Grief’s Secret Grace
Grief is an experience that just about no one wants. It is a familiar song, sung differently with every loss. One of the exhortations we have when we are grieving is that we wish we could go back to how things were before...
When we were teenagers experiencing early heartache, we would glom on to our favorite album and play it over and over. We would talk on the phone for hours with our friends. We would write letters we would never send. There was a lot of intelligence in creating external containers to fill with our internal tidal waves. We were young and less burdened. Our nervous systems were light and supple. We howled at the moon, we raged, we sobbed and we recovered...
Until somewhere along the way, we were told to stop.
It might have been well meaning and even loving, but over time, we learned to suppress our emotions and eventually to stop feeling our grief. We start to store it in places in our bodies, not literally, but through muscle tension, fascial restriction, neural response, and limbic hypervigilance. We became tighter and less responsive, trading our emotional freedom for safety.
After a decade of doing this, we got sick, or stuck, or depressed. We wanted to find our way back to our ability to move these experiences through us and often ended up entrenched in equally futile patterns of acting out or over regulating.
Zoe (my goldendoodle, who passed on the vernal equinox) was my great teacher. The loss of her physical self was very hard for me. The grief would well up into tears that I could barely contain. For the first month after she passed, I would curl up in her dog bed and sob. We shared such deep moments of communication and love there.
Eventually, I gave up her things. I stopped crying and got on with it. Until one day, after the heavy emotion had quieted, her spirit came emanating back into my heart's eye. I can’t explain it—I don’t even want to. I just know with 100% certainty that she is with me. I feel her most clearly in the places where her beds used to be, a soul essence of love, sadness, struggle, and hope. I know for sure that we will travel together forever and had I not gone through the grieving process, I would not have been able to enter so fully into this experience of mystery. Each time I sense my golden girl, hunks of fossilized pain break away, and I am pierced by Cupid’s arrow, willing to fall in love with life once more.
Of course, I wish I could go back. And also, I'm so glad I can go on. This is grief's secret grace.
With folded palms,