The Gift of Grief

It may be hard to imagine that grief could be a gift, but imagine what it might be like to not be able to grieve. Maybe you don’t have to imagine so hard, though. We are surrounded and bombarded in our culture by ways to distract ourselves from what we feel and experience and to have alternatives to allowing ourselves to be permeated by pain and really take it in.

The easy way out of grief is to harden our hearts and turn the pain of our loss and fear of our vulnerability into rage and project it externally into some imagined perpetrator. Wars are waged, families broken, relationships shattered, people isolated when the mind tightens into a story and defends against the broken heart.

We come to learn how to grieve from our early relationships, caregivers, family members, tribes, community and wider culture. There’s little tolerance for allowing the tenderness and we’ve come a long way from the wisdom of indigenous communities that take time to gather together, to acknowledge the loss, to grieve and mourn in the wide range of its possible forms, and to be welcomed back into the land of the living when you’re ready.

The emphasis of our modern world is to keep going, to not take a pause, to not linger in reflection and to keep business going as usual without skipping a beat. Grief can be isolating as it feels like you’re moving at a different pace and everything else is going on at usual speed. This is a common experience. And it’s also true that many of us suffer from feeling alone and isolated most of the time. Grief can accentuate this unless we take up the call that we’re not meant to grieve alone. We can’t fully grieve alone, actually.

The gift of grief is that we come into our shared humanity and the truth of our vulnerableness. The strategies for defending ourselves can possible soften, maybe even breakdown under the magnitude of the loss. That could be why so many people describe having a greater sense of connection with others during catastrophic times. The truth of our mammal selves, our inherent design as social beings can come more to the forefront. We are really connected.

While the personality defends itself, the soul has its own calling. We don’t grieve what we don’t love. We can’t control this, we’re not meant to and it’s not possible.

We may have moments in a grieving process where we feel some deprivation of who we are, but loss of another, the loss of a home, the loss of species and the bounty of our Mother earth can break down that little sense of isolated self. We can possibly come out of that smallness. It’s possible to live with a broken heart without it being translated into a weakness of character.

And if and when we can allow the grief, truly allow ourselves to touch our woundedness, a sense of vitality can come forth with a strength we never imagined. What a gift!