Allow the Loss to Lead the Way

I bumped into Brian D. Smith’s Grief 2 Growth program years ago and saw his What Is a Grief Doula? What Dina Bell-Laroche Taught Me About Grieving Well today. Dina Bell-Laroche is a Certified Thanatologist, grief doula, keynote speaker, and author of Grief Unleashed.

In 2001, her younger sister, Tracy, passed away from a rare cancer at just 29 years old. Tracy was pregnant with her first child when she was diagnosed. She lived to hold her baby, and passed thirteen months later, just after he turned one.

Brian shared that when he asked Dina to tell him about Tracy right at the top of their conversation, she paused with gratitude and said, “That’s often something that really opens up the grief heart, is when we invite them to speak their person’s name. So often we’ll talk about our daughter that died or our parent or our sister, but we don’t actually use their name because it hurts so much. And yet when we do, it makes it real and profound, and we can be witnessed in that experience.”

Brian responded, “I understand that in my bones. I say Shayna’s name every chance I get. Naming keeps them present.”

Brian says Dina talked about two kinds of time: clock time we all recognize and kairos time. Dina explains, “Our bodies understand a different language than our head does. We understand chronological time, chronos time. And yet we also have kairos time. This is this liminal space that you and I dance in.

“In kairos time, grief collapses distance. A smell, a song, a stranger who walks like your person, and suddenly you’re back in the moment they took their last breath.”

Dina told Brian these are called STUGS, sudden temporary upsurges in grief. The term was coined by thanatologist Therese Rando, and Dina said reading it brought her enormous relief. She thought she was going crazy.

Then she offered something beautiful: “STUGS can also stand for sudden temporary upsurges in grace“.

I had my own STUGS as I realized just how much grief I am processing currently. Oh, some of it is the deaths of dear ones in the recent past. I name my friend (Linda Higbee), my sister (Johnnie Sue), our long-time music friend (Michael), our dear Florida friend in Canada (Eli). Some aspects of the experience are anticipatory loss, often referred to as pre-grieving. This type of grief includes people I have concern for, but is not limited only to this. It also includes the losses of our own aging. Pieces of this grief, I am quite sure, are universal, and perhaps at the moment not personal.

At the time I sat on the porch tearfully expressing what I was feeling today to John after writing just the two opening paragraphs, I had not yet received news about the passing of a friend of Stacey’s in Tennessee that John and I have had the pleasure of getting to know, and a friend of John’s brother Greg, that they have been having a fabulous time shooting pool with on Monday nights.

A couple of powerful truths:

Doctors are trained to see death as the ultimate failure. Their role ends when the body stops. We’re taught to fight the one thing guaranteed to happen to every single one of us.

Pushing grief out of view only sends it underground.

In the Grief Journey Group we started here in Saint Joseph in 2000 we said you do not get over grief, you get through it. We had only two rules in our group: Do not judge your grief journey, and do not judge another’s. We looked a lot at the way different cultures deal with grief. And we acknowledged experiences we have that remind us people do leave their bodies but they do not leave their loved ones.

The uncomfortable feelings are feedback that I have more energy to process than my central nervous system can handle all at once. That is why it is called a grief journey…. These feelings are a result of our love.

In Grief 2 Growth Brian speaks of love that continues and the ways pain can become purpose. Appreciating this beautiful body of work. Thank you, Brian and Dina.

As she says, “Let us allow the loss to lead the way.”