Two Months
TWO MONTHS… A few things I’ve learned about death, loss, grief, and longing.
°The most glaring is, that few people have any idea of how to “be” with, or support the grieving.
°Our culture is not “good” at doing death or dying. We don’t know how to be with the event of a death. We spend all of our time actively avoiding it. We can see this in our movies, even in our political actions. In short, we are a “death phobic” culture.
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°I’ve come to realize that the death of a child causes many people to think of the possible loss of their own children. I am a living reminder of this nightmare. Which has made my “in real life” support very thin.
I suppose I don’t mind how thin the support is, because these very same people who imagine their own nightmare when they interact with me, project their nightmares onto my experience. But their nightmare isn’t the experience I’m actually having.
This has inspired me to carve out my own grief walk, free of these projections. Which has turned out to be a powerful choice. It’s not that I have no support, it’s that I’ve chosen not to be enrolled in other people’s projections of my experience.
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°People judge the way we grieve. How much or how little we indulge it. How we hold it. Etc.
Because I know people will always judge what we do to some degree, I’ve given myself permission to grieve precisely the way I need too.
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°There are a million different ways people hold death, dying, and grief. We are lucky if we can find a precious few who can meet us in the way we are holding it.
These special few, who somehow know how to walk in the dark with others; These are the souls of midwives, doulas, and medicine people. Souls of The Ancient Ones. I feel blessed that I’ve been shown exactly who these people are.
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°My body has incredible wisdom. I knew that from giving birth.
Similar to birth, there seems to be a technology in the way my body is relating to his death.
I’ve moved through layers of shock, dissociation, periodical numbness and overwhelm, and now I’m finally beginning to “feel” myself again.
The moment I learned that Tanner had died, I felt a piece of my soul “fly out of my body”, and another piece pushed back, and burrow itself in. This was a part of that wisdom.
Now that I’ve landed back inside and resurfaced. I can say the re-inhabiting part is painful. But it is inside my window of tolerance.
If I focus on what is happening inside my body, or rather allowing the waves of grief to be a full body event it passes through more gently and I can often feel my son beside me as it moves through.
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°Daily rituals, a suggestion from my teacher, have helped A LOT. They’ve become a type of communion with the deity of death, who holds this whole experience in the palm of their hand.
°The regrets that arise from death inform us of how to be more fully alive. They show us where we desire to channel our life force from here on out. And how we can deepen and weave our flavor of magic into the world.
° Thoughts and Prayers” are a powerful kind of magic. Being held in the field of other people's prayers brings a tangible feeling of being supported.
°Everything around how I engage with the sacred duty of parenting is now heightened and more intentional. For instance, when I cook for my kids, and they enjoy what I’ve made, (which brought me happiness before my son passed) now feels like an almost holy act.
° I savor things. Like really savor them. I move slower. And love even deeper.
°Grief divorced from story is a kind of nectar from the Gods. It allows me to feel it cleanly, without sticky webs of the mind keeping me bound in hell.
°Clean grief feels so similar to love-longing for me.
°Death is a deity. Not an event.
° I can communicate with my son.
°Grief has a guttural sound when it exits the body.
°If I just focus on today, this 24 hours, rather than larger timelines, the grief becomes more tolerable.
°Love is eternal.
°The soul is endless.
°And consciousness cannot be destroyed.
°Words spoken about our loved ones, hand on heart, are precious, and enduring.
