If grief is a disease,
then so must be love.
Despite the fact that we will all experience the death of someone we love, something in the social system pushes back against, that creating a systematic avoidance that promotes hostility, intolerance, and segregation of those grieving.
Beauty and pain coexist. But when we are in the early phases of grieving, in order to eventually see the beauty (and experience the joy) in the world again, we must first feel and inhabit our pain. ..(over time)…. we begin to notice how we move in and out of these binary states (sadness and happiness, grief and gratitude.) We needn’t eschew grief to be happy, and we needn’t decry happiness in order to feel grief.
Contemplating the death of those we love and feeling tremendous grief in the aftermath of so doing brings us face-to-face with what matters. It shows us what it means to be human is to be vulnerable, to suffer, and to risk love.
I recently worked with a grieving mother who told me I was her “last chance” at life. Over and over providers had pathologized her, telling her that she was mentally ill, specifically diagnosed with a major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disode. What does “mentally ill” really mean in the aftermath of losing two children and her husband in a fire? She told me tears come nearly every day, even seven months after their deaths. She wonders what she might have done differently to save their lives. She sits in their rooms some days, and others she cannot even bear to walk past those rooms. All of those reactions are normal and human. Clinically speaking, I would be more concerned about someone who did not experience some version of those feelings.
The pathological response comes from the culture, in the form of the message she needs to stop feeling profound grief in reaction to such a profound loss. A society that prevents a woman from grieving for her children and her husband as intensely necessary and as long as necessary is a culture that promotes bypass.
In a certain sense, I suspect the bypassing of traumatic grief may be the greatest threat facing humankind today, responsible for immense suffering from addictions and abuse to social disconnection and perhaps even war. When we disconnect from our grief, we disconnect from ourselves. When we disconnect from ourselves, we disconnect from others, and from the natural world. It is an insidious cycle of unnecessary suffering that pervades families, communities, cultures, and generations. By trying to circumvent suffering we magnify it. If we by pass long enough… we begin to fragment. When this happens, our emotional range contracts and shrinks – and so does our world.
Like love, grief cannot be constrained by time and place.
Like the rest of the natural world, grief has its own organic rhythm, its own pulse of change.
All we have to do IS FEEL IT!!!
Emerging From The Dark Night 