Last week was a week with loss. Good Friday, the husband of a client/friend/colleague passed. Holy Saturday, the father of a business acquaintance passed. Easter Sunday, a loyal member of Saint Joseph Buddhist Sangha passed. A Buddhist teacher invited me to use the 49 day ceremony.
When someone passes away, in addition to a funeral service that usually occurs three or seven days after the death, we have a ceremony on the 49th day. Traditionally, the period of 49 days after someone dies is seen as a time for that person to check their consciousness and digest their karma. According to Buddhist teaching the bodhisattva Ji Jang Bosal helps the deceased during these 49 days to perceive their karma so when they return they are reborn to help this world, rather than continue in the cycle of birth and death. Buddhism teaches that there is a life in this body, then a time of investigation or consideration, and then a new life …
Loss is such a raw part of human life.
Listening to a TED talk by Nora McInerny, I was moved to laughter and to tears. McInerny is the author of The Hot Young Widows Club: Lessons on Survival from the Front Lines of Grief.
McInerny said something members of our Grief Journey Group have said to one another over and over for over twenty years: We don’t move on from grief, we move forward with it.
The next day, opening the May 2019 Guideposts, I see, ‘A Different Kind of Grief’ by B’ette Schalk. Schalk felt she lost her husband to anxiety and depression, writing, “Gone was the vibrant man I’d fallen in love with 24 years earlier, the man who liked going to parties and playing cards.” The article closes with a single page with 5 headings of great wisdom for caregivers: How to Cope With Ambiguous Loss.
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How to Cope With Ambiguous Loss
Put a name to it.
Use “both…and” thinking.
Accept that good enough is enough.
Manage your mixed emotions.
Imagine new hopes and dreams.
Ambiguous loss is what my friend is living as her husband is in a facility for those with Alzheimer’s disease.
Ambiguous loss is felt by students afraid to be at school for fear of a mass shooting.
Ambiguous loss is felt in the aging and staging of life.
On the light side of 40, she recently shared with me she had read on a website about cancer that having cancer was like living with a loaded gun pointed at your head. You did not know when it would go off, but you knew it would.
Ah, ambiguous loss….
Whether it is our youth, our goals, our jobs, our homes, our health, our strength, our courage, or our loved ones, or our memories, we all navigate the waters of ambigious loss.
The best way I can think to close this post is with this Deep Spring Center Thought for Today:
“Your loved one is not dead, only he has left his human form. He is now expressing himself through you, through your growing open heart that can allow itself the experience of grief and allow that grief to become a catalyst for compassion. He is expressing himself through you in all the ways he spoke to you in your life, the joys and the sorrows. He is expressing himself through every human that he touched in this lifetime. And he is in the soil and the stars and the rain and the sun. You cannot lose him.” ~ Aaron
Whatever has the nature to arise has the nature to cease and is not me nor mine.
