months, but there was certainly a good amount of crying or staring absently into the middle distance. When my wife kindly took me on a day trip to our favorite beach in Maine, the openness of the sky and the rhythmic power of the waves were wordless, nourishing recipients of my pain.
I come from beach people on my mother’s side. She grew up on Long Island, with daily summertime trips to float in the swell at Jones Beach after her father came home from work. When he died unexpectedly in his 50s, she took her mother for a walk on the empty winter beach. I still have a fragment of a seashell she collected that day. That’s what we do, how we process things that are big and overwhelming, especially when there’s nothing to be done.
Whether it’s the ocean, a mountain, or simply the sky we all share, I hope that those who are grieving can feel they have something, somewhere, larger than themselves to witness and receive their wordless pain.
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| At the beach in Connecticut on the fifth anniversary of my mom's passing |
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When I did eventually read some books about grief, two were particularly helpful. Healing Grief, Finding Peace: Daily Strategies for Grieving and Growing by grief counselor Louis E. LaGrand is warm, kind, simple, practical.
The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by psychologist Francis Weller is more spiritual, communal, and mystical. I’ve been re-reading parts of it again lately, as it speaks to the common human experience of a continual flow between love and loss, desire and desolation, in all areas of life.
And I think this recent Discover article, The Stages of Grief Are Unique to Everyone, but They Can Help us Cope, is a good place to start for a shorter introduction to some of these concepts.
Here’s a poem I wrote about one of my journeys.
Stages
A purple tulip bud
clenched and dark
slowly unfurls
a central white star.
Grief reveals
in its own time
if a fist can become
an open palm.
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