Dealing with a loss? Meditation for .3/06/2014

Seaside Farms; St. Helena SC

“Unable are the beloved to die.  For love is immortality.”  - Emily Dickinson

“Grief is a process.  Not a state.”  - Anne Grant

     If we are to live long and practice empathy and compassion, we are sure to suffer intimate losses.  If we did not love, we would be incapable of feeling the mind-numbing and gut-wrenching pangs of grief.  Losing someone who is close to us from illness or age allows some time to process the event that will come; those that are accidental and/or young do not allow such a luxury.  Especially in the case of sudden death or where the passing of the person was especially difficult, we must each go through our stages along the road to acceptance – denial, anger and feeling betrayed are a few.  When we finally do accept the finality of death, we are confronted with not only our own fears, but we can fall into a pit where everything seems hollow – nothing seems real or of meaning.  We have this tendency to blame ourselves for someone else’s demise – a most natural of the human process.  Shakespeare said that it is better to have loved and lost than to never have known love at all – at these times that concept is not so clear.  Grieving is an intensely personal matter, but personal does not have to mean private.  Hiding grief brings us no relief – we must share it, and each time we do it loses a bit of its power over us.  Eventually other things will fill the space and time that the one we loved occupied, but nothing will ever replace them.  Death brings a grief that no one else can ever heal, but the love we had leaves us with cherished memories that can never be taken away. 

    If we have accepted our own mortality, it is instructive to look at how we will want others to be affected by our passing – would we not prefer that they honor our love and our contributions rather than bemoan their loss?  But it is clear that we must allow ourselves this most human emotion, because if we try to repress or medicate it away we are sure to skew our thinking and poison our future relationships.  If we can honor the life that merited the love we gave and be grateful for our own ability to share love we are well on our way toward being better rather than bitter.  If our wish is that good should come from our own passing, it follows that using our grief as fuel to build new strength and greater love out of another’s passing is the highest honor we can give them.

Today, may I give myself permission to be human.  

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Happy Friday!!

David