What is to give light
must endure burning.
—VIKTOR FRANKL
How do we cultivate our essential nature without sidestepping our human nature? This is at the heart of Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience.
It is a most beautiful and difficult thing to be human.
Waking up in this human experience is not easy. Authentic spiritual practice is not about maintaining high altered states, transcending the body, bypassing difficult emotions, or healing all that remains unresolved within us. It is more grounded, real, and alive than that. Spiritual practice helps us settle into the utter simplicity of being ourselves. The healing that it engenders happens when we bring awareness to the places that have hardened in us through the conditioned habits of grasping, resistance, and avoidance.
Mindfulness is a de-conditioning. It cultivates a merciful, awake presence of mind that no longer blocks the heart. Then things are free to be as they are. We allow the difficult, dark, and dense. We become more intimate with our pain and difficulties, our joy and beauty, embodying our full humanity and discovering an ever-deeper, vast sense of wholeness.
Sometimes what is over there seems more valuable than what is right here. But being who you are can only arise from accepting where you are.
* * *
My daughter, Gina, and I were walking on a stunning thin strip of beach on an island in northern Thailand. As a young person, she was prone to emotional upheaval. This day was being swept away by her unrequited attraction to a boy back home. As we walked, she talked, explaining how she had to get to a phone to call him. I asked her if she was sure she wanted to spend her time in paradise strategizing about how to reach this guy.
Wisely realizing that she wasn’t even seeing the turquoise water surrounding us, she replied, “No, but what am I supposed to do about this? How do I get rid of this feeling?”
I might have dismissed this as a teenage drama, but I saw a small opening. I asked Gina to sense her body, particularly in the area of her chest. She reported the tension and heat she found there. She took a few breaths. I asked if she could name the feeling she was experiencing.
“Sadness and the fear that I will be rejected,” she replied immediately. As she spoke, she realized how this feeling was opening up a deeper pool of unacknowledged grief that she had been carrying around.
With all the love in my heart, I said, “Sweetie, don’t sell yourself short. Your thoughts and emotions are not who you are. They pass through you, but they are not you.”
She stood still. It was like Moses seeing the burning bush. Her mind momentarily stopped. That simple truth had the power of a holy revelation for her.
We lay down in the sand and looked up. I said, “You are as amazing as the blue sky above us. Your emotions are like the clouds passing through the sky. This story of unrequited love is just another passing show. Like clouds, emotions can be powerful and painful. Sometimes they appear big enough to block out the sun. But it’s only temporary. Don’t be fooled.”
I asked if there was any part of her that could be with her sadness. I could see her searching, eventually finding a more spacious part of herself. I asked her to place attention on the relationship between the sadness and the newfound openness.
Gina said, “Wow, the relationship between the two is like a third thing.”
“Great,” I said. “Let them mingle with one another and get to know each other really well.”
Gradually, her crush on the boy faded, and her relationship with herself became far more interesting.
The ability to watch our inner dramas without getting lost in judgment or reactivity is essential to spiritual growth. When we try to push away difficult emotions or the bodily sensations and states of mind that accompany them, we actually keep them in place. When we lock them in, we don’t give them the space they need to unfold and reveal themselves, to show us what they have to teach.
Resistance does not assist our inner work. In Unfolding Now, A. H. Almaas sums it up beautifully:
When you are resisting, you are basically resisting yourself. It is a kind of self-resistance. Instead of being with yourself, you are resisting being with yourself. Instead of being yourself, you are resisting being yourself … Resistance implies some kind of division. It signals that we are not recognizing that what is arising is a manifestation of our own consciousness, of our awareness. When hatred arises in us, for example, or fear, it is our souls, our consciousness, taking that form at that time for a reason we perhaps don’t understand yet. If we are able to allow the fear or hate, embrace it, hold it, feel it fully in its totality—in all its texture, color and vividness—we give it the space to be itself.
We generally feel we have two options with difficult emotions: repress or express.
We repress because an experience seems threatening, upsetting, or somehow inappropriate. Repression can be a choice to defend against, as when we become conscious of a feeling or an experience and then push it below the surface of our awareness. Or the repression may be so powerful that it completely prohibits an experience, and we block it from ever coming to the light of day.
When we repress an experience, it does not go away. It still lurks below the surface, encapsulated in its original form with all its associated energy. When we bury feelings or bypass them, the material is not available to us. We can’t understand it. We can’t use it in a constructive way. Repressed anger easily turns to depression, resentment, or fear. Repression generates mental reactivity and skews our perceptions. It leads to what in Buddhism we call papanca mind, which refers to a proliferation of thoughts and reactions. We re-enact the play as we have scripted it, plot our response, and act out compulsive, mechanical behaviors. Physically, repression can manifest in symptoms like tension, dullness, and a lack of aliveness, and can even become a contributing factor to serious illness.
Emotional expression can be positive and healthy. Sharing our stories is often how we discover the meaning and value of a particular experience. Expressing grief over our mothers’ deaths and letting the tears flow can help us metabolize the loss. On the other hand, emotional reactivity usually means that our response is out of proportion to a given stimulus. Unconscious or unresolved feelings get triggered and erupt with an intensity that overwhelms us. Frequently, we act out on others. We kick the cat, rage at being stuck in traffic, or otherwise try to displace these uncomfortable feelings because we are caught by the desire to discharge them.
There is a third option: contain the emotion. This is a more balanced and creative response. We hold the emotions and the related material in a caring way. We accept the reality of their presence, regardless of whether we like them or not. We bring them forward with respectful interest. We get curious about our experience. Maybe we explore the tightness in our chest, or sense the heavy weight of our arms or the feeling of longing without attaching any of it to a story. Reminding ourselves to instead gently hold in steadiness apparently differing experiences and perspectives.
With equanimity, we can regulate, reflect, and reappraise. Breathing, sensing, and bringing mindfulness to the physical experience stabilizes our attention and allows the body to become a safe container in which emotions can be embodied and regulated. Then we can reflect on the possible consequences of acting out the emotion or unnecessarily dwelling on it, the potential impact of hurting ourselves or others. We can re-evaluate the automatic negative response and possibly even reinterpret our perceptions of events to discover a new meaning that helps us relate to our emotions in a constructive way. We realize that we have a choice to turn in a healthy direction, or at least to bring patience and kindness to our reactivity.
* * *
Grief is a normal, natural response to loss. It is also natural to want to avoid it completely.
There is a well-known Buddhist teaching that is often referred to as the parable of the mustard seed. It tells the story of a woman named Kisa Gotami, whose eight-year-old son suddenly died one day. She was out of her mind with grief. She picked up her son’s dead body and walked through the village pleading with people to help her, to give her some medication that might help her son.
Someone sent her to the place where the Buddha was teaching. She approached him for help. “Please, save my son,” she begged.
The Buddha responded, “I can, indeed, help you, but first you must complete a task.” (There is always a task in these mythical stories.) “You must bring me a single mustard seed. This mustard seed must come from a home, from a family, that has not been touched by death.”
Now, mustard seed was a common household spice at this time. What the Buddha understood was that Kisa Gotami needed to believe, for the time being, that her child would live again—she couldn’t accept his death yet. The Buddha had no agenda to take away her denial or refuse any part of her experience. Instead, he skillfully guided her toward the discovery of a powerful truth.
Kisa Gotami set out to the village in the hopes of finding the seed. And as the story goes, she moved from house to house, but couldn’t find a single home that had not been touched by death. No one could give her a mustard seed. Recognizing that death comes to us all, she was freed from her isolation. This enabled her to rest and bury her child. Rather than being defeated by the truth, she was consoled by it.
The difficulty with such stories is that we sometimes struggle to collect the wisdom from them, keeping them at a safe distance. “Oh yes, but these events happened twenty-five hundred years ago,” we tell ourselves. Or “Oh yes, but this is just a story.” That is why I like to imagine what it might be like if these events actually took place in the here and now.
Suppose this grieving woman walked through your neighborhood, to your street, and knocked on your door, holding a dead child in her arms. Can you imagine what it would be like to find her there? What would you do when you opened the door? Take a moment to reflect. What would you do, really? Imagine your response.
Some of us would invite her in, hug her, possibly even take the child into our own arms. We might make food, offer a cup of tea, or otherwise try to comfort this grieving mother. Others of us might sit with her on the couch, listen, cry with her, and, if it seemed appropriate, share stories of our own losses. Unsurprisingly, most of us would not know what to say or do. In our confusion, we might rely on hollow clichés like, “He is in a better place. He is with God now,” or “There is a reason for everything.” If we are honest with ourselves, we may admit that we would be too frightened to even open the door. Instead we would call the professionals, dial 911.
Probably those things happened even back in the day in Kisa Gotami’s village. I suspect that her story wasn’t as tidy as it is usually told. Death is messy. Grief is even messier. I imagine that Kisa Gotami, in walking from house to house, encountered the sadness, rejection, loneliness, and compassion of others. As she did, she began to realize not only that death comes to us all, but also that grief is our common ground. It is a connective tissue that joins us together.
Most of us wouldn’t be able to contribute a mustard seed. Certainly none of us is exempt from loss. Each of us has our grief. Our tendency for self-protection leads us to store these difficult, sometimes shameful, experiences in a dark, cramped corner of our minds. But every new loss triggers the memory of another. In the intense grief arising from the loss of someone we love, we rediscover the pool of grief that we have always carried, the ordinary, everyday grief that inhabits our lives.
A while back at Zen Hospice, we cared for a young woman named Cindy, who had breast cancer. Her parents lived in Iowa, where her father, Clyde, had worked for the past forty years in a meatpacking plant on the night shift.
Knowing that Cindy’s death was coming soon, I called to tell Clyde that if he wanted to be with his daughter before she passed away, he needed to come to San Francisco right away.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll take the train. I’ll be there in a couple of days.”
When I inquired as to why he didn’t just fly, Clyde revealed that he had never been in an airplane before. I said, “You know, Clyde, I think you’ve gotta come quicker than that.”
So he told me that he would come by plane and that he would arrive at ten o’clock that night. I went to Cindy’s bedside and whispered in her ear, “Your dad’s coming. He’ll be here at ten.”
She started mumbling over and over again, “Ten o’clock, ten o’clock, ten o’clock.”
As her father’s plane touched down at the San Francisco airport at ten in the evening, Cindy died. Honoring her indigenous roots, we bathed her body in a brew of herbasanté and covered her in a bed of herbs and flowers from our gardens: sage, lavender, lemon balm, bay laurel, scented geraniums, and rose petals.
It was my job to meet Cindy’s father at the door an hour later and tell him that his thirty-year-old daughter had already died. Shocked, at first Clyde just paced the hallways. One of the volunteers stayed with him, and one of us stayed with Cindy. One person to accompany a man in his grief, the other to bear witness to death.
Eventually, Clyde was able to enter Cindy’s room. Hours passed, some in silence, some filled with him telling stories about Cindy as volunteers generously listened. We mostly stayed close without interference, modeling that it was possible to be with grief.
Around three in the morning, I said, “Clyde, I’m tired. I’ve got to go to bed now and be home to get my children off to school in the morning.”
He said, “It’s all right. I’m going to stay up with Cindy.”
At eight, I returned to see Clyde sitting on the edge of the bed with his daughter. His right hand had slipped under the bed of flowers, resting on Cindy’s foot. He was holding a bagel in his left. He had the phone tucked into his shoulder, and he was making the funeral arrangements for his daughter.
Clearly, there had been a major shift in Clyde. Now he was willing to be with his grief. I asked him what had changed, adding, “As a father, I can’t even imagine what you must be experiencing. It must be so strange to have your daughter die before you do.”
Clyde was a plainspoken man. He said, “You know, I realized something. It’s kinda familiar.”
Most often, we think of grief as an overwhelming response to a singular event, usually the death of someone we love. Yet when we look more closely, we see that grief has been our companion for a good part of our lives. Clyde was talking about everyday grief, the response to the multiple losses and little deaths that occur almost daily. The loss of a treasured piece of jewelry, being let go from a job, the abrupt breakup of a relationship, infertility, financial crises, kids going off to school, the loss of our vitality or a physical or mental capacity, the loss of control, the loss of our dreams. Everyday grief arises when we remember how the carelessness of our actions has caused harm to others. It comes in moments of not being recognized, at times when our expectations aren’t met. Sometimes our grief is about what we’ve had and lost, and sometimes it is about what we never got to have in the first place.
* * *
Sadness is just one of the many faces of grief. I find it useful to think of grief as a constellation of responses, an ever-changing process. The author C. S. Lewis, after the death of his wife, wrote, “No one told me grief felt so much like fear.” Our grief manifests as anger, self-judgment, regret, and guilt. We experience loneliness and relief, blame and shame, and periods of numbness when we feel like we are walking through molasses. Rarely are we prepared for the intense feelings that engulf us when someone we love dies.
Karen, a longtime Buddhist meditator, master gardener, and lover of nature, experienced the death of both of her parents in about a year’s time. Her father’s suicide was unexpected and particularly painful for her. She described her grief as an all-consuming rage. Not long after these events, an environmental group invited her to speak at a rally to save the old-growth redwoods. In response, Karen shouted into the phone, “My father has died! There are no trees!”
In managing the grief of others and ourselves, we are generally afraid and impatient. Our own unexplored fear of grief can lead us to hurry others along the path of healing. But grief has a unique rhythm and texture for each of us. It is a deep, slow process of the soul. It cannot be rushed.
Dotty’s son died of AIDS. Years later, she told me how an overzealous bereavement volunteer from a large hospice agency had continually asked her, “How do you feel about your son’s death?” Dotty, a rather private person, said simply, “I hurt. How else could a mother feel when she has lost her son?”
Over the course of several months, the bereavement volunteer, with the encouragement of her support group, persisted in trying to help Dotty “get in touch with her feelings.” In telling the story, Dotty said, “I felt so much guilt and confusion in those days, not about the death of my son, but over my inability to give that volunteer what she was looking for and obviously needed.”
We need to allow for the full spectrum of expressions of grief, from the numbness and absence of expression to wild, out-of-control displays of emotion. The sometimes almost deranged explosions of grief are rarely allowed in conventional bereavement support groups. Yet grief is unpredictable, uncontrollable. You can be going along having a great day, and then suddenly, a memory is triggered and you find yourself overwhelmed by sadness. Intense emotions hit you when you least expect them. One friend whose mother had died said that it happened to her in the cereal aisle of a local supermarket. “I just lost it, right there between the Cheerios and the Raisin Bran.”
Our fear of this lack of control leads us to ideas about managing our grief or getting over our grief. It is curious to me that we never speak about “managing” our joy or “getting over” our happiness. Grief is like a stream running through our lives, and it is important to understand that loss doesn’t go away. It lasts a lifetime. It is our relationship to a particular loss that changes. It won’t always hold the same intensity for us, or take the same expression. But the grief as a natural human response to loss will remain, and our resistance to it will only intensify the pain.
In challenging our notions of control, grief cracks our defensive shell of invulnerability. It exposes the ways we hide from the truth and asks us to acknowledge what has always been here but was previously unrecognized: our human frailty.
Grief can be so powerful that instead of surrendering to its force, we reach for information and models that outline predictable stages of grief in the hopes that they will take us through our grief more easily. In so doing, we run the risk of confusing the map with the territory. Journeying through grief, it can indeed help to get familiar with the terrain, to know something of its patterns. But there is no “right” way to grieve, no timetable, no one path. And there certainly are no shortcuts through grief. The only way is straight through the middle.
We don’t get past our pain. We go through it and are transformed by it.
At Zen Hospice Project, our volunteer coordinator Eric Poché came up with a simple formulation that we often used to describe grieving. We speak of loss, losing, and loosening. These are not stages, nor are they meant to be a map. There is no linear progression through grief. Loss, losing, and loosening are simply common experiences that we might cycle through as we grieve, or that might suddenly explode to the surface of our awareness.
The initial experience of loss is often visceral. Even when death is expected, our bodies and minds can’t seem to take it in right away. We don’t want to believe that the person we loved has died. Just as when you’ve been punched in the belly, grief can take your breath away. A common reaction is shock and uncertainty. You might feel disconnected from other feelings or people. It can seem like you are sleepwalking or living in a dream. It can be difficult to find your balance.
When her sister, Piper, breathed her final breath after a long bout with cancer, Linda was down the hall. When Linda returned to the room, she let out a gasp, and then her body doubled over in pain. She wrapped her arms around herself, and although she was crying, no sound came out. She sat in a chair next to the bed, holding Piper’s hand and staring off into space, shaking her head from side to side, repeating over and over again, “She was so young. This isn’t possible. This can’t have happened. This can’t have happened.”
There is no explaining to be done at a moment like this, just accompanying. After an hour or so, following our custom, I invited Linda to join us in a ritual bathing of her sister’s body. Linda sternly shouted back, “She’s not dead yet!”
Clearly Piper was dead. There was no breath, no pulse, and already her eyes had begun to milk over. Rationally, it’s hard to imagine how Linda could deny these truths. Yet in the moment, her mind couldn’t allow the reality to sink in. Intuitively, I asked Linda, “When was your sister most alive?”
She replied, “Oh, Piper was a rascal when she was a little girl. Always getting in trouble with our parents. As a teenager, she was even more mischievous. After high school, she became this adventurer, spelunking, climbing mountains. Later, she was the editor of a left-wing political magazine. She was hell on wheels, incredibly alive.”
Gradually, more of the story emerged. Linda said, “Piper got sick a few years back. We didn’t know what it was at first. Then she started the chemo, and after that she had trouble walking. Remember, Frank, just after she came to the hospice, Piper took that fall and broke her arm and you brought her to the ER? So stubborn! She wouldn’t accept any help getting around.
“Everything happened so quickly. In the past few days, she stopped eating, then she stopped talking and even drinking. Her breathing really changed today, didn’t it? It got slower and slower, and then there were those long gaps. I only went down the hall for a few minutes to use the bathroom. When I returned, she’d slipped away.”
After a pause, Linda said, “Now we can bathe her.”
We did so, then we dressed Piper in a beautiful white kimono and surrounded her with flowers. Telling the story of her sister’s life helped Linda to accept the reality of Piper’s death. It helped Linda become current. She told me later that bathing her sister’s body with the utmost care, touching death directly like that, became a refuge for her. She would return to those moments when confusion or denial surfaced again to block the truth.
Shock and disbelief usually give way to guilt and regret. We judge ourselves mercilessly. I commonly hear statements such as “I should have taken her to the hospital sooner,” “We could have tried other treatments,” “I wish I’d spent more time with her,” and “I wanted to be there at the moment she died.” Our capacity to be cruel to ourselves never ceases to amaze me. If only we could stop for a moment and listen to the sounds of our voices, surely our hearts would open to embrace our pain.
Without acknowledging it, it’s easy to be swept away by the powerful and uncontrollable emotions that rise up with grief, often unexpectedly. After months of exhausting caregiving, continuously witnessing the suffering of someone we love, we may be ashamed that we feel relief when they die. At other times, we get angry, incredibly angry. We want to blame somebody, anybody. “The damned doctors, they said she had six more months,” or “What kind of God takes someone in the prime of life?” It is especially confusing when our anger turns toward the person who died. But the truth is we might be angry at that person for leaving us behind with all this pain and loneliness and confusion.
There is no avoiding these painful states of mind. If you’re supporting a survivor or you are yourself the survivor, it is important to acknowledge the feelings and understand that they are perfectly normal. Some people cry oceans of tears, others feel numb. Men grieve differently from women. There is no right way, only your way.
Grief is disorienting. We forget our keys, arrive at places and can’t remember why we went there. This is the state of grief that at Zen Hospice Project we called losing. We can’t concentrate. We live in a confused reality. And this goes on for a while after the death of someone you love.
A few months after her mother’s death, a woman described walking down the street and stopping at a store window. Inside, she saw a lamp that her mother would have really loved. When she got home, she picked up the phone to call her mother and tell her about it. Then she thought to herself, Oh my goodness, I’ve gone crazy. But this sort of experience is a normal reaction during the grieving period.
In the old days, people used to wear black armbands to let each other know that they were mourning because grief is like being in an altered state. And people treated mourners differently. They took care of them. In the first days and weeks after someone you love dies, don’t expect yourself to be able to function fully. Ask for help. Let somebody else make the meals and do the laundry. Cancel your appointments. Take time. Walk if you can. Your body will be rebelling in all sorts of odd ways. Incredible fatigue. Your legs will feel like lead. Restlessness will rule. You may not want to sleep or eat. Or you might need to sleep all day. Find someone to hold you, or find a shirt with your loved one’s scent on it and hold it close. Distracting yourself only postpones the experience. It doesn’t make it go away.
Losing can go on for weeks, months, even years. When someone we love dies, we keep on losing that person over and over again, especially at holidays, in times of difficult decisions, and in those little personal moments we long to share.
During this period, we realize most clearly the roles that the other person has played in our lives, and we grieve the loss of those also. We don’t just lose a wife when she dies. If she was the person who worked out all the battles with our kids, or earned the money, or touched our bodies with love and tenderness, we lose all those things, as well. One man told me that his wife did the banking and that every time he went to make a deposit he would cry. “Whenever I go there I feel like I lose her again,” he said. If our parents die, we may find ourselves feeling really fragile. They were the buffer standing between us and death, and suddenly, we become much more aware of our own mortality.
This is the phase of grief when we feel most alone. Friends drop away, others give us unwanted advice. After the death of her husband, one woman told me that her friends suggested that she should get a dog for companionship. Others tell us to keep busy or to get on with our lives. It is their fear of pain and our cultural predisposition toward avoiding anything unpleasant that is driving them. Unfortunately, their advice doesn’t help.
My friend Caroline told me that the one thing that did help after her husband’s death was a friend who called her every week to invite her out to dinner. The friend said, “I know you may not want to go, and it’s okay to say no. But I want you to know that I’m here when you need me. I will call again next Monday.”
Losing is the time to be around the people whom you trust the most, those who have earned the right to listen. It helps alleviate the feeling of being disconnected from life. Those who have consciously lived through a loss of their own also know the importance of listening without judgment or agenda.
In this period of losing, it is critical that we allow ourselves to feel the pain. Some say time heals. That is a dangerous half-truth. Time alone doesn’t heal. Time and loving attention heal.
Some begin this process by writing letters to the person who has died, speaking what was left unsaid, or repeating whatever they feel needs to be said again. Others make scrapbooks or photo albums. Rituals can help. I usually recommend that people find some place in their house to create an altar. Place on that altar a photo and some special objects of the person who has died. Spend some time there each day. Talk to the person, tell them how you’re feeling, maybe spend some time in meditation or in prayer. Use this moment to extend your wish to the person who has passed that they may be free of suffering, that they may be touched by compassion.
One Zen teacher brings together women whose babies have died. They gather for a weekend and sew a rakusu, a miniature version of the standard Buddhist monastic robes. It looks like a bib and is made of sixteen or more strips of cloth sewn together into a brick-like pattern. As the women sew, they speak of their babies. They share how their bodies and hearts ache.
The weekend concludes with a ritual that involves placing the rakusu on a statue of Jizo, who is said to be an embodiment of the Bodhisattva Vow, the aspiration to save all beings from suffering. In Japan, Jizo is the protector of travelers and children, especially mizuko, which literally translates as “water child” but refers to the souls of aborted, stillborn, or miscarried babies. Some of the unborn babies who were unnamed are given names. Often this is the first and only time these women’s losses have been acknowledged and ritually honored. They find it deeply healing.
For many years, I led an annual retreat for people living with HIV. On a certain night, we would gather round the campfire and introduce ourselves to each other by relating the losses of our lives. For some, this was the loss of hope or the loss of faith. For others, it was the loss of identities. For many, it was the numbing, multiple deaths that they had experienced when their ten or twenty or thirty close friends had died of AIDS.
As we listened, we would bear witness to one another. And we would discover that it is possible to open to and even heal such devastating grief. We would find that our grief was workable.
It is not the pain that awakens us; it is our attention to the pain. Our willingness to experience and investigate our suffering gives rise to compassion and kindness. Consistent, loving attention melts our well-constructed defenses and unleashes old holdings. We begin to invite the pain into our hearts. The thoughts, the physical sensations, the emotional turmoil that we have so long rejected and had so little room for … they begin to be held in the comfort of our awareness.
Loosening is the period in which the knot of our grief is untied. It is a time of renewal. You can’t go back to life as it was before because you are a different person now, changed by your journey through grief. But you can begin to embrace life again, to feel alive again. The intensity of emotions has subsided somewhat. You can remember the loss without being caught up in a stranglehold of grief. You can move forward without abandoning the one you love.
One elderly woman explained it this way. She said that she and her husband had made all of their important decisions together. For several months after her husband’s death, she continued to set a place for him at the dinner table. She would sit down, talk to him, and ask his advice, as if he were still sitting there across the table from her.
Gradually, she said, that habit stopped, but she would still hear his voice inside her head. And when it came time to make decisions, she still would base her plans on what he would have said or done. After about a year of loving attention to him and her grief, she began to notice that the responses to her questions were coming in her own voice, not his.
“I lead my own life now,” she said. “He travels with me everywhere, but I decide where we’ll go on vacation!”
When someone close to us dies, we experience a tremendous sense of loss. At first, it’s like reaching for a hand that has always been there, only to discover that it is no longer available. Gradually we see that the relationship continues. The person is in some way internalized, and you can carry them with you wherever you go. They might surprise you when a memory of them shows up when you least expect it. You can talk to them, they can talk to you, they can be with you, and you can be with them. You are not crazy because you feel the presence of your loved one in your heart.
The grieving process is like a transitional space in your relationship. The physical presence of the other person used to be at the center of the relationship, but now that there is no physical presence, the center of the relationship is the sensitivity and love that lives within you.
Grieving the death of someone we love is like being thrown into a raging river of powerful and conflicting emotions. It pulls us down, down beneath the surface of our lives and into dark waters where we cannot breathe. Frantically, we try to escape the whirlpool of this inner journey. Surrendering, we feel ourselves carried forward by gentle currents to a new destination. Emerging from the water, we step ashore with refreshed eyes, and we enter the world in a new way.
To accompany a dying person, to make the journey through grief ourselves—these may be the greatest challenges we will ever face in our lives. But don’t turn away. Bring your whole self to the experience. When we take care of someone we love and do it with great integrity and impeccability, when we feel that we have given ourselves fully and completely to our grief and didn’t hold anything back, then we will surely feel great sorrow. But also we will feel gratitude and the possibility of opening to a reservoir of joy and love that we may have never known before. I call this undying love.
In grief, we access parts of ourselves that were somehow unavailable to us in the past. With awareness, the journey through grief becomes a path to wholeness. Grief can lead us to a profound understanding that reaches beyond our individual losses. Every time we experience a loss, we have another chance to experience life at a greater depth. It opens us to the most essential truths of our lives: the inevitability of impermanence, the causes of suffering, and the illusion of separateness. We begin to appreciate that we are more than the grief. We are what the grief is moving through.
In the end, we may still fear death, but we don’t fear living nearly as much. In surrendering to our grief, we have learned to give ourselves to life.