Cherishing Grief: How to embrace unbearable pain

Cherishing Grief

Either your heart has been torn open by a grievous loss, or it has not. Perhaps you have lost a child, or watched a parent disappear into the haze of dementia. Maybe a beloved sibling has cut you off. Someone you loved, perhaps still love, dropped you and walked away. You may have been let go from a job that you dearly loved, or desperately needed. Our hearts can be pierced in countless ways.

Every one of us has suffered some losses.Yet there are people who have been spared grievous loss, whether as a result of innocent youth, or extraordinary fortune, or protection from a thick enough wall of denial. But many of us, perhaps including you, have felt the agony of a heart torn open by the loss of someone or something about which we cared deeply. Grief is the lingering expression of that love.

So the real question becomes, how do I live with love lost? How is it possible to take another breath when my chest is already swollen with pain?

Over the ages different people have offered so many suggestions: how we manage the loss in our thoughts, how we take care of our hearts, how we might fix our attention on something greater than ourselves, and how we resolve to live at conscious choice and execute on those decisions. Each of these topics could fill a book, in fact, have filled many. Each could be, and are, the topics for weekend workshops or a long term course of study. Entire religions have been founded upon these insights and responses.

If you seek to live effectively despite the pain of loss, then I encourage you to pursue any or all of these venues. You can pick yourself up and carry on.

However, let us take a moment now to also go in the other direction, to actually let that pain engulf us. That feels as counter-intuitive as to not withdraw your finger from being poked by a needle, or to not pull your hand away from a hot stove. My initial instinct is to recoil from this approach, horrified at the prospect.

But the universe has been generous with me in this regard, in that I have been given a lot to grieve. I keep getting opportunities to face another loss, and then another.

The older I get, the more losses I accumulate. The entire generation ahead of me nudges ever closer to and then, individual by individual, over that last edge. Obituaries in the daily paper now seem to include more people younger than I am than older. My life circumstances have changed, and then fundamentally changed, and then changed yet again. A truly humbling quantity of my losses result from my own personal ignorance and blindness reaping their self-destructive rewards.

So the first thing I want to tell you about how you can be with the pain of your grief is that no one can tell you how to be with the pain of your grief. What can be more personal, more vulnerable, more raw, more powerless, more despairing than the very bleeding of a wounded heart? The truest thing that I can say is that your pain is yours alone.

Taking nothing away from that aloneness is the additional truth that everyone that lives has lost, everyone that loves has lost or will lose, and the only absolute certainty is that, in the end, you will lose your very life as well. So while your pain is yours alone, you are not alone in feeling this pain.

It is natural for us to fear pain. The relentless struggle to avoid pain underlies many of our choices. Although this strategy is ultimately futile, and operates mostly within unconscious layers of our decision-making processes, avoiding pain is one of the major strategies around which people organize their lives.

So this, then, is the primary reason to make acquaintance with grief. Even if we never actually befriend this ache, we can at least embrace it with greater awareness. To that extent, we lift it out of the murk of our unconscious processing. When we become able to accept the very presence of grief, recognize it as intrinsic to human being, and hold it gently in the bowl of our cupped palms as we continue to step into our lives, then we are no longer victims to that unconscious part of our minds that futilely seeks to avoid the inevitable.

This morning, after my alarm roused me from a dream about leaving the house in which I am living and the logistics and feelings of losing this home, I sat in meditation at my altar. I put my meditation cushion in front of a statue of Michaelangelo’s La Pietá. This is the sculpture of Mary holding the dead body of Jesus after he has been brought down from the cross. In Italian, pietá means “lamentation,” a passionate expression of grief. I sometimes sit and behold this statue when I am feeling possessed by grief,. It helps me to sink into rather than resist the enveloping ache. I feel less alone in my lamentations.

Let me be clear: I also have a deep antipathy for my grief. I mourn my losses. I do not want to be in pain, and resist it in ways I see and in many more ways that I know I don’t know. But in addition to those reactions, I also find an vivid aliveness in my grief, a feeling of passionate vitality. The pain of each breath makes clear that I am still breathing. The exquisite agony illuminates my profound capacity to feel.

I have had the privilege of sitting with several excellent deaths. Some friends and relations have crossed over, out of this life, with grace and beauty and acceptance of their fate. Being with someone who is dying in this open-hearted way is one of the most life-affirming experiences I have ever had. There is nothing in this world that brings the very experience of life itself into bold relief like the immediate presence of death. The presence of loss brings life alive. You most acutely appreciate something when it is gone, or going.

The truth is, we are all going. With this very breath, you are now one breath closer to your own death. But that truth is so pervasive, so all encompassing, that are usually blind to it. Our mortality is too close for us to see.

After my first child was born, I would visit with him before I went to sleep at night. He looked so fragile, so vulnerable. A part of me could not comprehend that his delicate system could reliably breathe, and circulate blood, and perform the myriad functions required uninterrupted for human life. Each night I felt a poignant sense that this night, this very night, might be the last time I witnessed him still breathing. Every single night, I felt my heart break at what felt to me like the very real possibility that I might lose him. I would become engulfed by grief at the prospect, and when that wave receded, my devastated heart was raw and overcome with the pain of how deeply I loved this little boy. Then, and only then, could I fall asleep myself, with the strange solace that if this were to be my last day together with him, then on that very day I had truly and deeply felt the depth of my love for him.

It became a ritual. A small part of me was utterly convinced that one day I would go to his crib and finally find him cold and lifeless. I came to reluctantly accept that possibility. But never was I able to accept the possibility if that one morning would end the one night in which I had neglected my ritual, and had not stretched toward the bottom of my love for him. Eventually I came to believe I could survive his death, but I doubted my ability to live with the regret of not having loved him as utterly as I possibly could. So even if I were too tired to think straight, or detested the idea of diving into my grief yet again, another force greater than that resistance delivered me to his bedside, to nuzzle his soft hair and inhale his baby scent, to listen to the quiet breath that still entered and left his tiny nose, and to feel the tears of love and loss run down my cheeks.

Then my second son was born. I still had not developed the ability to trust that either of the babies would survive the night. Each night I would place my hand on their sleeping forms, feel the breath rising and falling from their tiny chests, and cry outward or inward tears at the potential loss. After that the twins were born, and now I went through the exercise four times every night, scratching the backs of those still awake the same way that my mother scratched my back nearly every night. My grief was not theoretical. The loss I felt is not just a potential loss. I knew then, as I know now, that one day I will certainly lose one or all of these children. If not from the intervention of their personal deaths, then through mine. We will be separated in our lifetime, and I grieve that still.

Then, at some point after the last child had reached puberty, I noticed that I no longer went to their sleeping forms consistently every night to grieve this certain loss. To some extent, I had come to take their ability to breathe through the night for granted. My grief still rolls through me in waves, at odd times, often at night but not necessarily. Yet I don’t resist this grief of losing them. This is one grief that I have learned to cherish. As much as it hurts, I have finally learned the lesson that I will survive that pain, and in its wake my heart will be raw and open and tender and exquisitely, agonizingly laid bare to the burning love that I feel for my children.

That grief, that love, makes me more alive. So does the grief I felt looking at La Pietá this morning. So does my impulse to share this pain with you right now.

I can’t tell you how to be with your grief. But I do pray that you find your own way of being with it.