When grief goes silent : and some thoughts on grief as an awakening process

I have such a sense of sadness when I speak to my sister lately.. I just read a post from the bloggers on The Grief Reality in which they revisited one of their earlier posts on the loss of their Mum.. It was good to read that two young women had started such doing such a proactive thing after their mother died.. sharing their feelings and providing a forum via a blog for others who have also endured loss to have their own grief validated and expressed.

I just left a comment on that post they shared again and in it I spoke of having no words for grief myself after my Dad died in 1985, and that was not the first major loss in my life a series of attachment losses really did stretch back to the age of one when my Poppa died and everyone was so sad at losing him..

These days I have a better perspective on the losses surrounding me and how hard my parents worked but only lately am I seeing how much grief was hidden in the anger I began to feel and express most powerfully in the last few months.. I only really began to touch base with my grief over the loss of my Dad just after I got sober in 1993 around the 8th anniversary of his death from cancer.. It then took about 6 years for the grief to be fully available to me.. and it still comes out at times.. new losses such as the death of my Godfather in 2003 helped to bring out the sadness and at other funerals of fathers and then mothers it has come out since I also lost both my sister and my Mum in 2014 and 2017.

I can come down very hard hearted at times when others seem closed to the emotional level of grief, it pisses me off, I wish there was a culture that acknowledged grief more.. I do not think we should get stuck in repeating it over endlessly either, but when legitimate grieving is blocked it really causes so many other problems..However, today I realised even that anger comes out of a lack of acceptance for the fact that as humans we naturally do have defenses against things that are deeply out of our control and painful to us (the Plutonian dimension in astrology)..

My experience is that in groups like Al Anon people actually try in time to make the effort to understand the pain, trauma, loss, agony or hurt that underlay a parent’s abusive or neglectful behavior.. Forgiveness does not let them off the hook but it does acknowledge unconsciousness and that we are all evolving, as well as the fact that in the cases of addiction and the associated abusive/emotionally neglectful aspects there is high level attachment wounding which all too often masks buried, hidden and deeply unspoken grief that seems to have long roots reaching many generations back.

Jesus understood the unconsciousness aspect of imperfect humans well. As he was suffering on the cross he prayed for the forgiveness of those who were blind, unaware or unconscious and wanted him (representing the force of love and wisdom) put to death.. This does not mean we need to front up for more hurt but that we become emotionally mature and more deeply insightful and integrated as adults who understand the nature of human multi-generational trauma and wounding.. Exactly where does the ‘buck’ stop on this issue?

I often feel my Great Great Grandather crying out to have his pain known.. I tell him all the time that I see and know and understand, some may think me crazy but quite frankly I do not care.. Some of us are just more in tune with the ancestral spirit worlds than others.. While it may not be strictly true that all is a lesson in terms of us ‘deserving’ any painful things that happened to us, I do believe that painful things may ask of us how much we are capable of opening and extending our hearts as well as of deepening in love, true fellowship and compassion.

We may choose to walk away from those in torment who only want to torment us or themselves more, that may be the best thing for all concerned but for me I will always pray for those people and lately I try to stay connected if I feel there may be some living hope of a ‘breakthrough’. Who knows if others are not indeed living their right destiny too.. maybe they are playing the part they need to play in my (or your) particular spiritual evolution.. Moving on may be the lesson.. but first comes the grieving and the shedding as well as the surrendering to change that each loss may have asked of me (or you, or us).

Yesterday in meditation my guides gave me a deeper insight into the part my own accident as well as undergoing all of the collective trauma from 1979 to 2010 played and even into the present. It was all meant to serve as an awakening for me as well as a realiaation into the deeper part of me that could be untouched by all of it, witnessing it now, many many years later almost as a distant observer.. Maybe it was my destiny to be set apart to not be embraced in grief, to take myself away due both my individual familial circumstances as well as the fact of the time in history I was born.

Often I ask myself did I take myself off a negative reaction or was it something I just needed to do having the only level of soul evolution I actually had at that time and being faced with the hardness or lack of empathy I feared may kill me or not enable deeper parts of me to birth?.. I am not sure.. I only know these days I need to look to the gifts.. while I increasingly seek for ways to allow myself to be embraced by the healing balms of inner surrender, acceptance of human limits and imperfections as well as being open hearted in the process of letting go of old hurt in peace (often after much expression of protest and rage).

The spirit world gives me this.. nature gives me this, loving souls here give me this, moments of pure connection with my living sister lately, give me this.. And there is nothing about it I need to change, I just have to keep learning how to keep widening my heart and soul more in order to begin to embrace the mystical totality of it and keep remembering to pray for those insights that can only be given to me in moments of deep inner attunement and divine connection so that they keep on flowing forward. If I can share as others who have gone through this are also sharing and in so sharing helping me it just seems to help, stops my own pain becoming barricaded. I may share o hopeful inspire or lighten the tough to carry burden of grief/anger/abuse/neglect and/or loss.. For all of us suffer in similar ways, all of us go through loss and grief and all of us are truly in this together..