The Wild Edge of Sorrow, page 4
The territory of grief is heavy. Even the word carries weight. Grief comes from the Latin word gravis, meaning “heavy,” from which we also get grave, gravity, and gravid. We use the word gravitas to speak of a quality in some people who are able to carry the weight of the world with a dignified bearing. And so it is, when we learn to carry our grief with dignity.
At times, grief invites us into a terrain that reduces us to our most naked self. We find it hard to meet the day, to accomplish the smallest of tasks, to tolerate the greetings of others. We feel estranged from the world and only marginally able to navigate the necessities of eating, sleeping, and self-care. Some other presence takes over in times of intense grief, and we are humbled, brought to our knees. We live close to the ground, the gravity of sorrow felt deep in our bones.
The onset of grief following a significant loss initiates a shift in our daily rhythm. We enter into what some cultures refer to as a time of living in the ashes. Among the ancient Scandinavian cultures, it was a common practice for those dealing with loss to spend their days alongside the fires that were aligned down the center of a longhouse. They would occupy this physical and psychic terrain until they felt they had fully moved through the underworld where grief had taken them. Ash speaks to what remains, the barest semblance of what once was. James Hillman wrote, “Ash is the ultimate reduction, the bare soul, the last truth, all else dissolved.”17 The soul in grief feels reduced, brought to the place where all other thoughts or matters dissipate into ash.
This sacred season in the ashes was the ancient Scandinavian community’s way of acknowledging that one of their people had entered a world parallel to but separate from the daily life of gathering food, feeding children, and tending fields. Little was expected of them during this time, which often lasted a year or more. The individual’s duty was to mourn, to live in the ashes of their loss, and to regard this time as holy. It was a brooding time, a deeply interior period of digesting and metabolizing the bitter tincture of loss. It was a time out of time, an underworld journey to the place of sorrow and emptying. Whoever came back from this sojourn came back changed and deepened by this work in the ashes. And indeed, any who undertake real mourning return with gravitas, wisdom gathered in the darkness. These women and men become our elders, the ones who can hold the village in times of great challenge.
Imagine what this grieving space does for an individual facing loss. It grants a profound permission to enter a place of sorrow, to work with it, to explore its contours and textures, to become familiar with the landscape of loss. Contemplating this time dedicated to grief, our minds can quickly respond with arguments against it: “This is self-indulgent, over-the-top,” “You could get stuck there,” “I should be done with this by now.” What is true, however, is that these cultural practices were developed over centuries to address what human beings need during grief-stricken times. There is wisdom in offering a period of time to those who mourn. According to Jewish custom as well, the bereaved are given a year to tend to their loss. The tradition of dressing in black or wearing black armbands for an extended period of time to let others know that you are in mourning was widespread in our culture until very recently. When we communally honor this time of living in the ashes, we invite a deepened relationship with death and the underworld of loss. We gain a connection with loss that, in turn, keeps our bond with the living world vital and sustaining: the two states are mirrors of each other, reminders of the great round of life, which must include the reality of death.
Barry Spector, cultural historian and author of Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence, reminds us of our need for emotional closure following the death of someone close. He focuses specifically upon the role of ritual in helping to come to this state. He writes, “Closure is important in all transitions, but after a death, there are rites of passage for the survivors as well as for the deceased. Completion of their ritual responsibilities . . . moves the living into a new phase of life. When survivors aren’t allowed sufficient time to grieve, however, the wounds close too soon, remain infected and never heal.” (Italics mine)18 We require a sufficient season of mourning to tend to the dead and the living, thereby restoring our place in the daylight world. Without an adequate time in the ashes tending the loss, sorrow mutates into symptoms of depression, anxiety, dullness, and despair. We must honor the needs of the soul during times of grief.
Grieving is also intimately connected with memory and the witnessing of those memories and emotions. Freeman House, in his elegant book, Totem Salmon, says, “In one ancient language, the word memory derives from a word meaning mindful, in another from a word to describe a witness, in yet another it means, at root, to grieve. To witness mindfully is to grieve for what has been lost.”19 That is the intent and purpose of grief.
Grief both acknowledges what has been lost and ensures that we don’t forget what must be remembered. There are places around the world where memorials have been built to remind the community of what has happened to the people. These are places of mourning and memory: Wounded Knee, the Rwandan Genocide Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, and the Holocaust Memorial are all sites where grief is given concrete form to remind us of our shared loss. Some grief is not meant to be resolved and set aside. Sometimes grief helps us hold what must be carried by a people so that they never have to endure such pain again.
Psychologists Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman explore the idea of non-redemptive mourning in their work with social injustice and violence. Non-redemptive mourning acknowledges that some losses should never be allowed to settle, like silt, to the bottom of our memory. Some losses, such as cultures that have been forever silenced, species that have disappeared, and traumatic events that affect whole communities and cultures, should be kept present in our communal memory. The experience of grieving in these situations is “not intended to finish with the past and return to ‘normal life,’ but rather to keep the past from slipping away in a present that continues to deny it.”20
There is a direct relationship between mourning and memory. To counter the amnesia of our times, we must be willing to look into the face of the loss and keep it nearby. In this way, we may be able to honor the losses and live our lives as carriers of their unfinished stories. This is an ancient thought—how we tend the dead is as important as how we tend the living. In our quick-to-forget, future-oriented culture, it is easy to discard the ones who went before, in all their shapes and ways of living. Yet they are all ancestors, from the oak savannahs that have been cleared for housing tracts to marshlands filled for shopping malls. The dead are among us, and we must not forget them.
A colleague of mine, Mary Gomes, cocreated an exhibit called “Altars of Extinction.” This was her attempt to keep in our memory our astonishing losses, as species continue to disappear from our world.
“Altars of Extinction” is an artistic and ritual memorial which provides an opportunity to collectively contemplate and grieve the extinction of plant, animal, and fungal species at human hands. Why build altars to extinct species when so many are endangered and in dire need of protection? Reasons range from the highly practical—by learning about extinction, we are far better equipped to prevent further losses—to the deeply spiritual and philosophical. As author Mark Jerome Walters remarked, “Each extinction is a unique voice silenced in a universal conversation of which we ourselves are only one participant. When the tiny wings of the last Xerces blue butterfly ceased to flutter, our world grew quieter by a whisper and duller by a hue. . . . Rarely, in turning our attention from a recently extinct species to our last-ditch effort to save another, do we pause to say goodbye.”21
Grief helps us acknowledge the losses and to hold these painful memories communally.
No one escapes suffering in this life. None of us is exempt from loss, pain, illness, and death. How is it that we have so little understanding of these essential experiences? How is it that we have attempted to keep grief separated from our lives and only begrudgingly acknowledge its presence at the most obvious of times, such as a funeral? “If sequestered pain made a sound,” Stephen Levine says, “the atmosphere would be humming all the time.”22
It is the accumulated losses of a lifetime that slowly weigh us down—the times of rejection, the moments of isolation when we felt cut off from the sustaining touch of comfort and love. It is an ache that resides in the heart, the faint echo calling us back to the times of loss. We are called back, not so much to make things right, but to acknowledge what happened to us. Grief asks that we honor the loss and, in so doing, deepen our capacity for compassion. When grief remains unexpressed, however, it hardens, becomes as solid as a stone. We, in turn, become rigid and stop moving in rhythm with the soul. When we are in touch with all of our emotions, on the other hand, we are more verb than noun, more a movement than a thing. But when our grief stagnates, we become fixed in place, unable to move and dance with the flow of life. Grief is part of the dance.
As we begin to pay attention, we notice that grief is never far from our awareness. We become aware of the many ways it arrives in our daily lives. It is the blue mood that greets us upon waking. It is the melancholy that shades the day in muted tones. It is the recognition of time’s passing, the slow emptying of our days. It is the searing pain that erupts when someone close to us dies—a parent, a partner, a child, a beloved pet. It is the confounding grief when our life circumstances are shattered by the unexpected—the phone rings with news of a biopsy; we find ourselves suddenly without work, uncertain as to how we will support our family; our partner decides one day that the marriage is over. We tumble and fall as the ground beneath us opens, shaken by violent rumblings. Grief enfolds our lives, drops us close to the earth, reminding us of our inevitable return to the dark soil.
We are laid low by grief, taken down below the surface of the world, where shadows and strange images appear. We are no longer moving in our brightly lit, daytime existence. Grief punctures the solidity of our world, shatters the certainty of fixed stars, familiar landscapes, and known destinations. In a breath, all of this can be shaken, will be shaken, by an unexpected loss. In this place, everything moves slowly—time, body, thought. Grief feels like it will never pass. This brings us great fear. We worry that this house of sorrow will be our final resting place, that our days will always be overcast, gray, and dulled by the sadness we carry. We have the sense that we are on a slow walk with no obvious direction. Fortunately, grief knows where to take us; we are on a pilgrimage to soul.
It is challenging to honor the descent in a culture that primary values the ascent. We like things rising—stock markets, the GDP, profit margins. We get anxious when things go down. Even within psychology, there is a premise that is biased toward improvement, always getting better, rising above our troubles. We hold dear concepts like progress and integration. These are fine in and of themselves, but it is not the way psyche works. Psyche, we must remember, was shaped by and is rooted in the foundations of nature. As such, psyche also experiences times of decay and death, of stopping, regression, and being still. Much happens in these times that deepen the soul. When all we are shown is the imagery of ascent, we are left to interpret the times of descent as pathological; we feel that we are somehow failing. As poet and author Robert Bly wryly noted, “How can we get a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, lethargy, or misery? Disneyland means ‘no ashes.’ ”23
When we were able to see times of loss as inevitable and, in a very real way, necessary, we are able to engage these moments and cultivate the art of living well, of metabolizing suffering into something beautiful and ultimately sacred. It may be strange to imagine grief leading to beauty, but imagine, for a moment, the shining face of someone who has just released his or her cup of tears standing before us naked and cleansed. We are seeing someone as beautiful as Botticelli’s Venus or Michelangelo’s David.
It feels somewhat daunting to step off into the depths of grief and suffering, yet I don’t know of any more appropriate way to undertake the journey of reclaiming soul than by spending time at the grief shrine. Without some measure of intimacy with grief, our capacity to be with any other emotion or experience in our life is greatly compromised.
Coming to trust this descent into the dark waters is not easy. Yet until we can make this descent successfully and come back up, we lack the tempering that can come only from such a deep experience. What do we find there in the well of grief? Darkness, moistness that turns our eyes wet and our faces into streams of tears. We find the bodies of forgotten ancestors, abandoned dreams, ancient remnants of trees and animals—things that have come before and that have the power to lead us to the place to which each of us will return one day when we, too, leave this life, which has been gifted to us for a short time. This descent is a passage into what we are, creatures of earth.
Three
The Five Gates of Grief
Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.
—OSCAR WILDE
Over the course of our lives, grief enters our hearts in many ways. If we are to acknowledge and tend our grief, it is important to become familiar with what I call the Five Gates of Grief. Each of these doorways leads to the communal hall of grief, and each helps us to understand the many ways that loss touches our hearts and souls in this life.
We are all familiar with the first gate of grief, which is the sorrow we experience with the loss of someone or something we love. The other four gates receive virtually no attention in modern society. Consequently, the grief that accumulates at these thresholds remains untouched, and we feel the growing weight of unattended sorrows. This is often misdiagnosed as depression. We are pushed down, overwhelmed by so much congested grief. The number one cause of death in this society is congestive heart failure. What is it that is congesting our hearts? It is more than plaque buildup in the arteries, more than high levels of cholesterol. We are burdened by undigested sorrows as well. Far too many of us suffer from broken hearts that remain unattended. By understanding the grief that is held at these other gates, we may be able to compassionately meet it and, in the right settings, allow the full expression of grief to be felt and honored.
The First Gate: Everything We Love, We Will Lose
I have come to have a deep faith in grief, have come to see the way its moods call us back to soul. It is, in fact, one of the voices of the soul, asking us to face life’s most difficult but essential teaching: everything is a gift, and nothing lasts. This is a painful truth. To accept this fact is to live on life’s terms and not to try to deny the simple truth of loss, what the Buddhists call impermanence. When we acknowledge grief, we acknowledge that everything we love, we will lose. No exceptions. Now, of course, we want to argue this point, saying that we will keep in our hearts the love of those who depart this earth before us: our parents, or our spouse, or our children, or our friends, or, or, or—and yes, that is true. It is grief, however, that allows the heart to stay open to this love, to remember sweetly the ways these people touched our lives. It is only when we deny grief’s entry into our lives that we begin to compress the breadth of our emotional experience and live shallowly. There is a poem from the twelfth century that beautifully articulates this lasting truth about the risks we take when we choose to love.
For Those Who Have Died
Eleh Ezkerah—These We Remember
‘Tis a fearful thing
To love
What death can touch.
To love, to hope, to dream,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
Love,
But a holy thing,
To love what death can touch.
For your life has lived in me;
Your laugh once lifted me;
Your word was a gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy.
‘Tis a human thing, love,
A holy thing,
To love
What death can touch.
—JUDAH HALEVI OR EMANUEL OF ROME24
This startling poem goes to the very heart of what I am saying. “It is a holy thing to love what death can touch.” To keep it holy, however, to keep it accessible, we must become fluent in the language and customs of grief. If we don’t, our losses become great weights that drag us down, pulling us below the threshold of life and into the world of death.
My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart. Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives. To love is to accept the rites of grief.
One day a young man walked into my office with a sad look on his face. He shared that he had just come back from time spent with his new love and that he’d had a wonderful weekend with her. He’d returned home, taken care of some things, fixed some dinner for himself, and then turned on his computer to look at photos of his parents and his girlfriend. And then it hit him. He said, “I realized at that moment that I am going to lose them all.” He wept those bitter tears that melt us and reduce us to the vulnerable truths we must all confront. We need these bitter tears sometimes. They are a tonic, a fortifying essence that helps us digest these difficult realities.
He said he had tried his whole life to keep this truth away, but this day he welcomed the dark angel of grief, the one holding the sharp truth of impermanence. He told me he wanted his heart to stay open and to love big. This was a beautiful moment, a life-changing moment for this young man, forged by the fierce beauty of loss.
It is the bittersweet embrace of love and loss that sharpens our appreciation for those we love. Staying open to this vulnerable truth is challenging, especially in a culture that keeps pushing grief to the margins. Sometimes, however, we cannot deny this guest at the door.
