Bare Tree at Sunset. 2009<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIn fact, it turns out that\u00a0we get better at\u00a0grief\u00a0with practice. \u00a0Grief is hard work, but it is also a skill, and one that improves with use.<\/p>\n
Not that any of us want to have many opportunities to practice this skill, but there is a grace that can be mastered when you walk through loss again and again.<\/p>\n
I am thinking now of one friend in particular, younger than I am, who has lost father, brothers, mother, and wife.\u00a0\u00a0She has lost every member of her immediate family, and certainly it has been a heavy load for her to bear. \u00a0But while she misses them every day,\u00a0there are times she takes my breath away: something about her unflinching honesty about the sadness she feels; something about the kindness she brings to those around her, even as she mourns.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s another thing I know about grief: the kindest of us, and those who have a lifetime\u2019s cultivation of seeing and appreciating the kindness of others, they are the ones who cope the best with grief\u00a0when it comes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you for coming,\u201d they say at the memorial, and with sincerity. \u00a0\u201cThank you so much,\u201d they say to the small offerings we bring them: food, flowers, a picture of the one who died, a listening ear or a hug.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is so sweet,\u201d another friend of mine exclaims, over and over, when anyone expresses their concern for him in his grief. \u00a0\u201cThat\u2026 is so.. sweet<\/em>,\u201d he says again, when I tell him that I love him, that feel protective of him in his sorrow.<\/p>\nHere he is, his world has ended, and he is putting his heart and soul into reflecting back love at every one of us who visits him in his sadness. \u00a0Of course it makes us all love him more\u2013but, also, I know from my years of grief counseling that it is helping him to heal, moment by moment, kind act by kind act. \u00a0Gratitude is a balm for grief.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t come naturally for all of us, of course. \u00a0I will admit it: I\u2019m not naturally kind or generous in my grief.\u00a0I sometimes refuse to accept it, emotionally, when someone I know dies. \u00a0I can be graceless at times.<\/p>\n
I remember, for instance, how I responded when I learned that a man I cared about\u00a0had died\u2013had self-starved to\u00a0protest world hunger.<\/p>\n
Yes, he had debilitating Parkinson\u2019s disease. \u00a0Yes, he was confined to a nursing home, and yes, his wife had already died. \u00a0His quality of life was not good, and it was not going to improve. \u00a0And yes, I completely understood\u2013intellectually\u2013how a man whose entire life had been spent in service of others might choose the manner of his death, in order that it should have some final grace note of meaning.<\/p>\n
Intellectually<\/em>, I knew all that. \u00a0But grief is not an intellectual thing.<\/p>\nI was angry. \u00a0The mere notion that a man of such profound compassion could think for one minute that the world would be better without him than with him made me want to shout at him.\u00a0 Try as I might, I couldn\u2019t overcome my anger. \u00a0I thought I was handling it well\u2026until my supervisor at the clinic where I worked called me on the carpet for how rude and critical I\u2019d been all week, to everyone around me.<\/p>\n
A psychotherapist, a woman whose job it was to make room for the emotions of others by working through my own, I\u2019d been walking through that clinic punishing people for my feelings of anger and loss.<\/p>\n
So I have to own the truth: I am an angry griever. \u00a0I understand that way of responding to loss from the inside. \u00a0And I know how, on one level, my anger makes sense: when we lose someone \u00a0important to us, we\u2019re emotionally overwhelmed in a way most of us haven\u2019t been since we were toddlers and our mothers went away\u00a0and left us with strangers.<\/p>\n
Abandonment is forever, when you\u2019re two.<\/p>\n
When we are babies, every loss destroys our world\u2013our lives are so short, we haven\u2019t yet formed any such concept\u00a0as \u201ctemporary.\u201d \u00a0But we learned. \u00a0We grew. \u00a0And now that we\u2019re big boys and girls, only the biggest\u00a0of losses can do that to us.<\/p>\n
The death of someone we love? That loss is so large, we have no defense, no shield against the grief. \u00a0Once again, we are like children left all alone in the world.<\/p>\n
Still, grief is a skill, and there are things we can do, those of us who aren\u2019t naturally generous or kind when we mourn.\u00a0Some things do help.<\/p>\n
What I\u2019ve learned that works best for me is this: make your life large<\/em>. \u00a0I don\u2019t\u00a0mean that we should distract ourselves from our grief with endless hurry and endless projects, but rather, we need to craft lives that are large enough, have people enough in them to love, that even in the deepest grief, someone, in some part of our lives\u00a0will give us\u00a0a\u00a0reason to be glad\u2013at least for them, even if not for ourselves.<\/p>\nI think back to the darkest period in my own life, for instance: a time when I was desperately worried about my child. \u00a0I was helpless to change her life, to fix what was broken in it. \u00a0I could not make her well.<\/p>\n
That\u00a0was the year Massachusetts approved same-sex marriage equality. \u00a0And I thought of my friends and family who were gay, and I wept grateful, healing tears. \u00a0And that was the year that my friend Laura adopted first one, then two, and finally three<\/em> children, from foster care and from overseas.<\/p>\nWhen I think back to that period of my life, I can still feel the heaviness of my fear and my grief, like a weight on my back. \u00a0But those memories are mixed with the memory\u00a0the first time I met my best friend\u2019s son, and the look in all their eyes that day.<\/p>\n
On the days I was not sure how I could keep on breathing in and breathing out, the thought of my friend and her children was what\u00a0got me through. \u00a0When my heart was broken, their happiness carried me through, until it could beat normally again.<\/p>\n
Friends are our life support, it turns out\u2013and not even for what they do for us, when we grieve, but for what we can see in them.<\/p>\n
Grief is inevitable. \u00a0Anger and fear\u2013at least for me\u2013seem to be inevitable, too. \u00a0But we can build lives large enough that there will be enough of Light, if not to swallow the darkness, at least to show us that it is not infinite.<\/p>\n
After all, Langston Hughes probably said it best:<\/p>\n
Folks, I\u2019m telling you,
\nbirthing is hard
\nand dying is mean\u2013
\nso get yourself
\na little loving
\nin between.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Grief is a skill, and one that improves with use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1904,"featured_media":1331,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[151,150,149,148,10,7,80],"class_list":["post-1327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cats-posts","tag-bereavement","tag-bereavement-counseling","tag-death","tag-grief","tag-ministry","tag-pagan","tag-samhain"],"yoast_head":"\n
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