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.