Author: erica marguerite

showing up for grief

Posted on by erica marguerite

Platitudes don’t heal grief.  Cliches are meaningless.  Nothing a person could ever say could ease the pain of knowing you will never see your loved one alive in their body again.  The physical loss is unbearable.  Nothing anyone can say can ease this ache.  Grieving people know this better than anyone. Grief radiates through the body – grief literally aches and exhausts.

Here are some things to do (and a few things to say) to someone who is grieving the loss of someone they love.  Listen to your own body and inner voice as to what’s appropriate to the person and to you.  Know your limitations yet be willing to deepen your capacities through the willingness to be uncomfortable.

  1. look them in the eyes, bear witness to their pain
  2. hug them and hold them
  3. ask them if you can listen (only do this if you can truly be present)
  4. cook them a meal
  5. bring them flowers
  6. send them a note, card, email to say you’re thinking of them
  7. offer to do an errand or chore and then do it
  8. make them tea and just sit with them with no expectations
  9. give them a foot massage
  10. remember their loved one through story (write them down if you can)
  11. acknowledge anniversaries, birthdays, holidays etc.
  12. ask them what they need or want and know they may not have the answer

Things to say:

  1. i am so sorry
  2. i love you
  3. i love _____ and will never forget them.

Grief doesn’t end with the funeral but support often drops off significantly after this event.  Post-funeral is a time to show up even more. Even if you hear nothing in response, be persistent in your care and contact.  In doing so, you are acknowledging the grief and remembering the person who was lost.  This honoring matters more than words could ever say.

strength in darkness

Posted on by erica marguerite

Today I tell myself eight words – You are stronger than you think you are.  Sometimes the loss of my mom, my best friend, is just too much.  It feels too surreal, too painful, too deep to navigate. These are days I feel like I could drown in the vastness of grief, dragged down to the bottom by things left unsaid, unasked, undone while memories – simple, beautiful fragments – drift by on my way down.  Grief is a deep place.  Grief is an endless place.  It is both like a cave in which you are forced to crawl and a wide plain across which you could run forever.

Today, it’s late on Sunday afternoon, I fall asleep on the couch.  I wake to darkness both inside my house and out.  This darkness infects me.  I get up to pull the clothes out of the washing machine and move them into the dryer.  A train roars by in the new night.  Then the eight words come out of nowhere. You are stronger than you think you are.  The words fill my body like air.  There’s no comfort in them, no soothing or easing, but there is a knowing.  It’s a knowing that I am still here.  I still walk, talk, laugh even.  I am still here.  Sometimes that’s a miracle in itself – that a body, a heart, a spirit, a psyche can withstand a loss that shatters our sense of the world and our place in it.  You are stronger than you think you are. 

 

love in action

Posted on by erica marguerite

A week ago I had the honor of spending what would’ve been my mom’s 69th birthday with people who loved her.  These people included her sister and brother, a couple of dear friends, two cousins, my boyfriend, myself and a 91-year old aunt who was at the hospital the day my mom was born.  For the third year since her passing, we have come together to celebrate her life and to continue her spirit of giving through a service project.  Those friends who were unable to attend this year generously donated from afar.  For the last two years, this special group of people gathered paper products, laundry soap and money to give to Annamarie’s Alliance – a unique domestic abuse shelter that also includes a space for pets. My mom cared deeply about many things – but children and animals were particularly close to her heart.  We came together, as in years past, to gather the donated items and to share a meal. I keenly felt my mom’s presence in the love and laughter we shared around that table.  I’ve also felt, in the days that followed, the need to explore what I’ve experienced in doing these projects – the sense that remembering our deceased loved ones through acts of service creates changes at the deepest levels of being.

When we give – our time, resources and presence – in someone’s name and memory this isn’t simply a gesture that feels good.  This act creates an effect in the world beyond what we can see.  Our loved ones feel the energy of love that infuses these acts.  In a similar way to prayer – acts of remembrance and service elevate, strengthen and support a spirit in their journey beyond life in a body. These acts also change us.  We open ourselves to a deeper connection with ourselves and each other – both in this physical world and in a world we can’t see.

Remembering is meaning-making. Remembering is prayer.  Remembering is love in action.

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Remembering Margaret – a dedicated and generous mom, daughter, sister, cousin, niece, friend and human being.  With loving thanks to her friends and family.

origins

Posted on by erica marguerite

grief/loss/death/soul/beauty

In 2014, my mom died suddenly from a brain aneurysm.  At that time I couldn’t imagine how this event would change my life, I just knew that it would. Part of this journey over the past two and a half years included learning how totally unequipped this culture is when it comes to dealing with death and grief.  Somewhere along the way, it became clear that my path included raising awareness around these experiences and providing spaces for people to come together and grieve.  Spaces where grief would be held, not feared or pushed away.  Spaces where all the pieces of grief – the heartache, the pain, the rage and anger, the joy, the beauty, the fight and surrender, the rawness – ALL of these pieces could be seen and be okay. Our cultural understanding of grief is abysmally one-dimensional (ie. grief = sadness) and negates the complexity and power of a very primal energy and experience. Francis Weller, a psychotherapist who specializes in grief and sorrow, says,

“There are few human expressions more genuine than a cry of grief.  We don’t have to wonder what that person is experiencing.  It is the soul revealing itself: Right now I am just broken by this loss.  It’s also powerful because we almost never hear it in this country.  Most cultures, but not ours, have keeners whose job it is to sound the note that opens the gate, so that we can all enter sorrow together”.

Entering sorrow can be intimidating.  Brokenness scares people – it can scare the one who has lost and it can scare the people around them.  We don’t know what to do or what to say.  We want to make it better but we can’t.  We live in a culture of words, a culture that is addicted to feeling good and is uncomfortable with deep emotion and silence.  We need to remember the power of simply showing up and looking someone in the eye and holding them – not for a moment, but long enough to ground them and for the grief to run through their body.  As Weller says, a cry of grief is the soul revealing itself. What if, instead of approaching a grieving person with a sense of awkwardness and inadequacy, we saw ourselves as a guardian of their soul? A guardian with a sense of purpose; to really hear and see our loved one’s grief.  Maybe we could approach our own grief from a similar perspective – trusting it’s our soul reaching out to show us the depth of our capacity to know, to give, to receive, to be LOVE.