“Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” – Jesus of Nazareth
Every relationship that you have will one day end, including the one with yourself. My relationship with my best friend, my spouse, my children, my siblings, my parents, as well as my relationship with the person that goes by my name and wears my glasses in one way or another, will all come to an end. For many of us, these endings are difficult to think about and even to imagine.
Practically, the human organism has evolved to make connections with others and to reproduce. We also grieve and mourn when those connections end, because of love.
In my favorite scene from the movie Interstellar, Dr. Brand addresses this phenomenon in a conversation with Cooper:
Cooper: You’re a scientist, Brand.
Brand: So listen to me when I say that love isn’t something that we invented. It’s… observable, powerful. It has to mean something.
Cooper: Love has meaning, yes. Social utility, social bonding, child rearing…
Brand: We love people who have died. Where’s the social utility in that
Cooper: None.
Brand: Maybe it means something more—something we can’t yet understand. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.(1)
“We love people who have died.” Yes, we sure do, Dr. Brand. A significant factor in my spiritual journey has been my own experience of grief and loss—specifically, the ending by death of my relationship with one of my immediate family members thirteen years ago. The difficult path of learning to befriend my own grief has also led me to the work I do full-time now as a hospice chaplain and bereavement companion.(2)
Sitting with dying people and companioning their loved ones through the initial year or so of grief is not only my job, it is part of my personal practice of healing through the relationship endings I have already experienced, and of preparing myself for the endings still ahead of me.
In my experience of grief—and that of the people I support—nothing takes away the pain of the loss. I sit with grieving people regularly who may believe their loved one is in heaven, but find no actual comfort for their aching heart in that belief. A frequent refrain I hear is, “They may not be suffering, but I am, dammit!”
What can possibly comfort a person after their partner, child, sibling, or parent dies? Actually, nothing. Oh, we try all kinds of things like alcohol, drugs, food, sex, religion, busyness, distraction, and focusing on other relationships. Trying, trying, to numb the pain, fill the void, and just feel a little better. Or at least a brief escape. Or maybe to wake up from the dream that is this reality: They’re really gone. And it just hurts like hell.
In our Western, death-denying culture, we are conditioned to repress grief and to feel successful if our non-crying days outnumber our crying ones. “I must be getting better” we tell ourselves and others. More often than not, we are in a trough where the water is shallow enough to stand up. But another wave of grief is coming. And then another, and another, and another.
At first, and maybe for quite a while, the fact that nothing brings comfort can be infuriating, even leading to despair. “They’re gone and they’re never coming back. Will I feel this bad forever?”
Over time, it may be possible for the realization that nothing takes away that ache of emptiness to become its own kind of comfort. “Ok. There it is. Rock bottom. Now what?”
I wonder if, as W. H. Auden wrote of poetry, it is also true that, “grief makes nothing happen?”(3) The muting of senses, the mental fog and lack of focus, the insomnia, the dull ache beneath all awareness, the visceral pain rising into the chest like a heavy cantaloupe threatening to cut off the airway. Grief is a natural force that ushers us into the void.
Because sometimes nothing is precisely what we need. Space. Emptiness. The zero-point. Just being where “deep calls unto deep.” Nothing is that out of which new forms are always arising. Alan Watts said, “There is the mysterious point where extreme love and extreme pain are identical.”(4) This is why the void is often used as a symbol for grief and loss as in the 911 Memorial in New York City. We ask, “Who am I now? And what form will my healing take out of all this loss, hole, gape, pit, lack, void, emptiness?”
Now, from that still-point of no-thing, slowly, breathe in, and breathe out. Be very gentle with yourself. And begin to wonder if while comforted by nothing, maybe also everything heals.
Everything like my morning coffee. Birds at my backyard feeder. Redbud blossoms in the Texas springtime. A kind hug and a smile from someone else who loves me. Work, rest, and play. Fixing food and cleaning up. Finding new purpose. The ordinary course of life. All people grieve and every person’s grief journey is unique to them. While no one can grieve for you, someone like me can be with you as you grieve.
A healing practice during grief is to engage in acts of mourning.(5) An act of mourning externalizes the feelings of grief into concrete forms such as tears, words, ritual, service to others, or creative artistic expression. An act of mourning can be as simple as letting the tears flow while you talk about your loved-one with a trusted friend. It can be writing in a journal. Planting flowers or a tree in memory of your loved-one. Acts of mourning can also be as big as embarking on a new career path or direction in life. All of these things, and so many more are ways of memorializing our loved-ones, honoring our connection with them, and affirming that our love for them continues.
Eat healthy food when you are hungry, drink water when you are thirsty, sleep when you’re tired, go for a walk outside, continue your spiritual practice even when it feels empty, cry when you feel sad or angry or overwhelmed, and don’t be afraid to laugh. Don’t worry about forgetting your loved-one (you won’t) or erasing your connection to them (you can’t). Also, keep reminding yourself that you’re not crazy, you’re grieving. You won’t feel this bad forever, even though you may feel this bad again from time to time.(6) So, be kind to yourself. You will survive this. I promise.
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Notes:
- Interstellar, Paramount Pictures (2014).
- I prefer Alan Wolfelt’s term “companion” rather than “counselor” as it more helpfully reflects what grieving people need: someone to be with them, not someone to fix them. See, Wolfelt, Alan, Understanding Your Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart, Fort Collins Companion Press (2021), available at: https://a.co/d/3mB9diu.
- Auden, W. H., In Memory of W. B. Yeats, online at: https://poets.org/poem/memory-w-b-yeats.
- Watts, Alan, Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship, Novato: New World Library (2022), p. 141, available at: https://a.co/d/aJLZXUd.
- See, Wolfelt, Alan, The Six Needs of Mourning, online at: https://www.centerforloss.com/grief/six-needs-mourning/.
- See, Why Grief Is like a Ball in a Box, online at: https://hospiscare.co.uk/how-we-help/advice-support/talking-about-death-and-dying/why-grief-is-like-a-ball-in-a-box/.
- Other resources for supporting yourself during grief include: 1) Kübler-Ross and Kessler, On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss, New York: Scribner (2014), available at: https://a.co/d/avutEw6; and 2) For in-person grief support, call a Hospice or Funeral Home in your area and ask for help.
Thank you, James. This Is lovely.