Today I am held by Grief.
As an American living in Canada, I’m grieving my inability to cross country lines, my inability to see my family, smell them, hold them and to see myself reflected in the faces and eyes of my kin.
My Grief mingles with fear for their health and a recognition that my parents are getting older — to go home is a decision that could put their health at risk. In the tumult of a divided American nation, this fear extends to their safety; as hospitals exceed surge capacity, Americans firmly plant themselves on either side of a political battlefield while our president sows evermore seeds of divisiveness.
As I hear the pain in my mother’s voice over the phone, I can feel her heart break over long distances and I know that my Grief is not just my own. This is familial Grief. This is communal Grief.
Many of my patients feel this — Grief has been a companion in my practice for many months now, yet we rarely call her by name. Not only do we feel our own Grief, we feel accumulated collective and ancestral Grief. As a settler living in the PNW, Grief is largely silent and suppressed; the tears have yet to be given back to the earth and so that which needs grieving still lingers like a hungry ghost waiting to be fed. It is no surprise that depression is so prevalent in our western culture, for as Martin Prechtel says: “Grief is not depression. Depression is a lack of Grief.”
To grieve properly is to “look bad when you’re done,” but this kind of Grief requires us to be deeply seen and held in community. We need to be safe enough to be out of our minds with the Grief that we deserve. Martin speaks of this when he says:
“[We call] those who are grieving ‘lost in water’ and they need the village to help pull them out of the water. They’re one person, they can’t do it alone.”
To grieve properly requires trust that you won’t be left to drown and that you have a village to help pull you out. And yet, if we never allow our Grief to be seen by others, we never allow others the opportunity to pull us out of the water.
In my culture, Grief has a very narrow window of “appropriateness.” Death is really the only holiday for Grief and she is seen as a burden, a thing to apologize for. Even in my clinic, patients will apologize for their tears, as if to be anything but happy, even as they seek a witness, is a sin they must atone for. And yet, the more I witness other’s Grief, the more I know that she is a sacred gift — a rare moment of vulnerability. Grief is heartwork and it is truly an honour to grieve with others. With our Grief, we build our village.
I’m still unlearning a culture of silenced Grief, but today I let myself go into the water. Just a little. I am blessed to know that I have a village.
Today I grieved for my mother and father, my sisters, my friends. I grieved for strangers who have died. I grieved for the life I was “supposed to have,” the lovers I had, the friends I lost, the opportunities I didn’t take and the ones I took that disappointed me. I grieved for my great-grandmothers and grandfathers, for my aunts and uncles. I grieved for the children I could have had, for my nieces and nephews. I grieved and yet I know there is still more.
And in that Grief there is so much Joy. As Martin Prechtel says
“…the ability to laugh and the ability to grief all live in the same house. They all sleep in the same bed…If it makes you weep for happiness, there’s grief in it. They’re mixed. Inextricably.”
A broken heart is an open heart. If we’re lucky, our hearts will break over and over again.
So can you also welcome your Grief? Can you allow your heart to spill onto your cheeks and run down to your chin? Can you let the sobs shake your ribcage and can you be so ugly that you couldn’t be called anything but beautiful?
It may feel like your Grief will kill you, but it won’t. It’s the Grief you deserve and it’s just a season.
Your Grief will also carve out more space in you for laughter
and,
in time,
your Season of Joy will come.
And you will deserve that too.
