Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Healing the soul after grief’

Jan 22

The Fifth Season of Grief

Friday the thirteenth, 2017, I get a phone call from my sister, who tells me my mother is gone. Gone. Dead. Died, and went to heaven. Soon to be pushing up daisies. I’m numb. It’s been less than six months since Jon did the deed. I flash back to that Monday, and our phone conversation. It was the only time I had told my two siblings that something was really wrong, and to go and get my mother (who from this point on will be called Momz—Mom-zee) to the doc. True to form they ignored me. They blew it off. She lived in pain all that week.

I just knew. I always know. It is part of my Enneagram Eight makeup.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of the color green. Green was my mother’s favorite color. After doing lots of reading, I’m starting to believe I’m getting a clear message from her: I’m here. Nine years out and I’m finally thinking of her. Mourning the dead happens when we can take in the information and sit with it. She’d be in her nineties now. Had she not had the heart attack on that Monday when I’d called for our normal chat, would she have lived longer?

I didn’t go to the service. Everyone said don’t come. I was still too shocked from Jon’s suicide to think it through. The heavens opened somehow, and my momz was placed into a blue casket. Had I been present, I’d have insisted on that color. Blue, lovely blue with colorful flowers. That thought took me back to my father’s death. My mother says we’ll do yellow and white flowers because those are the colors he could see with his colour blindness. I pipe up: “No! If he can really look down from heaven, he can now see all the colors.” And so, the momz did it right! And I got my two cents in over the color because, somehow, someone spoke for me.

I sit here with the blue sky, and the sun actually shining as I write this, and I think of my clients and the different types of grief they need to work through. I tell them that there isn’t a correct way to grieve. I tell them that the day my younger sister Joyce died, some of us went for pizza. The place where she died, Paradise, California—the actual spot—burned down. (See The Lost Bus on Apple TV.) That grief just hurt because I thought I’d get back there again and see that 76 gas station. I’d go up there and drive by, knowing that here was where she dropped dead in a phone booth. (It was the ’70s)

Grief is like a carefully built chain reaction of falling dominos. It creates designs that we may not expect. When we’re inside the process, we can’t see the creation or realize that, in sadness, something beautiful might spring up. We don’t see it because grief is not for wimps. The work of sifting through relationships might involve a purge involving an iceberg and a trip to your own battlement. This I learned somewhere in year three but couldn’t do it until much later in the process. If we explore our relationships effectively, they must be cleaned with powerful disinfectant. An honest look brings out the dirt of the process, and you shouldn’t go forward with a new relationship until you’ve worked through the past relationship. BUT, you say in protest there is nothing to look at, and I’m lonely and want someone new.

Here is why you clean out the old relationship: unfinished business. We all have it. The thing about looking at relationships after death that stops many from doing it is the old saying of not speaking ill of the dead. The problem with this is that in order to move forward in a healthy manner, the entire relationship needs to be sorted out.

I remember all those years ago, sitting here at my desk, looking out the window, and noticing the house across the way. The thought of holding my marriage up to the magnifying glass was a hard one, and yet, I knew that there were things I needed to address. Was I willing to do it? I had to look. And so it is with my older sister, my older brother, and my parents. We must mourn the good and the bad, because if we fail to look at it all, we cheat ourselves out of part of the process—just like the blue sky going overcast, and the sun disappearing behind the cloud cover. We must look and face our reality.

I now look at it all because, like the seasons of grief, I must encounter a new season that I’ve never thought of as a season: resolution. It is the calm after the storm. It is the time of life where we can open up our souls to the new journey of peaceful minds and hearts. The work of relationship cleansing has taken several years. Now the fallen dominos are displayed in a colorful new manner. My happy iceberg smiles at me, the castle battlement stands emptied, and I turn to face a sky that looked much like the day Jon took his own life. And I think to myself: I can deal with this sky.

Jul 2

1 Comment

Morning Has Come

The shouting, the screaming, the yelling that carries through the halls and walls of a home: the children cowering in rooms behind locked doors, curled up in balls at the bottom of a bed, hoping that if they do so, the noise will go away. It never does. They live in hopes that their parents will see the error of staying for the kids and end the terror of days and nights. They didn’t ask to be a part of this.

This is how you come to see me. This is how the secrets of lives get unbottled: slowly, gently, until they all spill out in their ugly horror. They fall to the ground for us to inspect, and when we dare to look, because we can no longer ignore what is present, we must come to realize and understand that the path we’ve been on can’t be walked alone. If we try to do the walk alone, it falls apart. We understand this because that is what we tried the last time, and it didn’t go well for us.

It is not reasonable to attempt to fix trauma by ourselves. To do so is risky. When you are in the forest, where it is dark, you need a light held for you so that you can navigate through the trees. The forest has goblins, witches, and wizards waiting for us. Some sit quietly, waiting to see what the trees tell us; still, others would cast spells. With the light, we see dimly to the next safe spot, and as we weave our way forward, the cries of the darkness begin to recede.

At times we stumble, and at other times we run forward, believing we see the light in its fulness, only to fall and injure ourselves. It is then we understand the value of the person with the flashlight. It is the guide who has been in the forest before. Guides understand the nature of the darkness. They run rivers and are willing to return to offer safe passage to others. These guides may or may not have run your river or walked through your forest. What they have faced is their own journey, and come out on the other end. 

We stand at the place of boarding, waiting to connect with the one who joins with us. We gently clasp hands, at first in timidity, and then more surely. Then we jointly launch ourselves into deep exploration.

In our transit to another place, there are codes that are both spoken and unspoken. It’s a sensing that the guide, able to transit us to new places, understands. In this place we learn from each other. We both have things to teach and to learn. 

Trauma is a teacher and guide if we allow it to be. It teaches us to be brave enough to heal and to listen for the lessons of the hidden passages. In healing, we discover unknown strengths and weaknesses, and we encounter questions that we didn’t want answers to and yet need so desperately. 

In discovery, we come to understand who we may have damaged along the way. We realize those we must part company with for our own well-being. We must also seek forgiveness from others we’ve harmed. The brokenness that we entered with is healing in ways we couldn’t imagine. Our bodies and our souls are made stronger for this experience, and as we see to the full light of day, we raise our heads high and walk slowly into the light of a new beginning, for morning has come.

Jan 22

Changes

This past week I spent four days in Wales at the home of some lovely friends. I was fed and watered and dosed with a smidge of teasing, and it was sad to leave and fly home. The letdown was coming home to a cold, empty home.

It is often said that grief and loss alter the address book of those who have lost. What happens when we have someone exit our lives, or when death comes into our life, can be challenging or devasting for those left behind. Due to two different events in my life, my husband’s death and a faith transition, I lost ninety percent of my address book. The rebuild is being done in new ways, and with new understanding.

The above being said, that isn’t what I’m going to talk about. I’d like to talk about the changes that come because of the work we do in our process of rebuilding our lives after a deeply life-changing event or a death. The fact is that all of this can shake us to the core. I haven’t really heard this spoken about, as everyone talks about coping.

We might be sobered, or become more of a risk-taker. We could do a complete about-face and change our career path. We might change from not questioning our faith to abandoning what we once believed. Grief does a number on the body and soul. It is something that must be experienced to fully understand its jarring reality.

Grief sends the bereaved to the emergency room thinking they’re having a heart attack. It sends others into a hermit-like state of existence, and the unique possibilities are too numerous to mention, so I’ll stick to two of the most common ones.

So, as a friend, please do the good stuff of listening to the hard things a friend needs to speak. You might feel squeamish, but as you open your heart and mind to their reality, it gets easier. There are added do’s for suicide and trauma. Like death, everyone has a different version of trauma. Don’t compare.

I’ve often had to stop and reflect about how Jon’s suicide altered me personally. What I once valued changed. I had to question some major assumptions about myself and those around me. I found that certainty had been wiped out from my life. I discovered that my family didn’t know what to say after the suicide. I’ve now established a boundary around the subject because no one really wanted to ask and talk about the suicide right after it happened, or in the first year. Going on eight years later, it would be much too little, and way too late.

So how have I changed? In some ways, I’ve become more selfish, and in other ways much more generous. The pandemic and the lockdown caused me to question my safety. I was now alone, and it was not an easy world to adjust to. Most of all, certainty has been taken out of my life. For the most part, the loss of certainty is a good thing. Certainty can make one arrogant.

As I did the work, there were wow moments of realizing that things had been altered. There were also gentle velvet times that softened the harsh reality of my new life. Somewhere in all of this mess, I awoke to a new sense of self. Eights are strong souls, and we can tell it like it is. I was stunned when I began to realize how all of this had altered me. I saw myself not as the gentle soul I thought myself to be but a harsher person who I didn’t like. When we’re forced to see our new reality, it can get ugly fast. I’m needing to adjust to the me I really am. It isn’t that I’ve never been this way: I have. It is that I’ve never needed to soften the hard edges in the way I realize I need to do now. I’ve cried, I’ve become depressed for a few days, and then risen up to fight for a better me. I was blind to who I was, and grief called me out to new growth. It is a process that takes years. No one should be the same person at the end of any year. I’m not the same person I was in 2016. I’ve lived eight more years.

My beliefs have changed; my attitudes have changed, and I understand things I didn’t, and couldn’t, understand before. I also know that this process can breed trauma. I accept the trauma not as drama. I accept how I’ve been affected by all of this with an understanding that there are resources out there. I look back and I wonder how I could have ever thought there wouldn’t be some trauma with this loss. Time and wisdom have sobered me to a new reality. While change is good, it can be harsh.