Another Preface to Cover the Silence Since Last Time
Wow! From early Easter until now has been a long time! Explanation? Although we had moved to new quarters last November, our former home was slow in selling in today’s housing market. After Easter, were several “Open Houses,” with still no results. We spent time sprucing things up, making sure our former little house looked very presentable and appealing. Suddenly, about Mother’s Day weekend, an “ offer to buy” came through, and escrow closed in a matter of days. Peace of mind, and no more second rent to pay. Suddenly plans could be made for trips yet to be taken this year. So the above accounts for how we spent our April and May. We hope we can promise that, for the balance of this year, we shall each try to deliver a new essay at the beginning of every month. Amen!
THE PRICELESS GIFT OF GRIEF
Who is not familiar with the television credit card commercial that names the cost of a number of things, but then points to a memorable moment or a precious relationship, and concludes with the reminder that still, “Some things in life are priceless!”
To have loved and to have been loved is priceless. Remember the quote, “Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all?” Sometimes we purposely and consciously end relationships, maybe for good reasons, and then cling to that truth to see us through the giving up of a friend or lover. But then there comes the unwanted loss of a person we hold incredibly dear, to the simple fact that human life always ends with death. Someone we love dies, and oh, it hurts! How it hurts!
In the last analysis, however, we will have to accept that grief is the price we pay for loving and having, then losing!
Acceptance of that truth is hard to swallow. But life is like a single coin. Loving and being loved is the shiny side we like to contemplate, to hold close. The underside of the coin is the natural emotion of grief, and that we don’t want to handle, to deal with! But grief, looked at this way, also becomes as priceless as love. This essay will examine many facets of grief.
My mentor, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, turned to the participants of her workshop that I attended, and said to them, after I told my story of unrequited love from my birth mother, “The greatest grief you can ever experience, which is far greater than any loss that anybody ever talks about is the grief over love that you have never experienced. That is the greatest grief.” Her acknowledgement of this loss in my own life was a turning-point for me. Then I could begin to deal with unspoken grief, from which I had suffered for fifty-four years. A year later, I began cognitive therapy with a skilled therapist. I realized too that there was “a law of compensation,” as Emerson reassures us, that had sent into my life a host of loving women, two beloved foster-mothers, teachers, mentors and close friends—all who helped to fill the breach. I began to “mother myself,” and the healing of grief ensued. Without shedding a tear, and with no bitterness, I could later write a book mentioning my unfortunate relationship with my mother. I could even begin to feel compassion for her, and express gratitude for what she did give me.
Once I had a hospice patient, who for seventy-five years, carried a burden of guilt and unacknowledged grief because her father had begun to molest her at age seven. She had never told another person, until I sat at her bedside, how the love she needed from him was subverted, distorted and denied. The grief she bore expressed itself in screaming when it was time for her to sleep at night. “It was not your fault,” I reassured her over and over. She lay back on the pillow as if a huge weight had been lifted from her, and her countenance became utterly peaceful. In a newfound tranquility, a few days later, she slipped into a coma and died shortly after
When grief is not shared or worked through, but rather repressed and pushed down, it can last for fifty years. One nurse was asked by a terminal patient to stand by her bedside when she confessed to her husband that she had an abortion secretly, decades before. She didn’t want to die, feeling the guilt from her long ago decision. The nurse recalls that after the woman spoke, the husband took his wife’s hand in his and lovingly said to her, “But sweetheart, I knew that all along, and it’s all right.” Forgiveness had already been granted her long before, and how sad that she had not shared her grief earlier so that she could experience her husband’s understanding heart.
If grief is not worked through, but denied and pushed aside, then when the next tragedy occurs, grief seems to increase exponentially. I had a dear friend who performed his work assignments with a quiet brilliance and deep integrity. But he “spoke truth to power”, saying that the public stakeholders had been lied to, and so he was demoted from a senior position.
He must have considered it unmanly to grieve the loss of his life’s work, which certainly needed to be grieved, so when an adult child of his was killed suddenly in a tragic automobile accident, the original grief reappeared and intensified the tragic loss of his beloved daughter. It was almost a decade before his life returned to any sense of normalcy, and during that decade he experienced what therapists and social workers call “complicated symptoms of grief.”
Returning to more normal expressions of grief, we often see bereaved persons making either saints or sinners of the one they have lost to death, or they cannot even speak the name of the one who has died. Wisely, the poet Long fellow observed, “Well has it been said, that there is no grief like the grief which does not speak!” Those who work to facilitate bereavement support groups find that other bereaved folks can often help their fellow mourners to strike a balance when looking back on the life of the one they have lost. And a small group of grieving folks together form a safe space where sorrow may be vented and not hurried along, but allowed to take its own natural time sequence. Too often spouses, siblings or parents are told, “Get over it,” or “Move on with your life.” But each person’s timetable to work through grief is individual and needs to be respected. When facilitating bereavement groups, Cliff and I urge participants to remember that grief is not something one gets “over,” but rather a journey one takes “through” sadness and loss, and eventually the individual can reinvest in life with all its sunshine and shadows. Social worker Gale Massey puts it so beautifully, “By letting your heart break you let your heart begin to heal,” and she adds, “Denying sadness denies healing.”
Before closing our examination of grief—this priceless gift that comes sometime to each one of us--- I want to mention the value of “anticipatory grieving.” Facing one’s own death or that of one who is dearly loved, grieving ahead of time can make the actual death, when it comes, somewhat less painful to bear. The one who is dying will quite naturally grieve the losses he or she faces. Family and caregivers should expect, even encourage the expression of sadness that life is coming to an end. When I have urged family members “to go have a good cry” when sadness overcomes them as the death of their loved one approaches, maybe even cry with and in front of their loved one, later these folks have come and thanked me for that guidance. I learned this for myself when I would fly across the continent to see my ailing Dad in his Idaho nursing home. After each visit, when driving back to the Spokane airport I would cry all the way. Then the day I was phoned and told of his death, I took about six hours to sit with my grief and do a life review of everything I could remember about our life-long loving relationship. It was like playing a video in my heart of memories I would always treasure. I did the same thing when a beloved brother died, and found that “life review” process very comforting, bringing a sweet sense of closure. Of course, tears still flow from time to time, but the raw, agonizing sadness is past!
Beauty can be found, as one faces death, as we indicate in the name of this web site. Grief is a priceless gift, for it reassures us, as we cope with it day in and day out, month in and month out, that once we were dearly loved and had the great privilege to return that love to another. “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted!”
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