“Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night’s sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn’t hear her husband’s ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren’s will be. But we learn to live in that love.”
-Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
Of all the things I have ever read (or written) about grief, there are some that make the most sense to me. Grief is not something you get “over”. What you do not say is probably more helpful than anything you might say. “Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.” (Leo Tolstoy) Grief is a natural response to loss. Loss is universal, but how we experience grief is deeply personal. “I will not say, do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.” (J.R.R. Tolkien)
For sure, everyone who lives, experiences loss. Some lives seem more filled with loss, but no one is exempt.
What may be less obvious, is how loss and grief connects us to something wonderful. We come to treasure the bloom, knowing it is only here for a short time. You learn the reason why not going to sleep angry is a pretty universal suggestion for happiness. Once in a while, we have the opportunity to slip beyond the veil of the imagined into the ocean of truth.
Rabbi Rami Shapiro (you can read his column “Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler” at spirituality/health.com), wrote about grief this way:
Imagine that the universe is a rope and you, your mom, and all things are knots in that rope. Each knot is unique, and all knots are the rope. When we die our knot unties, but the rope that is our essence remains unchanged: we become what we already are.
Life after death is the same as life before death: the rope knotting and unknotting. The extent to which you identify with a knot is the extent to which you grieve over its untying. The extent to which you realize that the knot is the rope is the extent you can move through your grief into a sense of fearless calm.
For me, the rope is God, the source and substance of all reality. When your mom dies she relaxes into her true nature, and realizes who she always was and is: God. I believe this realization comes at death regardless of who we are or how we life. (Spirituality& Health, January/February 2007)
This week, be aware of the process of grief. We not only grieve loss, but without being aware, we might grieve not having what we have. Best to love the moments we are living, even the ones that are challenging. (Perhaps especially those….)
This week’s health tip originally appeared online at https://scs-matters.com/grief/
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Tips from 5 April 2010 to 6 August 2012 are here: Archived Tips
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Rev.Debra Basham
Voice: (269) 921-2217 Email: debra@scs-matters.com https://scs-matters.com http://ImagineHealing.info http://SurgicalSupport.info Small Changes … Infinite Results™
“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” ~Mother Teresa |