The gift of grief - wholeness

I am noticing how many of my clients are grieving.

Not necessarily because of death, although I do have a number suffering this loss, but grieving for all sorts of reasons.

For some children have now left home and there is a silence that is hard to bear.

There are broken relationships, beyond repair.

Hopes and dreams fallen apart.

Parents needing care, no longer able to parent, roles reversed.

The coming to terms with the fact some parents never parented in the first place.

Animals departing, their unconditional love lost.

Illness, which has caused a shift in relationship with body and life.

Aging and time lost.

Motherhood never made possible.

Friends and family emigrating.

Jobs dropping away where once a heart and soul were committed. 

Grief robs us of roles and titles.

For some, loss means we stop being identified as husband, wife, daughter, son, mother, father, sister, brother, friend.

Or maybe our role changes, we are no longer hands on mother, no longer a sister around the corner, no longer a partner partnering, no longer a dog owner walking a dog, no longer a doctor helping the sick, no longer a director, demanding respect. 

For others loss means a change in the way of life, relating, being.

Grief robs us of life as we knew it.

It puts a line in the sand and says, that was then, this is now, let’s begin again.

I lost a friend that fateful December morning. And my role as friend dropped away too, that relationship ending.  

Just this morning I cleared out my inbox and found myself re-reading the last exchange of emails with Em. The final email I sent, two weeks before she passed, reads “You know where I am and if I can help let me know. Sending love ! xxx” . I never received a response and never will now.

She has moved on, and we must move on too.

This is life. Things change. Rise, fall and back again. Wax, wane and wax again. Dark, light and around we go again.

Grief comes to help us navigate this change.

It says, “let go” and “let go again”.

I’ve never been gifted at letting go.

And I have never been one for owing my grief, for recognising it as so.

Even when Em passed, I didn’t feel I had a right to grieve. After all, a husband had lost a wide, children had lost a mother and parents had lost a daughter. I was just a friend.

There was lots I didn’t know about grief.

Em’s death, and the deaths that followed since, have taught me so much about life, and living, and about impermanence. 

I have been pushed through a process that, at times, I thought would never end.

Yet now I can see the gift that grief gives. In the clearing out of all that has been, to make way for something gentler instead. A new chapter in the story of our life, one without a script, in which we can choose again.

And yet do we really choose?

This is a notion I have grappled with these last ten months.

How conscious are we of the choices we make, and how conscious are others of the choices they make?

In many ways death has helped me to recognise that we can never understand the reasons for choices made. With other people, we can speculate, we can imagine, we can even make sense of their mental self-representation of their choice, but this is not the same as understanding the deeper reason for that choice, which might stretch back a whole lifetime and beyond.

I have tortured myself for years about some of the choices I have made, which I might label mistakes. Death has gifted me a reframe. I realise now that there is no such thing as a mistake, only choices made, based on all sorts of factors, many of which we do not fully understand. It’s a cognitive illusion to believe that we can truly understand our own choices or someone else’s.

It has taken me a long time to recognise this. That our choices are not always as conscious as we might believe them to be, that there is more to a choice than our immediate mental confabulation.

It has helped me recognise the pointlessness and purposelessness of judging ourselves or others for the choices made.

This awareness has been both liberating and healing.

The deaths that began with Em last December, have brought up in me all the grief that had not been expressed. All the losses of a life lived, which had not been processed and, therefore, still laid deep.

I have a habit like so many of making myself busy, to avoid the feeling of emptiness that is needed to allow the grief its space to be.

That feeling of emptiness has been both friend and enemy.

For many years I starved myself empty, because the feeling was more comfortable than the feeling of fear and anxiety. Emptiness became my friend.

And then emptiness became something I feared, a feeling that arose when separated from those I loved, which grew worse at university with homesickness. 

I have played a game with emptiness ever since. I know the pain of separation and I have done all I can to distance myself from it.

Marie’s death brought it up. But I buried it back down and distracted myself.

Em’s death, well I couldn’t hide from it anymore, and this led to a deep dive which has taken me to dark places I had hidden well.

It was now time to digest.

Em offered me a gift. Not least in my feeling of her essence. But in the clear out which has happened since.

Grief gifts us this. It asks us to clear the muddle from our mind and the chaos from our life.

It asks us to recognise that meaning comes in the smallest and most subtle of ways.

I discovered that my deepest wounding, my deepest grief, was of the choice to take my own life and the steps I took to do this. 

I had hidden that wounding deep. There was shame and a family who didn’t need reminding. Why did I find life so hard? There was a vulnerability that came with this, a fragility from walking such a thin edge, of life and death.

It wasn’t talked about. I didn’t talk about it. I didn’t know I had a right to own it. After all, I hadn’t actually killed myself. Yet, if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to talk about it, such is the irony.

The irony still, is that in my brush with death, I didn’t even feel worthy of owing it.

Em’s sudden passing allowed me this conversation, made me look at my worth. Could I grieve for her? Eventually, yes.

Initially, people gossiped that she had taken her own life, yet I knew she hadn’t – she didn’t – there is always more to a story than we imagine. But the conversation hung in the air regardless, shocked mums talked of the fear of losing their minds to hormonal imbalance.

Em did not take her own life. And nor did I.

Yet this sudden loss gave me permission to talk about the fragility of life and I spoke honestly with family in a way I had not talked previously.

I know my mind now, am not as scared of it as I once was. My terror was not necessarily other people, albeit life has shown me that other people are not always safe, instead, my terror has always been the demonic nature of my mind.

I trod a thin edge and my mind almost threw me over the side.

It doesn’t get more final than that.

A few years ago now, on a birthday again - my first brush with suicide being on my 27th birthday, you can hear more about that on my podcast here – I wasn’t sure I might make it home. I had sunk to a very dark place, my sense of failure was great and I was done with this life lived.

Yet there was a voice that called an alarm and it said, “call home NOW”. I was so desolate, helpless, felt everyone would be better off without me, selfless – quite at odds with what people say, when they label those who take their own life as selfish, yet selfish is the last thing we feel in those moments of deepest, darkest suffering, pain and despair – and I needed an end.

But that part of me that is programmed for life spoke loudly that night and I knew then with absolute certainty that I could never now take my own life.

Yet it has taken time to make peace with this awareness and to trust that voice. I have worked with healers, a shadow worker and a grief counsellor to overcome this deep terror inside, of losing my mind and making a choice that I cannot then change, that pushes me over that edge from which I may never return.

Once I ended up in a toxic relationship which led to the darkness that caused me to want to end my life.

It was this relationship, the way I lost my mind to it, that has also terrorised me. I have been scared by ‘love’ at times in case I lose my mind. The mind is very good at dressing up ‘love’ in cloaks of denial.

I know love now though.

And I know my mind.

I can finally let go of the terror which has tugged at the fabric of the rug beneath my feet, threatened to topple me, causing a deep restlessness inside.

I have made it my mission these last twenty years to know my mind as I do now. To befriend it, contain it, understand it, so I am not tricked by it again. This has gifted me a deeper voice that I can hear above the noise, that speaks gently, kindly, and with compassion.

Em’s passing has helped me to realise this.

Her death softened my edges, made me let go over and over again into a deeper vulnerability so that I have nothing left. I can bend down, on my knees and kiss the ground. What pride I had is disintegrating, there is nothing to hide, I am naked again.  

And I am grateful that grief has offered me this gift of vulnerability. Of letting go of the woundings and stories and my victimhood, which accompanied this.  

We, all of us though, receive a gift from grief.

It can be hard to accept this.

Because grief is difficult to process.

We need time and space.

A letting go of roles and identities takes place and it can be distressing.

Our heart can shatter into a million little pieces.

And yet an open heart is what this world most needs.

Sadly we have been conditioned, programmed, trained to close down our heart, not feel emotion, put on a brave face.

We have to be careful though, playing that game, for the body keeps score and it will show us where we are holding. Emotional suppression leads to all sorts of dis-eases, from cancers to lumps in our throats, from inflammation to indigestion, high blood pressure to migraines, bad backs to sore necks, eye issues to heart conditions. It does us no favours to avoid our feelings.  

Grief gifts us a path to worth. To own our emotional landscape and learn to navigate it for ourselves.

We are asked to soften our edges, let go over and over again of whatever has caused us to harden in the first place; our shame, our guilt, our regrets – the many ways we harm ourselves.

It is that has struck me the most. How much I have harmed myself.

There was wounding that caused me to blame, such is our western psychological way, and then I realised that the blame goes back lifetimes, generation to generation. There is no one to blame. Life is life because of what happened in the very beginning of time.

Yet because of my inner angst, the insecurity, the not being good enough, the lack of worth, the many ways that our inheritance catches up with us, I have taken it seriously, made myself the fault, and punished myself – police, judge and jury.

Yet it was not my fault to take. Not my responsibility. I do not need to be wrong to make the world right.

Grief has set me free from this bind.

It sets us all free if we let it.

Through tears and the anger and outrage and disbelief and sorrow that we feel, this is all grief.

So as we mourn for our life now changed, as we digest all that has been, we can take comfort in the emptiness that we feel, for now there is a space that allows something else to begin.

Our cracked heart, has not closed.

Instead our cracked heart lets light into the spaces of our life where it was absent. We have reclaimed the parts of us we had cast into the shadows, and are allowing now our wholeness again.

This is the gift of grief.

This is the potential it reveals.

Our wholeness.

But we have to stay open to grief, not be scared by it, not turn away from it, not pretend it doesn’t exist, but by welcoming it in and allowing our life and our self to be shaped and transformed by it.

Love Emma x