This is a continuation of the series I’ve been writing about the Dark Night of the Soul/Phoenix Era. Read previous posts here, here, here, and here.
I am four and a half months into losing someone I cherish, a beloved friend/old love. Although I have experienced grief before, this loss has brought agony, anguish, and sorrow at a level I did not think was possible. While the cognitive capacity to digest grief ‘content’ has been low, a fair amount of insights are emerging for me from the fog. Even with a spiritual outlook that allows for the survival of consciousness after death, grief must be felt.
Truthfully, I probably wouldn’t be sending this out yet if I hadn’t realized it’s Grief Awareness Week because my notes are disorganized! I’ve been writing and rewriting this newsletter for months, with pages and pages of thoughts. The next few blogs will address many more things around death, grief, and loss, such as how they are an initiation, closely tied to the Dark Night/Phoenix Era, how to use rituals in grief work, mediumship, after-death communications, and why we should all grieve SO many more things in our lives instead of carrying the emotional residue around.
But for today, here’s what’s been emerging:
Most people do not know what to say or do to help or comfort you when you lose someone you love.
The short of it is this: our pain wants to be acknowledged. Not fixed. Not erased. Just acknowledged. This short animation explains it perfectly.
The best thing you can give someone who is grieving is an ear. Bear witness to their pain. If you have it in you, a beautiful thing to say is, “Tell me about the person you lost and what they meant to you.”
(**Many others have written about how to help someone who is grieving. I’ve added resources at the end.**)
The reason they don’t know what to say or do is…
Western culture is grief illiterate and grief avoidant.
Death, loss, and grief in Western culture? Eh, we’d rather not.
Why? Because Western culture is allergic to extreme emotions, particularly negative ones. And boy is grief extreme. It’s downright primal.
I used to think, “I’ll learn about deep grief when I really need it.”
Ugh, please, don’t make the same mistake.
In modern, grief-avoidant Western culture, this attitude doesn’t work. It might work in another culture where death, loss, and grief are openly embraced. Where community comes together when someone dies, to catch you as you fall to your knees. Or where rituals and ceremonies provide support and direction about how to be bereaved. In that kind of culture, you can unconsciously adopt behavior by observing how others cope with their grief and mourning.
But in the West, waiting for grief to descend upon you — which it inevitably will — to learn how to deal with it is a terrible idea. It not only puts you in a vulnerable position, but it also makes you unable to support others when they go through it.
When you lose someone (or something, time, or place) that you love with your whole heart and being — or that is simply meaningful to you in any way — a piece of you dies, too. And because of our grief avoidance and illiteracy, we are typically ill-prepared for the devastation, the mental-physical-spiritual chaos that ensues. (This very much applies to other things in our lives besides just the death of a person and I will write more about this soon.)
What kind of chaos? Well…
Grief can be a staggering assault on your cognition, emotions, social life, physical body, and more.
Grief leaves you bewildered in a broken new reality.
It is uniquely idiosyncratic, individual, and feral.
It can physically hurt. For me, it felt like I was being cut or stabbed from the inside.
Grieving takes more energy than you ever could have imagined, leaving you fatigued.
Your cognition can become ravaged, resulting in confusion, disorganization, trouble thinking and making decisions, along with an inability to concentrate on any one thing.
Your psyche becomes tied up processing the shock, disbelief, denial, memories, pain, anger, guilt, sorrow, longing, despair, etc. The amount of processing is overwhelming. Whether you let it bubble up to your conscious awareness or not, it’s happening in your psyche and body. Your entire being starts to emotionally process and mourn both symbolic and tangible losses, not just the death.
You grieve for what you have lost from the past and the future. For all the hopes, dreams, and unfulfilled expectations you held for and with that person.
For everything that was just between the two of you.
For the shared memories that you now carry alone.
It will take much longer than you — and society — anticipate to work through (and that’s okay!).
With few strategies to turn to when grief descends, we end up scrambling to get out of this crushing pain, needing to suppress it because, truly, how could you deal with all that on your own without tools and community? We aren’t meant to.
Western culture is truly insane for how it ignores grief and expects people to bounce back, get to work, and be happy again. The cultural expectations are outlandish.
And more importantly, the cultural expectations are inhumane.
We have belittled, ignored, and suppressed grief to the point that there now exists a thing called a grief advocate. Imagine having to advocate for the expression and acceptance of a normal biological function (oops, women already know about that!) — that’s how estranged we are now from our human nature. It sounds like something from an absurdist novel — except, it’s reality. Are we going to need breathing advocates soon, too? Laughing advocates?
With bewilderment, comes new depths of love and loss.
Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper have a beautiful conversation on loss and grief where Colbert discusses the importance of “learning to love the thing you most wish had never happened” (he lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was young). He explains that your own loss allows you to understand and connect with other peoples’ losses. It’s true. It’s just like that scene in Harry Potter where only Harry and Luna can see the Thestrals (the winged, skeletal horses) because the two of them have seen death, whereas their classmates have not. Grief and loss — probably the most universal of human experiences — are an invisible thread that ultimately connect us all. It’s just that the thread becomes visible sooner for some of us. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
While I am not grateful for the event, I can easily say that the cavernous depths of love and loss that have cracked me open — depths you simply cannot imagine until you experience them —have brought genuine awe. Reverence. Humility. It is nothing short of Sacred. If you let it, grief can dissolve your defenses and let you feel the center of existence, love.
In some ways, the tempestuous, torrential landscape of grief, which decimates the suddenly trivial nonsense of your everyday life, the meaningless chatter in your head, and the misplaced values in your heart, gives you a clear line of sight into being. Like, “Ooh. This is what it is. This is the reason. This is it.”
Don’t get me wrong. I wish it had not happened. I wake up every single day bewildered and disoriented again to the fact that it has happened. But the depth of feeling that the experience of losing someone you love brings is… almost psychedelic, bringing sensations, emotions, colors, and intensities that you couldn’t access before. Pain and love. Despair and hope. Anger and gratitude.
And — is it just me? — when I meet new people now, I can’t help but wonder what losses they’ve had. What’s caused them to crumple to the floor? Have they, too, crawled into bed with a note from their loved one because it’s too hard to part, even in sleep? What are their scars?
We are taught to turn away from pain. But your tears are holy.
I started noticing that in the small things people would say to me, there is an inherent assumption that we all want to avoid pain, like, “Won’t that hurt more?” or “Here, this’ll get your mind off it.” For example, when I read every message, every email, every journal entry that I could find between myself and the person I lost, some people in my life were incredulous that I would put myself through such pain.
That’s what we do, isn’t it? Turn away from painful memories. Avoid the things that we know will sear our hearts.
But when you lose someone you love, some of that is tempered by the desperate need to connect with them in any way possible. This is one of those moments in life where you can see how inextricably linked love and loss really are. Yes, it will hurt to revisit these memories, but my soul needs that moment of connection and love. And the love pouring out of my heart wants to honor my person and everything between us, even if pain wants to tag along.
I now know that emotions build up like sediment in our bodies and minds if they aren’t felt and released. The only way to heal is to feel. So, I turn toward the pain. I am utterly exhausted from trying to outrun it. Now, instead, I embrace every meltdown and breakdown as house cleaning, like, “Ah, another layer released to the ethers.” It’s already there in the language we use, isn’t it? After a good cry, we say, “I feel lighter.”
And that’s not to say it’s easy. It f*cking hurts. A lot. It’s a howling, untameable pain. But I know it will hurt more to turn away. My grief is a new broken, vulnerable, raw part of me that requires great care and attention. It is my companion and may be the only entity in the Universe that fully understands the connection between myself and the person I lost — and that’s why I honor it.
Anderson Cooper’s podcast on grief, All There Is, is one of the hands-down best things I’ve ever heard. I cannot tell you how many times I have listened and relistened to his conversations with psychotherapist Francis Weller (here and here). Cooper bravely shows us what happens when you don’t fully feel your grief.
“Those tears are holy,” Weller says. Indeed, they are. They are the bridge between us and what we have lost.
Megan Devine – psychotherapist and grief advocate – says, “It is a radical act to hurt.” That vibrates to my core. So, to Western culture which encourages us to, “Be strong. Move forward. Buck up,” I say: F*CK OFF.
That doesn’t mean to stay in it forever. You go into the darkness to move it, to find the light.
As Weller says, we are looking for permission to express what is so utterly human. So, if you feel called to share, I would love to hear about your losses and what they have meant to you – drop them in the comments, send me a private message, or hail to the Substack chat (if I can figure out how to enable that…). No one should have to carry the pain alone.
A very NOT comprehensive grief resource list (more to come in upcoming weeks)
Resources for Grievers from Megan Devine
Grief & Loss During the Holidays from The Forever Family Foundation
How to help someone who is grieving: here, here, and here.
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Dr. Francis Weller
All There Is with Anderson Cooper
This blog was originally posted on Cosmos, Coffee, & Consciousness
