I was thinking a lot about grief today after having a long walk with my cousin this morning. As usual after our walk we sit and share a cup of tea and talk about so many things, and our conversations so often touch on grief. Her father was my Dad’s younger brother, he followed my Dad to Australia after the war and met my aunt at a dance in Sydney. We used to live close to my cousin and her brother and Mum and Dad but when I came to be born my family was on a so called ‘upwardly mobile trajectory’ we moved away from the cosy suburb to a more exclusive (and emotionally lonely and deadened one.)
One of the sad things about this was we had so little to do with my cousin and her family in my adolsence and that is a wound that my cousin and I have been working to repair over the past few years since my breast cancer. Its is a sad thing to me that because my Uncle was only a public servant I don’t think Dad felt he had much in common with him. I see similar attitudes in how my brother keeps distance with us at times.
Anyway today we talked more of how people all tend to handle grief differently and I shared with her how much unresolved grief I had even into my mid 30s after the loss of my father. I never got to see his body or say goodbye. I missed the last night of his life as I had had an overseas shot for travelling to India and as it was for some weeks my father had been put under by drugs something he prophetically predicted before his cancer op to my Mum. I actually found myself crying today as I shared how my grief only really started to open up about 14 years later when I had 6 years of sobriety under my belt and then I ran from the second therapy attempt. I ran from the first one when my male therapist got sick and put into hospital not realising until years later what a trigger that was for me to run. I was not yet sober at that stage and one year of devastating addiction still lay before me.
It wasn’t until my godfather died though in 2004 that I really got grieve for my Dad but my sister was very disgusted when I broke down at Uncle Piet’s funeral telling me I was making a spectacle of myself when I shared a hug with his oldest grandson who was also really sad. I seem to touch base with the grief at other funerals. A very close male friend died late last year and I was overcome for the first 10 minutes of the service.
Anyway it occurred to me that unresolved grief may mean we live more in the land of the dead than the living for many years, even if unconsciously and it is said that when we didn’t get to fully bond with the parent or person concerned after they die the grief is also far more complex. The pull of the grief may drag us down into addiction or other diversions that don’t enable us to encompass and open up the fissures in our soul where pain or hurt is buried or contained.
I read a lovely book on the subject of grief and loss called The Soul In Grief which I shared a lot from just before my mother died at the end of 2017. In the book author Roman Romanyshan speaks of grief as a kind of spiritual orphanhood where we enter a mystical place of sadness and may also feel a connection to nature as well as the land of the shades. As I think about this in ancient cultures it was the Shaman who was probably the one who travelled to this grief underworld where he dialogued and may have brought messages back from the dead ancestors.
I heard recently that in my home town they are soon going to be having grief get togethers at cafes where those who have lost loved ones can go to talk about them or and grieve their losses with others. Sharing memories is one way of reconnecting to the passed loved one, though some may shy away from ever mentioning them again.
One of the saddest consequences of my father’s death and the 8 years I spent in active addiction following it was that I was forced to go overseas alone by my mother and when I tried to come home she had remarried and in later years she admitted this had been a kind of grief avoidance of a kind, not that we can ever outrun grief, it has a very insidious and sneaky way of eventually catching up with us. I wandered are around with so much unresolved grief deep inside and sometime I know my grief made it hard for me to achieve true intimacy. It is almost as if, when we do not fully grieve a loved one, part of us gets lost and even when we grieve if we loved them so deeply a part of ours may forever remain with them. In his book Romanyshan shares his journey of letting go of the loss of his wife after her death which led him through many phases and in time to a new connection. This may not be possible for some people though.
Unresolved grief to my mind often lies at the root of a lot of addiction whether it is grief for the lost self we got barred the way to over the course of our development or an ancestral component of unresolved grief, loss or trauma never fully spoken about but never the less carried in the collective unconscious of the family and borne by one family member. I was thinking of my sister in this context over the past few weeks, she seems to be carrying much of the grief of my mother in a deeply internalised place but none of it seems to make its way into the surface in the form of tears and there doesn’t ever seem to be any way we can connect at a deeper level over past losses much as I try and maybe we are not meant to. I just don’t know any more. She just keept looking for her entire solution in the medication. But that is her path. Still not being able to share and cry together is difficult for me. I don’t do the purely superficial connection of just sharing news that well. I would like to be able to share some feelings with her but this just does not seem possible.
Anyway my therapist often talks about how the Underworld of grief and childhood trauma, neglect and loss captured me pretty early on in my life. I read a book a few years back on archetypes of life experience that some of us go through and this book made mention of the concept of the Persephone woman. As some of you know Persephone was the one who picked the Narcissisus flower when out on a spring walk with her mother the Goddess Demeter one day and immediately the ground opened up and swallowed her. She was captured by Pluto the King of Hades and forced to spend the rest of her life in the Underworld until her Mother kicked up such a ruckus that a bargain was struck that ensured Persephone would be freed for part of the year from the Underworld and thus the seasons of nature were born.
The Persephone woman amongst us are the ones who carry a burden of psychic ‘darkness’ having undergone a past of abuse or trauma or disconnection or psychic pain. We feel ourselves to be separate, we may succumb to addictions as a way of coping, we feel draw to mediumistic or mystical types of subjects and can be artists which is the way we work to make the unconscious conscious or at least develop a relationship with deeper complex feelings we struggle to express in a more materialistic culture.
Some of us attempt suicide because the land of the dead or fears of decay or feelings of low self esteem obliterate our solar light or life force, we most certainly suffer long periods or ‘seasons’ of depression and deep soul sadness due to our experiences that others may not fully understand. And we may never quite feel like we belong in the daylight world with other ‘lighter’ human beings. Others sensing our energy may fear us or shy away from us or scapegoat us or try to exile us and this can add to even more of a sense of our being ‘apart’, but we do have gifts to give and a large part of our healing lies in learning to embrace our wounded self without allowing it to steal all of our light and life and longing for and movement towards connection with what ever medium we choose as a medium of nurture..
For myself I realised that I inhabited that dark Underworld for many years especially when I hit the 10 year mark of sobriety and all that I had buried or that lay unresolved in me began to percolate and open up. I can still feel the lure of that dark place open up for me and I am aware that all the experiences I have had in my life mark me out as a bit removed from the pure daylight world but lately I have felt so much more as though I would like to ‘remain in light’. I see the dark pathway manifesting when the conscious feminine in men and woman is silenced, when our true feelings are disparaged or mocked, when we are misunderstood or judged for being addicts even in recovery. Hopefully in time though we learn to come to terms with our so called dark side and dark past. We come to accept the scars we carry as badges of courage because they mark the places the underworld opened up as our psychic skin cut and bled through. We come to accept the experiences we went through and see how they were in some form a kind of awakening, a challenge to accept the totality of emotions and reactions that the daylight world often shuns or dumps : guilt, shame, rage and grief. We also learn that in some way our experiences mark out our life for some kind of meaningful contribution particularly at this time when the wounded and unconscious masculine and feminine archetypes are in a state of transition. And through the gifts of our art and bearing testament to our experiences we show others that they too can embrace the Underworld and not only survive but live a full life and thrive again.
Emerging From The Dark Night 