We Learn by Grieving how to Grieve

Last updated on: September 30, 2016 at 9:21 am by Marilyn McEntyre

We Learn by Grieving how to Grieve 2016-09-30T09:21:00-07:00 Marilyn McEntyre

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“In my end is my beginning . . .”

I’ve spoken with two people in the past two days about grief. Its ongoingness. The way it resurfaces. The way a dream will trigger it, or a sudden look from a stranger whose crooked smile is heartbreakingly familiar. Grief softens over time, and sometimes disappears, and then comes back. It ebbs, but it doesn’t end.

But loss is a beginning. I have learned that enough times to trust that it is true, though saying it can sound glib, especially in the midst of loss. A death, a job change, a move across the country, a child’s move across the country, a project aborted–each opens a space where something can happen. The next thing. Whatever it is. If one is willing.

I know people who get stuck in grief—one I think of has made her loss so much a part of her identity that I don’t think any potential partner will be able any time soon to persuade her to let go of the consolation or security she receives from dwelling in widowhood. She may need to hold that identity. It may empower her. She says she’d like to find a partner, and I hope for that on her behalf, but she makes it clear to all who know her that the spouse who died years ago is still very much her significant other. Often, when I speak with her I think of Mary Oliver’s writing, “To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones, knowing your own life depends on it, and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” Grieving can be a process of hanging on or a process of letting go.

When it is the latter, it is a beginning.

In my work as a hospice volunteer I am struck by the various ways families witness death and quietly prepare themselves, sometimes almost surreptitiously, for what comes next. Two weeks ago the husband of one of my patients left her bedside to spend an hour in the garden she had loved, uprooting, transplanting, pruning, and, I thought, enacting transition and transformation. They had moved her into a hospital bed in the family room. She would never return to the room they had shared. It would be for something else now. Most changes of this material kind happen after death, but quiet preparation for a new chapter helps people face an end that will have to be a new beginning.

We live the paradox in small, practical ways. We put away or give away what will never be used again. Lying awake at night we dare to imagine “afterwards” in moments that allow a little curiosity through the thick fog of grief. We find ourselves trying on moments of acceptance, release, redirection even as we listen for the reassurance of a beloved one’s next breath.

A dying friend whose cancer had swollen her belly so much she looked very pregnant, was surprised one day by a new nurse who walked in, looked her over, smiled, and asked, “What do you think is being born in you?” It’s an ancient metaphor, but apt in so many situations: we don’t know what is germinating in us. We don’t know what we’re being prepared for.

Mystics and some physicists affirm the astonishing and unsettling truth that “All is always now.” Time is a human experience, not an ultimate reality. However we think about heaven, afterlife, the spirit world, or other dimensions, we have plenty of testimony to the fact that what we see isn’t all we get. We sit in Plato’s cave watching shadow shows and weeping, but there is more in the world outside the cave than is dreamt of in our seasons of sorrow. Weeping does endure for a night—for many nights—but if “joy cometh in the morning,” that morning may not be so much a moment in time as a dawning awareness that in the very midst of ending an unfolding has begun.

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