As a culture we often are so ignorant,clumsy and insecure around loss and grief. We often sideline those who are grieving or act as if grief is some kind of inconvenience, at least this is how I so often have experienced people relating to me when I was in grief.. However being able to make a relationship with our grief and finding ways to express and release all of the complex associated feeling is now being understood to be more and more important for our mental and emotional health. Possibly some of us may know how to grieve or are lucky enough to have those around us who allow a place for its expression in our life, though experiencing this kind of support of thing seems to be rare. Lucky are those who find this and don’t have to sustain some kind of injury or illness in the process of having their grief and feelings shut down.
C S Lewis once wrote that for him, grief was a lot like fear many of us can find the feelings overwhelming and destabilising and that is what the landscape of grief is like, it is out of our control really.. Recently I have been reading an autobiography written by C S Lewis, Surprised By Joy, and in the book he describes how he came to fear emotions due to the way they were repressed in his family.. When his mother died when he was only 9 years old the word became very cold and dark for him, his one saving grace seemed to be the relationship with his older brother.. Both siblings were sent away to boarding school following her death and when they did spend any time at home his father was more likely to express anger than sadness. Bear in mind too that he was born in the late 19th Century.
I highly recommend grief therapist Joanne Cacciatore’s book on grief that I quoted from a couple of weeks ago. It is called Bearing the Unbearable : Love, Loss and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief. As a counseller Joanne has a lot of experience and she also suffered the loss of a child so what she writes really does come out of her own process endured in navigating the storms and fires of grief… In the book she describes so beautifully what the grief process is like if allowed to unfold naturally..She emphasizes just how important it is for others to be present so that our feelings are ‘held’ and witnessed or that we find some kind of container.
I have not finished the book yet but the chapter I just read on contraction and expansion really spoke to me.. The contraction in grief happens as we get hit with the shock of the loss and shut down or contract our body, we pull away, retreat, withdraw, fall to the ground in tears and so on… Joanne says that if such contractions are allowed they are in time followed by expansions, even more so if the process is not blocked by our own or another person’s defences. Many express the process of grieving as being hit by waves, at times we can be knocked down quite literally, but never the less even at the base of all of this sadness there is love, there is light, there is fire, if we stay open.
It is said the the two most certain things in life we cannot avoid are both death and taxes, loss is part of life and will mark all of us in different ways.. There can be a mix of feelings left behind in the wake of loss that can be highly challenging to manage. But expression is really what helps us and often also connects us with others… Poetry seems to be a particularly potent channel or vehicle for the expression of grief..
If I find information helpful in grief, I do like to share it on my blog.. I found Joanne’s book beautiful, rich, real and soulful, so I am sharing about it in this post today in the hopes it may be of help to others who are grieving or trying to be there for those who are.
“It offers hope for those who feel like their loss has disconnected themselves forever from humanity and the circle of life.”
Doug Bremner, MD,
Professor of Psychiatry
Emerging From The Dark Night 