Grief is a universal story
It has been four years since I’ve been on this journey of grief. It has taken me on adventures I could not imagine and I’ve traveled every terrain in this grief. I’ve walked the hot scourging sun of the Sahara desert, feeling my pain, sorrow, sadness, and fear sweating out of my skin like salt till all that was left of me was my leathery emotional corpse whose lips begged for the life giving taste of water. In other moments, I found myself running through the forest naked and afraid in my birthday suit swatting away mosquitoes and foreign bugs I had no name for, all the while feeling held in a strange way by massive arms of trees old enough to be sung in songs of ancient stories. On those days, I can almost imagine ancestors I’ve never met urging me to hold on, that this feeling and experience was just another part of the story of being human. Maybe it was their story I was feeling in my bones too. Tales of their unsung stories swirling in the galaxy of my DNA waiting patiently to be expressed through me.
On other days of my grief, I was transported to the frozen tundra where the icy winds with their steely hands threaten to stop the little breath I had. On these days I simply wanted to rest my weary body on the white blanket of snow and allow myself to become a frozen. Those moments in the cold I was yearning for numbness, anything to take the sting of loss away. The terrain of grief can mimic some of nature’s most intense landscapes and each tells a different story and brings a different healing to the soul. Grief is a universal journey we all must take. What have I learned in these four quick years that seemed only like yesterday and like a thousand years? That grief is a universal story and I’m just one of billions adding my story to the human storybook of life. I wish I could say that my story is so different. The how might be different but the pain, heartache, the trauma is the same. Grief is a matter of the heart that tells the story of love, how we hold tightly to those close to us, and how the tremor of love runs like vines through the core unit of our universal heart.
It is this one beating universal heart that we all belong too, where all of our stories come together to give voice and meaning to our human journey which is interlaced with births, deaths, failures, traumas, successes, joys, and sorrows. The storybook of our human journey is filled from top to bottom with these recordings, some written, some oral, some in images. Regardless, of how the stories are recorded, we are all bound by them, regardless of language, culture, religion, socioeconomic status, and gender. We all feel the sting of loss at some point in our lives and are all being called to the place of commonality when it arrives. During loss we come to see that not much separates us except our own beliefs that we are somehow different from each other. But experiencing loss says the opposite, it says we’re closer to each other than we imagine, much closer. When our grieving eyes dilate to see compassion through our own heartache, we can begin to see the other as ourselves, fragile, vulnerable, afraid, and in need of each other.
As I sat in the middle of my grief experiencing different angles of the journey, with time I found my heart growing more open when I thought it was surely going to shut down and collapse. I’ve found that this muscle that is my heart is flexible and stretches well beyond my own imagination. It has room and space to open into new territory and dimensions. Rather than being a collapsible heart, it is an expandable heart and it’s the heart we’ve all been blessed to be born with. We only embody the collapsible heart when we are so stung by heartbreak that our mind creates plans to become defensive towards love. Only then do we shut our hearts down, and move into protective mode. Through suffering compassion is born and we are drawn closer to each other through the ongoing tapestry of our stories. Grief is universal amongst all humans.
In the years of walking this path, my grief still lingers but so does joy, laughter, love, and happiness. I cannot abandon the feeling of loss I have experienced, nor can I turn away from life and all the abundance that surrounds me. The universal story of my humanity says that I am created to feel many complex emotions and experiences that will serve as my classroom to grow my heart and soul. As a result, giving myself permission to be with my loss and grief is a sacred act of opening up to the fullness of being human to feel and acknowledge every experience that comes my way. There is no script that’s available that shows us how to grieve, there is no wrong or right way only the human way to be with it. What has worked for me will surely not work for another; we all have ways in which we cope with loss. Loss for me is honoring the love I felt for the person no longer present in physical form, it’s also honoring the story of my becoming through these experiences.
Listed below are some things that have helped me during these last twenty three months:
Spending time in nature
Having close friends for support
Seeing a therapist
Writing in my journal to give voice to my emotions
Crying whenever the need arose in real time
Healing modalities such as acupuncture and massage
Laughing
Spiritual practice of prayer and meditation
Exercise, dancing and yoga
Art. I’m not an artist but taking a local art class in my community helped with some of the energies I was feeling.
Finding stillness
Doing these things were part of my grieving process and each of them served a unique purpose in my overall healing. I say healing here not in the sense that I needed to recover or overcome from loss. I don’t believe grief is something we need to overcome or even forget, it’s not a sickness, it’s a matter of the heart. It’s a matter of love. Rather, what I did was honor the loss of my husband through rituals, acceptance, and being present with my pain. The other aspect of the process was to simply give myself permission over time to gently adapt to the new changes in my life. Much of these things I still do as they all have benefits for my mind, body, and soul. The most important thing is finding what works for you and honoring your sacred journey of grief with mindfulness and intention. What I listed above was the prescription mix that worked best for me and I trust you will find the prescription that will work best for you too.. Grief is a universal tale of how we love; it isn’t a negative experience of something we need to get over or forget. Our grief is another layer of our human story that deserves voices to tell the tale of how we grieve and how our hearts bend to the light of love.