Our society isn’t prepared for grief. I had to ask for a week off to help with the funeral after my bereavement leave. Do you know how long bereavement leave is? Three days. I’m lucky that my employer gave me more time off. Imagine mourning someone you’ve known since they were born for three days. Imagine being expected to get back to normal after three days. Unreal.
One of the books that helped me process my brother’s death was It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand by Megan Devine. Here are the quotes that resonated with me the most:
“Pain is not always redeemed, in the end or otherwise. Being brave-being a hero-is not about overcoming what hurts or turning it into a gift. Being brave is about waking to face each day when you would rather just stop waking up.”
“We do this because being human hurts. It hurts because we love. Because we are connected to those around us, and it’s painful when they die. It hurts when we lose what we love. Being a spiritually minded person makes you more open to pain and suffering and hardship-which are all parts of love.”
“Love with open hands, with an open heart, knowing that what is given to you will die. It will change. Love anyway. You will witness incredible pain in this life. Love anyway. Find a way to live here, beside that knowledge. Include that knowledge. Love through that. Be willing to not turn away from the pain of this world-pain in yourself and in others.”
“Experimenting in grief means looking for things that bring even the tiniest amount of relief or peace in your heart, or in your life. We’re talking micro-distinctions here: What gives you the strength or the courage or the ability to face the next minute, the next five? Does it feel better to write out your pain, or does that make you feel worse? Are you more inclined to sleep through the night if you go for a walk or not?”
“It’s true what they say in many spiritual traditions: the mind is the root of suffering.”
“Upekkha is the practice of staying emotionally open and bearing witness to the pain while dwelling in equanimity around one’s limited ability to effect change. This form of compassion-for self, for others-is about remaining calm enough to feel everything, to remain calm while feeling everything, knowing that it can’t be changed.”
“Your pain needs space. Room to unfold.”
“I think this is why we seek out natural landscapes that are larger than us. Not just in rief, but often in grief. The expanding horizon line, the sense of limitless space, a landscape wide and deep and vast enough to hold what is-we need those places.”
“Part of this process is learning to trust yourself. Trust is really tricky when the universe has upended itself, so I’m not talking about trust that everything will work out, or trust that you’ll do everything right. Not at all. I’m talking more about trusting that you won’t abandon yourself in your pain.”
“Remember that calming your anxiety is not one bit related to whether something unexpected happens or not. Calming your anxiety is about only that: calming your anxiety.”
“Self-trust is tricky, but no matter what, you’ve got a bank of success stories to draw from. Large or small, you’ve likely proven that you can face most kinds of challenges. There is no reason to believe you wouldn’t be able to solve these problems yourself, or ask for help if needed.”
“‘You create your own reality’ is so patently untrue, and so cruel to the grieving heart.”
“You are many things, but you are not that powerful. You cannot manifest death or health or loss or grief just by thinking about it. Your thoughts did not create this loss. Your continued anxiety will not make more loss happen. Not being anxious and on guard will not ‘doom’ you to more loss, nor will it protect you from harm.
“Let your thoughts create an internal state of calm and hopeful (if mild) optimism. That’s the reality your thoughts can change.”
“To paraphrase Eckhart Tolle: Anxiety is using your imagination to create a future you do not want. So let’s not do that.”
“As author Sharon Salzberg is known to say, ‘You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.’”
“Creative practices are a balm, and a support, inside what can barely be endured. So while the creative practices in this chapter won’t fix you, and can’t bring back what you’ve lost, they can help you find a way to live what has been asked of you.”
“Recovery inside of grief is always a moving point of balance. There isn’t any end point. While it may not always be this acutely heavy, your grief, like your love, will always be part of you. Life can be, and even likely will be, beautiful again. But that is a life built alongside loss, informed by beauty and grace as much as by devastation, not one that seeks to erase it.”
“Grief changes you. Who you become remains to be seen. You do not need to leave your grief behind in order to live a newly beautiful life. It’s part of you. Our aim is integration, not obliteration.”
“‘Everything happens for a reason.’ What a ridiculous, shame-based, reductionist, horrible thing to say to anyone-let alone someone in pain. What reason could there possibly be?”
“‘He had a great life, and you were lucky to have him for as long as you did. Be grateful, and move on.’ As though a great life lived makes it OK that that great life is now over.”
“Holy outrage means telling the truth, no matter who gets offended by the telling. And equally important, it means doing so in the service of more love, more support, more kinship, and true connection.”
“No one knows the right thing to say. That’s why it’s important to have these dialogues. Not so that we get it right, but so that we can do it better.”
“It would be so great to be able to just transmit, without speaking, the reality of this loss in your life. To have people feel-just for thirty seconds-what it is you carry every second of every day. It would clear up so much misunderstanding. It would stop so much unhelpful ‘help’ before it ever reached your ears.”
“So many people expect you to be over it, if not already, then certainly in the very near future. They can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be you, to live inside grief like this. They want the ‘old’ you back, not understanding that that old you can’t come back. That self is gone.”
“If the people in your life can handle, even appreciate, you staying true to your own heart, then they’ll make it through with you. If they can’t, let them go: gracefullly, clearly, and with love.”
“The griever, on the other hand, knows that their grief is not something that can be fixed. They know there is nothing wrong with them. They don’t have a ‘problem.’ The more people try to fix their grief, the more frustrated (and defensive) they feel. The griever is frustrated because they don’t need solutions. They need support. Support to live what is happening, Support to carry what they are required to carry.”
“Even when you mean well, trying to fix grief is always going to turn out badly. This may be hard to hear, but if you truly want to be helpful and supportive, you need to stop thinking that grief is a problem to be solved.”
“When a bone is broken, it needs a supportive cast around it to help it heal. It needs external support so it can go about the intricate, complex, difficult process of growing itself back together. Your task is to be part of that cast for your broken friend. Not to do the actual mending. Not to offer pep talks to the broken places about how they’re going to be great again. Not to offer suggestions about how the bone might go about becoming whole. Your task is to simply be there. Wrap yourself around what is broken.”
“It seems counterintuitive, but the way to truly be helpful to someone in pain is to let them have their pain. Let them share the reality of how much this hurts, how hard this is, without jumping in to clean it up, make it smaller, or make it go away.”
“The role of the support team is to acknowledge and companion those in pain, not try to make it better. These are high-level skills. They aren’t always easy to practice. But they are simple: Show up. Listen. Don’t fix.
“Good things and horrible things occupy the same space; they don’t cancel each other out.”
“No matter how many times people tell you they’re here for you, no matter how well they are here for you, no one can ‘do’ grief with you. No one can enter into your true mind and heart and be there with you. It’s not just semantics.”
“In truth, we can hold on to nothing: not the physical world, not feeling states, not even our own thoughts. But love, love we can carry with us. It shifts and changes like a natural force because it is a natural force, yet somehow remains foundation, bedrock, home base. It connects what is now, to what was, to what is to come. It allows us to travel between worlds.”
Originally published at https://kyladelrosario.com on February 2, 2022.
