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[/caption]Carol Marleigh Kline , Guest- “Snap out of it. Time to move on!” We’ve all heard the world’s business-model advice to the broken hearted. Friends and relatives who are uncomfortable around our grief try to cheer us up, distract us, or convince us that we’ll “get over it.” If we’ve lost a love, they remind us about all those other fish who are eagerly swimming in the sea. We, however, are neither cheered nor ready to go fishing.
In this culture, we are not raised to use grief for growth. It’s treated more like a low-level, self-indulgent illness—the right words or a little vacation are supposed to bring us back to the smiling person we were, just as if nothing had ever happened. A woman I know lost her daughter to cancer. “Kelly was a generous, caring human being,” she says. “But my friends and family are tired of hearing me talk about her. They don’t know what to say to help me. I don’t need words of sympathy. I just want them to remember her life with me and take joy in who she was.”
Many people don’t understand the value of the grieving process. They want us to ignore it, largely out of their own fears about the future—the deaths and losses we all face if we live long enough. Grief, though, is not just some bad habit that needs to be hidden from others’ eyes. It hears only the griever’s drummer. And for good reason.
Everything in life is crucial to our growth. That includes grief. If we try to blot out the pain with externals—with parties, shopping, food, or anything else that allows us to pretend that great and important things are not at work in our depths—the opportunity that grief represents is lost. That deep pain asks us to be quiet, to slow down for awhile, to go within and maybe spend time out in Nature.
Grief is a natural process with its own heart-based rhythm. It moves us into a slower gear. That’s because while we grieve, everything we experience flows first through the heart and then through the mind. Minds are not accustomed to a second-banana connection to the heart. They don’t quite know what to do. We may find ourselves forgetful while we grieve. We lose our keys. Misplace our shoes. We skip dinner—and remember it hours later. Our thoughts veer off into memories. We’re “not ourselves.” If we try to act normal while we don’t feel normal, life loses its flow. Fighting with grief is as effective as boxing with the wind.
We would like to believe that time heals all things. It doesn’t—not if we think time will do the job for us. All by itself, time does not heal anything. We heal ourselves by examining and using what’s going on inside productively. Or we miss the opportunity.
When we break a leg, it heals faster if we get out of bed and hobble about on crutches. That’s because the body was designed to move, just like emotions and feelings.
Stagnation of any kind is unhealthy. We reach carefully, gently within to understand where grief wants to take us, and what it can help us learn.
Recently, I lost someone. I spun into grief mode on autopilot. My angry outer mind threw rocks at “the enemy.” After a few hours of going over and over the same territory, I told myself that if everything happens for a reason, this experience could not be the one and only exception to that rule since time began. And so I sat with it. And felt it. As my heart and my mind communicated, I understood another deep “should” of mine—that no one should hurt my friends. But the reality was that what was done was done. The situation was out of my control. I felt stymied. How could I respond in a way that was respectful to the spirit of our friendship?
Eventually, I wrote down some qualities I will miss most about this particular friend—his loyalty, his cracked sense of humor, and his courage. And finally, this thought came to mind: “Maybe I can learn to be more loyal, laugh more about wonderfully crazy things, and be willing to stand up faster for what I believe is right.” That thought could not bring him back. But it did soften the hurt. It allowed me to tap into love, instead. And that’s when the anger began to subside. It was only then, when I reached a new perspective on my grief, that I understood the purpose of the anger. It was an arrow I could use on a path toward growth.
The experience of grief and grief’s timetable are different for each person. Our inner self can tell us when it’s time to move on—if we listen. It’s all right to spend time in the land of grief, but it’s a mistake to be buying a mortgage there. Our hearts grow brittle if we stuff them with nothing but memories. Staying stuck in grief keeps it limited to an emotion. Grief offers us a unique opportunity. If we allow grief to evolve from an emotion into a feeling, it scours us out and leaves a space behind. In that space, we may find the seeds of compassion growing.
In the end, if all we do is drown in the emotion of grief or sorrow, we choose drama over love, loss over gain, and death over life—not what the people we love, and have lost, would want for us.
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Carol Marleigh Kline specializes in giving advice to help people manage complex emotions from a spiritual and ethical point of view. In her recent book Streetwise Spirituality she offers more self help tips, as she does in this article on managing grief.
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