Working through grief | Beyond Grief and Loss Therapy

Feb 26

From Survival Clothes to Comfy Coats

In the US it’s a zipper; the UK calls it a zip; and here in the Netherlands it is called a ritz. Well, the thing broke on my warm coat that I have worn for over ten years. I was told that I could replace the zipper, zip, or ritz, and the warm, dark-blue coat could continue on for many years. I got to thinking that maybe it was time for a new color. The hunt began, and I found something pretty that will last at least ten years. This time I’ll be in lavender.

The old winter jacket had a double zipper. I loved it, and it also could snap in! I must have put the zipper into the coat incorrectly because it got stuck in a royal way. I’ll have the new lavender version in two weeks. It has to come from the US.

This has made me think about things.

I’m one of those people who loves her clothes, and I’ll wear them forever. The last round of purchases I’ve come to think of as survival clothes. I purchased the stuff after Jon’s death. Now, as 2026 rolls into full bloom, I’m finding that I need to say goodbye to the old and welcome the new. It’s kind of like the fluffy towels; I just took a wee bit longer to arrive at this point. This is going to cost me somewhat more than the towels. I’m still liking my towels, so, it is all good.

This time I’m not caring for Jon. This time I’m not in survival mode, and this time I can take my time thinking it through. I realize that I’ll need to write a new “Please Do” post. There are things on the “do” list that I didn’t know then, and that I can now talk about because, as time passes, new things that we might not view as essential come to the forefront.

As I’ve worked through the trauma of Jon’s death and developed a crush on the iceberg, I’ve learned a new form of self-care. I don’t know if it is the grief or the trauma that we can encounter that causes us to not care for ourselves in healthy ways. I think it may be both, and I also believe that it depends on the person. Whatever it is, look out for yourself!

What Version of Death Are You Living With?

There are all kinds of ways to die. As loved ones and family and friends, the versions are many.

My grandmother died in her bed as she drifted off for an afternoon nap. My father slipped away quietly in a hospital bed. His body shut down fighting stomach cancer. He woke up for a minute and my mother told him that it was the thirteenth, and he got on with the business of dying. My mother died quietly in a hospital room, after a heart attack. For the most part, all three of the deaths were peaceful instead of traumatic. The deaths filled with trauma took longer to process, and different types of emotions surfaced, depending on the person and how they died.

I’ve said it here and will continue to say it: THERE IS NOT AN INCORRECT WAY TO GRIEVE, as long as you grieve when you are able to grieve. A decade out of losing Jon, I’ve discovered so much. There is now only moving forward. What a journey! This post is a delightful thing to write because I’ve done some deep soul work. The fact is that when I started out on this path, I was on a road that I had never walked before. Yes, I’d done family and friends’ deaths, but this one has been completely different. My sister died violently as the cancer ate away at her body. My brother slipped away, with Covid being one of the things that caused his death. All things considered, my mother died a peaceful death after her heart attack. Somehow, it was my mother’s death that hit me the hardest. It hadn’t been six months since Jon’s leaving, and I didn’t fly to her funeral. I let my family talk me out of the flight. I should have flown over for it.

I believe that being at a service for those you love helps the process along. Funerals are for the living, not the dead.

This new fluffy coat is going to rock my world. So is all the healing from trauma, and what it brings. It is a new season and time in my life. I’ve done well finding my way on this journey. I should be proud of all of this. I’m happy with where I’m headed and give credit where credit is due. Nah, it’s the fluffy lavender jacket.

Feb 12

Goodbye, Again

I don’t say goodbye well. It isn’t that I can’t; it’s that I will always remember. I’ll remember the place and the clothes I was wearing. I’ll remember the time of day. Now, it seems that 2026 is a year to let go of the old and welcome the new. It is a bittersweet time of my life.

And so it is with grief. We move forward into new discoveries. What I once struggled to part with is now back in a decade of dust just like the dust that a car makes on an unpaved road.

Last night I said a difficult goodbye to a leadership position that I’ve held for eight years. I’m saying goodbye because I’m moving forward. I’m headed into an unknown, and hopefully good, place where I’ll serve others in new ways. Goodbye was hard, and after I said the words and left the meeting, I sat on my wonderful bed, and I let the tears come. It seems as if clearing the battlement, and realizing that I don’t need to engage the iceberg as I once did, enabled the tears I once might have not shed to come freely.

It seems to me that, like the seasons, I’ve moved in time and understanding. I now have the option of questioning what I’m ready for as I move along my new path of life.

As I think back on the winter of grief, tears form, and I recall the pain of wondering if the tears and the heartache would ever end. I listened to the voices of others who said that, yes, the tears would change, and the quality of the tears would be different. Then I became one of those voices. The day came when I noticed that the tears had faded into the past. “Goodbye, I love you” could be said in a different way. That was the season of autumn, with its rich colors and flavors. It was a time of acceptance and quiet movement. Autumn speaks to my heart in many ways, and this season of grief has spoken well, and I suppose that I’ll visit this season in new ways and different times of my life.

I’m entering into a new spring! I’ve been here before. This time around it isn’t the budding of new hope: it’s the beauty and surprise of the unknown that will welcome in a place of exploration and gently move me into a summer of exploration and new life. I’ll gladly engage with this new journey! Summers are all about the work of the journey. Once again, I’ve crossed Styx. I stand on this expectant shore ready to welcome the spring and summer that will unfold for me.

I realize that the seasons of grief are not organized with one following the other. These seasons take us to where we need them to carry us, and the work that we do on our grief journey determines the season we arrive in. There are multiple seasons!

I light my scented candle that brings the scent of water into the room. I realize I’m being called to a place along the shoreline where the river pilot waits for me. He ushers me on board the sleekest of sleek boats. Run the water with this! Whoa! I know my friend the pilot and I will navigate new waters with a new confidence. I’m sure I’ll put to shore in different seasons and head inland to explore. The pilot asks me if I remember that first running of the water. I do, and I was so scared. That old boat is somewhere off in a past that has faded into so many new discoveries. I believe the best one is that ten years ago I didn’t know I could do what I’ve done.

As I cast off into the water, I’m finding out how to welcome the new. A few years ago, I said a goodbye at Bracelet Bay in Wales. I spread ashes and cried, and a friend said a prayer. Jon’s ashes spoke to me of the place where I needed to spread them. The fine dust of life went into the water that September day. Wales has been a part of this grief process, and soon I’ll be within view of it in March as I take on a new task in my life.

I haven’t been too anxious to move things along at a rapid pace. I’ve needed to learn what the river holds, and I’ve needed to allow the gentle process of healing to glide me along the path that it holds for me.

Grief is about tears, mourning our losses, and accepting new futures. Grief is about learning to say goodbye in a thankful manner for what the journey has taught us. Grief is leaning to welcome what is new graciously.

Apr 21

Author’s Pick: No Life Hacks

This post was originally published on February 7, 2023.

The Quilt

In 2017 I traveled to the US to attend a conference, to see a friend, and to spend time with my family.

My mother had died on January 13th, a Friday. It came five months after Jon’s death. To be truthful, I was still crying for Jon; now I had to cry for her as well. I was numbed by Jon’s death; I did my best. I knew I would be bringing some treasures home; I didn’t know just how much.

My mother loved green. Her bed had this lovely green quilt, and it was filled with many other colors as well. The tiny flowers that danced across it brightened up a room.

While at my sister’s, my sister and sis-in-law came bouncing in with the quilt: “You need to take this home, Gail!”

HOLD IT!! I don’t do green—I do blue. I didn’t have a bed that would work with that quilt. I took the quilt. What would I do? In December of 2017 I ordered a new bed with a blue headboard. The quilt would work with that bed. My mother would approve. Yes, I had decided to honor her with a bed large enough that the quilt would work. It felt good. It resolved something; seeing the quilt on my bed was just what I needed.

Had I tried to force emotions around my mother, the gentle peace that came to the process would not have happened. The fun and delight in finding the bed would have been stolen, and the crazy part of all of it, the part that made it my mother, would not have come into being. The memory of it all is delightful!

As I sit here writing this in 2023, my mind is taken back to the recent past. I’m thinking about the fact that grief does its thing on its own timeline. If we do our work with that in mind, things will surface when they are ready to surface. There was no need for me to “hack” it, or force anything to happen.

While I’ve done a great deal of work around Jon, I thought about my mother, who was ready to go when she went. It is the two most recent sibling deaths that I haven’t fully processed.

The Nightmare of 2021-2022

I was raised in a large family. I’m the middle child, the middle daughter, and now one of two living siblings. 2021–2022 is a time period I’d rather not relive. It was a time when I had to face the possibility that all three siblings could die.

April and May of 2021 played out like a horror story. It began with a phone message from my sister, Beth. I knew. I knew that this call was to tell me she was dying. She was hopeful, felt they could treat the liver cancer. But I knew. Over the next year, it unfolded until an ugly death scene played out as her husband witnessed the end in a period of fifteen minutes. By the time the hospice nurse arrived, she was gone. A year of sadness ended. I miss her but am glad her suffering is over. Writing this seems to bring insight that, in many ways, the year of processing was what I needed.

My two siblings and I understood the fact that my brother wouldn’t live to the end of 2021, and, mercifully, he died that fall. A call from my sister-in-law alerted me to the fact that he’d been admitted to the local hospital late on a Friday evening. He never regained consciousness, and around Sunday at noon he was gone. When I got the WhatsApp message, I yelled into the cosmos; I was so angry at him for not taking better care of himself. I was at him: crying, yelling, and making peace with it was all I could do. Singing at his funeral was also a good thing.

Returning to May of 2021, my younger brother had a heart attack. When the testing was done, he was facing a quintuple bypass. (As far as I know, the record is a septuple bypass.) I cringed. With that heart attack, and the surgery he’d face in July, I had to face the ugly truth, and I’d better face it full on. He might not survive it all.

I didn’t want to do any of this grief work, and yet, it stared me in the face like the ugly monster in the dark. I could become the only living sibling. Yes, I have nieces and nephews, and even great nieces and nephews. The thought of being alone, thousands of miles from family, was terrifying to me.

Fast-forward to 2023, I’m fighting the tears that for some reason won’t come, and need to come. There is no “life hack” for this. As much as I know I haven’t done all the work yet, I can’t force it. When someone forces things, the result is more work. If we allow our minds, our hearts, and our bodies to open to the process, the heart, head, and body will be much gentler in leading us to where we can release the emotions we’re holding safely. I find myself in a place of peace, patience, and willingness to sit with the stillness that whatever is needed will be delivered to me when it is needed. I don’t need to fight the unknown. It will find me. No hacks needed. This is super liberating.

Once again, I realize that sitting, writing, and reflecting does the work for me. I don’t need the tears: I need the time to build peace within myself. It’s a good place to be.

Support Sites at the Right Time

In this era of wanting instant gratification, the art of waiting is messing up the soul. When I first started this process in 2016, I waited to look at support sites. When I did search out a site or two, I was stunned to see that people were coming to these places so soon after the death had occurred.

It works differently for each of us. I sat with the pain; I had a friend who listened, and ultimately made my way through two years of hell.

I took knowledge from the sites; I came to a realization that the path into the grief process would become my unique journey: no two paths are the same. Each of us face differing life circumstances. While we might each want the tears to go away, they go when they’re good and ready to do so, and not a moment before they have done their work. Learning to wait, getting support for it, and learning to live in the present moment with all of it is needful. Trying to push it disturbs the process.

One of the gifts I took from the support group was that I was right where I needed to be. Being able to read someone else’s experience affirmed to me that I was doing well. The other gift of the support group was that I became less judgmental of myself and others. I learned to accept my own process. The online support groups served as a place of understanding and peacemaking for my own needs.

I slowly returned to life, rebuilt, and am still to a great extent doing the work of creating the new life I desire. What I envision for myself in year seven is so different from what 2016 looked like. The deep spiritual and soul work I’ve done is nothing like I would have imagined it would be. For me, knowing comes with the understanding that I’ll continue to grow, reflect, and reach upward towards new places. Yes, once again the spiral moves me upwards. It is good.

Mar 25

The Hard Things (Revisit)

Originally posted on July 3, 2023.

This past week has been a roller coaster of sadness, fear, contemplation, and soul-searching. I’ve had to step back and look at the last seven years of my life and reconnect with feelings that I thought were buried.

On August 29, 2016, I sat at my dining room table and wondered how I would get through life as a disabled person in a country where I didn’t have family or many friends. The fact is that I was traumatized, in shock, and trying to make sense of everything with no way to make sense of anything. And so, a journey began.

I began to read and learn and discard the useless junk books. People spout Elizabeth Kübler Ross’s stages, workbooks on working through it. They said that if you do this, that, or the other thing, you’ll work through your grief, and all will be well.

I call BS. Grief can’t be fixed or cured. I stumbled on one book that I will recommend. The author went through traumatic loss and did what she needed to do to come through things. It’s OK That You’re Not OK by Megan Devine is an excellent book that portrays the awful, the trauma, and the struggle to stand up again when grief and loss enter our lives. Death, unlike other life events, presents unique challenges for each of us. Someone’s death by suicide adds to our saying goodbye in unique ways.

Devine’s experience was different from mine, and yet she touched on similarities: the inability to feed myself, to sleep, to drag myself into a new day or to know what to do. I’d had to shut work off and allow for healing time. I was compromised.

The only thing I fully understood on August 29, 2016, was that for the next year I would not be making any major life decisions that could be put off. My father had taught me this, and it served me well during a time of tears, fear, trauma, and uncertainty.

I was able to visit the US in the summer of 2017. It felt like I was in a foreign country. It wasn’t home. Europe was home. Going to the States was a chance to explore and connect with family, and to realize that I needed to find my own path. It was time to begin to do the deeper work of change.

I needed to let go, and to trust that the process of healing would occur as it needed to happen in my life. I let go and engaged in trusting the universe and myself. I had to trust that I would walk a path that needed to be walked. At the end of two years, the type of tears I was crying had begun to change. My life was changing, and I had begun to trust my process. I was headed into new territories. It was a velvet road that I walked. Yes, the road was bumpy, and there was much to learn. The transition was done on velvet and I only realized after the fact that I’d been moving to a new place.

Newbies to this process often ask when the tears will stop, when the pain will stop, when the missing will stop. Things change; things don’t stop. You don’t get over people you love; you work through it all. Learning to walk through things is the real work of grief, loss, and an acceptance of the life we move into. And so, I began my education in standing stronger and finding how to heal from the awful, and unthinkable, of surviving my husband’s suicide.

This last spring, I completed continuing education units (CEU’s) for my license renewal. The presenter on surviving a death by suicide had me until he played a snippet of a video on forgiveness. I thought about it and I asked why you would need to forgive someone for doing what they felt they needed to do in life. I realized at the end of those hours with him that he didn’t get it in the same way I got it. My husband’s death has never required my forgiveness. It never will. I digress.

In 2023 I’ve begun a new soul journey that calls me to an acceptance that my vision is changing. Once again, I must face the fact that it is harder to read, to see what I once saw, and to figure out what the new path forward will be. Once again, I’m grieving the loss of what was, and sitting with the fear of how bad it will get. Once again, I’m wondering if I can do this hard thing.

How does anyone get on doing the hard things? I got thinking about this yesterday when I realized that I had a friend who hasn’t quite walked the life path I’ve walked and doesn’t understand the messiness of facing the hard in the same way I do. I hold out space for this person because they’ve had different challenges.

I think some of us who have faced a constant stream of hard things tend to shortchange those whom we view as not having hard and challenging lives. I’ve had to call myself out on this. What looks like an easy, privileged life is seen from the outside. One of the things the past seven years has pounded into my head is that judging this type of thing is a trap. It’s a trap because we might look at ourselves as knowing more when it comes to doing life. I don’t think we know any more than others. We only know a different thing.

I get that my clients and directees come to me for various reasons. I expect them to need to deal with hard things. I’ve had to learn that I need to cut a great many people a great deal of slack. We each face our hard things differently.

I tell you all of this because I’m learning to graciously accept others’ sincere comments about my doing hard things. While it’s second nature to me, it isn’t to them. I realize that I want to respect their desire to support me just as I would support them. My journey is calling me out on being a judgmental person. Oh, this is a hard thing! This is deep soul work.

I think back to when I was in my twenties and I wondered how people older than I was got to where they understood all of this. It’s about not being afraid to call the old self out to the new self. That is what grief and loss are all about.

May 27

What’s out There?

I had a minor stroke in October of 2014, and altered my lifestyle to take it slower in the mornings. I’ve gotten to like the morning. I’ve enjoyed the lazy two-hour waking up and relaxing before I do anything. I sit in bed and listen to podcasts or read. I meditate. I wander downstairs, eat, and begin the day in earnest. It’s really been nice.

I’m giving it up.

I’m giving up the lazy part of the morning due to the fact that I’ve been confronting myself about why, after so many years, I’m still doing the lazy. It’s time to call out myself on being lazy and loving it. It isn’t a helpful thing for me to do. It has served its purpose. It was needful for the first two years post stroke. It became a habit after that.

After Jon’s death, I felt at liberty to heal the mind. Reading a note that your husband killed himself, and being told where to find the body, and trying to open the door that is locked from the inside is traumatizing. I needed to heal. I healed, slept odd hours, ate at strange times, and took two years off to begin the process of getting back to a new normal. I was fortunate in that I could do a two-year break from working.

There is not one normal thing about doing the work of grief and becoming the new person that lies beyond the death or serious loss of someone in your life. Many years of reflection is what it took for me to feel like I’d come out of the fog and daze that grief causes. Getting up off the bench I was sitting on yet again is what it’s all about.

There have been mornings when I’ve wondered about how to fill the days, and days when I’ve wondered how I do anything. The changing times seem to allow for the seasons of loss to come and leave their mark. I think back to my grandmother and my mother and my aunts, and now I understand that lonely of not having a life partner next to you in bed. With eight years gone by, I think I get it.

Now I understand why getting back to a more active way of living is so hard. This other life, the one where I can do lazy mornings, is habit forming. I have had no desire to place myself in a position where I’m accountable for the exit.

Yesterday I changed the way I identify my personal appointments on my calendar. It was an eye-opening experience. I took out the nickname my husband used, and I replaced it with Gail. It felt like it was time to do that little act.

I have been fortunate to have several family examples of how to get through the grief process. I’ve been able to observe my grandmother, two aunts, and my mother. Some of the family pattern has been useful, and other parts have been strewn with problems. I hope that I’m doing it in a healthy way.

I’ve had my own set of challenges with being disabled. I’ve had to build up new confidence and come to terms with my own past demons.

Now, it is my turn. Eight years going on nine, and I’m asking the question, “What’s out there?” I’m finding good things to explore.

May 20

Going In and Coming Out (Revisit)

Originally posted on February 28, 2023.

It is a fact that grief is unique to each of us. We go into the process thinking that there are rules, and we emerge knowing there are no rules. Nothing is certain because nothing in life is certain. As much as we may deny it, at the beginning we’re grieving because something happened that was unexpected.

After Jon left this life, I didn’t do anything major for two years. My rule was simply to not make a life-changing decision during the first year of a life crisis, and I extended that to a second year.

When the severe crying was over, my days were mostly calm, and I was moving into year three when the real changes began. I’d taken over the larger room and turned it into my space for when I would return to work. This meant sorting through things that had to go. They were his, and I didn’t need his stuff in what had to become a new space. This process has taken several years.

I decided to let things happen in a natural manner. My desire to trash things has gotten the better of me at times, and this time I’ve exercised a great deal of caution.

The big change has been sitting with the space, thinking about what I really want for it, and allowing the thoughts to come as my head let them come. It is also about making decisions that are realistic. Like a person becoming sober and clearing their head, grief—and the journey out of grief—will take us to places where our heads clear up. Think of it as grief sobriety. This doesn’t happen rapidly; it takes distance and hard work. Sometimes clearing the head takes years because we don’t have the ability to ask the correct questions in the beginning.

Doing a reclaim of the self is about time. Who was I before this relationship? How did this relationship make me a better person? What did the relationship do to me that wasn’t good for me? How is my relationship with myself affected by this event occurring in my life? Each of these questions are questions that we answer as we look long and hard into a mirror. Ultimately, we answer the questions, and this allows us to move forward.

One of the tiny things that I realized was that I’m living with chipped cups and plates. It began to bother me each time I took a cup or plate out of the cabinet. Last night, the feeling hit a fever pitch when I saw something that I liked, and for a price I loved. The thought entered my mind that I didn’t need to live with what was not pleasing me. I could replace my daily table setting with something that would make me smile. Ordering that blue set was liberating. Ordering the set triggered an insight into what I was doing in the home to make it mine. Now, with my eyes open, I was seeing clearly. I need to let myself enjoy the space I have here. I’m widowed, loving my space, and I can do what I want, when I want to do it. That is the plus side of moving forward.

The Gift of Grief

There comes a time in the process when we ask ourselves: What do I want my life to look like moving forward? This is the gift of grief, growth, and exploration.

Creating our future comes our way when we’re able to make peace with the past and move ahead with an understanding that we’ve done the deep work of our past life. We are usually older, wiser, and with the living we’ve done comes a freedom to think it through at a slower pace.

The healthy side of grief allows us to slow down and to plan an unrushed future. I think of this place as being in a condition of contentment.

Coming out of grief could mean we’ve been deeply affected by any number of life situations: death, divorce, realizing that we are LGBTQIA+, coping with a disability, experiencing traumatic events, growing up and moving out on our own, or something else. Recognizing that we’ve been in a foggy place, and now the skies are clearing up, is what coming out of grief is all about. Most people quietly leave where they were for where they are. We don’t even think that we’re glad it’s over because it’s a velvet transition.

While entering the grief space is, for the most part, traumatic, walking into the future is soothing.

If had been told at four years after the loss that I had to sit down and plan the future, I would have planned a messed-up life. At four years, I was ready to work and to learn again. I was ready to think about what I wanted beyond that point in time. For instance: I wasn’t ready to consider new tableware. I wasn’t ready to make the emotional parting: I needed time to say goodbye.

Gail’s Learning Since 2016: a Few Tips

Allow the tears to flow and the anger to do what it needs to do within yourself and avoid others who tell you that you’re on a schedule.

Don’t force something that will happen naturally. Forcing emotions that aren’t ready to surface can be distressing.

Making life decisions before the end of the first year of whatever it is you are coming out from might not be such a healthy place to go. Take the time to let your head clear.

With some types of life situations, there are things that have to be done legally, and they are on their own schedule. You might not begin to grieve until the resolution of an estate or other major happenings. You may need to sell the home, move to a new place, or do other things in a rapid manner that will affect your grief process. Cut yourself some slack. Do the essentials and work to calm things so that you can connect with your grief.

Isolation within a relationship is not healthy. Being so content that you spend time only with a partner can lead to social struggles when the relationship ends. Stay engaged with others! Healthy relationships thrive on variety and a sprinkling of others that we can engage with.

Your address book will rearrange itself. I can tell you from personal experience that some family couldn’t deal with a suicide, or a faith change, and they distanced themselves. It was the same with people who I thought were friends. Grief shows us who is able to stick around when the life waters get choppy. There are also others who show up in amazing ways. These are people who are living life in a way that allows them to join us where others can’t go.

I believe the greatest thing I’ve seen and learned as I’ve traveled this path is that rushing into anything that can be slowed down will pay off in a huge way. Rushed relationships can end sadly; rushed life changes can land us in a pickle. Saying we “won’t ever_____” may cause us to need to recant the words. Judgment can come back to bite you, and wanting it to all go away will cause you to miss out on discoveries that will make all the difference. What we think we want at the beginning isn’t what we’ll need at the end of the process. We don’t need a quick fix: it’s a thoughtful journey, this walk in the woods.

Feb 6

After the Raging Storm

The wind blows, and I’m inside, sheltered from its intensity. I live in a windy place where storms travel across the North Sea and greet me. Sometimes the raging winds howl outside, and I wonder if my windows will break to admit the destruction into this home. At other times it is a softer wind that I hear, and I can look outside to see the umbrella cover being moved: that is how I know there is wind outside.

Beyond the walls of my home, the storms can rage. There are times that mental storms rage for people, and the fix or cure is to talk them out. Sometimes you need a professional to do the listening, and to provide the safety of shelter from the storm.

Grief can rage with an intensity, and at the same time can be the quiet storm that calls us to a peaceful reflection. I’ve experienced both sides of the storm. I’ve known the intensity of the wind as I feel it might break through all of me and leave me splattered on the ground.

I remember a night early on in the process where the storm raged outside of my home, and inside it brought up the question: How will I survive this alone? I raged at myself, at Jon, and at God. The rage wasn’t about how this could happen to me. The rage was about the unknown I was facing. At the time, it was November, and his death had been in late August. I was waking up to what was. I was raging at myself because I was now alone. A disabled person who had relaxed into having another person present to help when I needed a pair of eyes that worked well. Now he was gone and I thought to myself that I’d been foolish to relax my independence. I’d become lazy in relying on him. NO MORE.

I raged at Jon for exiting and honoring his own need to not live through another psychotic episode that would take years to walk out from. Yet, in that rage, I knew the trauma that he had chosen to avoid. It would have been too much for him, and too much to ask me to hold as I cared for him. At the end of his life, I was suffering from compassion fatigue. I wasn’t in a good place.

I was raging at God because I could safely let God hold my rage. This wasn’t about God. God didn’t do anything to me or to Jon. That is not a God I could ever believe in. I just needed to rage on that stormy night. It was enough. When the tears faded out and the body stopped shaking, I was able to rest in the bed we had shared. It was a beginning of closing out the old and entering a new space where that bed would be replaced for something that was all mine.

The bedroom went from a milk-chocolate brown to an ice blue.

I purchased the new bed on a stormy day. That night, sirens blared at accidents that had happened. The snow stayed for days, and I hunkered down as the powerful wind howled beyond my office, rattling the windows, and I wondered if I’d survive it all. Somewhere out there, the storm I was surviving was raging in someone’s head. By then, the head storm of that November night in 2016 had passed, and I understood that I could do what I had to do if I was smart about it. Jon’s storm had ended, and my storm had begun.

We’d talked about how his suicide would hurt me, and others. We’d talked about it in the very room I slept in. He knew what it would do to those left behind. I couldn’t hold it against him, because to stay would have meant suffering mental terror that no one should suffer. Psychosis is traumatic.

When you are in the storm or trauma, you can’t look to the edge and see much hope. This is why grief can be the unwelcome storm that rages out of control. We have no control over any of it. We can manage some of our behavior as we gain experience in meeting the winds. We are not in a place to stop any of it. Storms, by their nature, tend to blow themselves out when they finally get to a point of dying down.

Grief by its own nature will calm itself when we allow our bodies and souls to do the work that must be done. We navigate harsh waters; we travel underground, and we bore through mountains. In the end, we stand on new ground.

The rage inside and outside has stopped. We question how it happened, and we can conclude that the process of it all, while useful to understand, isn’t needful to focus on. In many ways it is enough to respect the wind for its power to carry us to a new place in life where we come to believe that we can face the other storms that come our way.

Oct 4

4 Comments

Crossing Styx

I remember a moment in my office when I realized that the journey of grief was about the past and the future. A new life could spring forth. It was the thought that I could plan how my life beyond would look. I got that idea from a book I’d read on grief. The trouble with that type of thinking is that it feels certain, and life is not anywhere near certain. The illusion of control is what would vanish during the next years of my life. While I can plan for some things, where I was led was, in ways, completely unexpected.

I sat looking out the window at the other houses, and I thought I knew where I was headed. I could have drawn up a plan of sorts. Wrong. While we can think about what we want, it is an illusion. Once again, certainty called me out.

There is something about this process that, if we allow it to do so, leads to wonderful and mystical surprises. Around each bend, things that we can’t imagine for ourselves appear, and disappear. Life has a way of doing that to us. Call it what you want: listening to your inner voice, your own knowing; or just letting go, and letting it happen. If we’re able to engage beyond our control, delightful things happen.

In my case I listen, and I have been doing the listening since early childhood. Whatever it is for you, it affects our footsteps as we walk on our path exiting out of the loss we’ve had to face. That day in my office a few years ago has come and gone, and it has proven me wrong. I had no way of making the connection that leads to a transition, because when you’re in it you can’t see it. When you’re in whatever you’re in, you don’t know what you’ve been sucked into.

The real work of grief and loss is found in the liminal spaces, and the times when we can enter back into that “funeral bubble” where life stops for us and we pause to collect the new understandings. We see old relationships in new ways and call them out for what they were. We allow their existence to come to new places within us. It took me somewhere between three and four years to get to this point in the process. Some of it is good, and some of it can be heart crushing. Like a river surging forward, it affects how we understand ourselves, as we leave a sheltered space to travel to a new destination within our personal knowing. Once again, we board a new boat. We’ve been on this boat since the loss happened. We don’t know we’re there because, their nature, death and other losses are traumatic.

During the past few weeks, I’ve begun researching for a book. The research involves reading memoirs involving grief journeys, and I’ve been taken to sadness, visiting old haunts, and a new understanding of where I was, what I could have done better, and ultimately seeing that I’m at yet another place on the river. While my eyes are wide open, I’m scared, and I have questions for myself. Can I navigate this? What is my new soul work? I think this is that space beyond grief where you know you’re someplace else, and once again you find yourself looking back, and this time knowing how you got to this new shore. For me this new place is an intersection that has involved the spiritual, my sexuality, and coming to terms with where I was in my young adult life. It is scary.

I’ve arrived in this liminal place with new skills, and yet, it’s so fresh to me that I wonder if I’m ready for it all. Arriving at a new point in time is more of a recognition than anything else. It is humbling. Once again, I faced a new set of demons down, and moved myself to the new beyond.

In realizing I’m on a new shore, I pause to shed fresh tears. This new set of questions is so different from that August 2016 day when I cried and wondered how I’d do any of this.

I think that in the beginning of the grief process, our knowing and certainty get ripped from us. While we’re busy having ourselves torn apart in the first days, months, and two years, we can’t fully understand the stirrings within. We get grabbed and taken to an underground we didn’t know was present. The underground is a dicey place for several reasons: 1) you don’t know you’re there; 2) you’re still moving along to someplace; and 3) the more inner work you do, the more you discover. The catch to all of this is that we’re underground, and we don’t realize it.

If I could go back and advise the woman of the past—the one that was scared and questioning the “how” of it all—I’d tell her to trust her footsteps. I’d tell her to honor the trauma that the suicide brought into her life, and to understand that this new journey of learning will bring a new calm, along with new acceptance of the essential things. I’d also let her know that grief is like the River Styx.

In a weird way, the living are the ones crossing the River Styx. We cross an underground river to make a grounded connection. Each living journey is unique to itself, and what we begin our crossing with is not what we’ll emerge with. We enter an underground that will propel us to a new, above-ground life. The living work of grief is to cross the River Styx to find ourselves alive in new ways, and on a new shore. At some point in time, we noticed that whatever needed to happen spit us out on this new shore. We’ve lived through our hard work to discover life post whatever tossed us into the boat and sent us shooting onto the waters of darkness. In places the current was strong, and we survived the journey.

There is no way of knowing that the living also traverse the waters of Styx. Maybe this is why grief, and the journey out from it, is so elusive for so many. We fail to understand that where we are is not anything that anyone can warn us about. We are underground, yet seeing light. Our support systems are what provide the lanterns that shine in this underground of Styx. In this place the light dances, dims, and shines brighter until suddenly we’re out!

The work of grief is dark. Grief challenges us to look deep within ourselves, admitting all things and standing as a witness to our own life, and the life of the deceased. We must honor the truth of each life. Like in Speaker For The Dead by Orson Scott Card, we must recognize the truth of our life, and the lives of those gone from us. We find our truth while traveling in the darkness of the River Styx. The work of grief requires this.

I pause with this realization of the journey well-traveled: WOWZA!!!! I dig my feet into the warm sand on the new shore. This is the afterlife! Post Styx. Goodbye, Styx, and thank you for the boat that served me so well.

Jul 3

1 Comment

The Hard Things