Chapter 9

Getting Through Grief and Loss

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

We need other humans or animals as expressions of divine love to allow us to experience our own divinity. Grief and loss are inescapable. We can experience loss in so many ways: the loss of a body part, a dream, a precious pet, a beloved person through emigration or death. Grief and loss hollow us out. “Challenges are the fuel for spiritual growth,” 7 as Sonia Choquette says. It is hard to think of heartbreak as a route to spiritual growth when we are going through it. In Tibetan Buddhism, compassion is the capacity to help any living creature at any time. If we allow it, then we can use the pain of grieving to let in more light, more compassion for our own suffering and that of others.

If we are not ready to experience our grief, we need not worry: it will remain on hold for us to deal with when we are ready. It will be there for us when we are strong enough to deal with it.

When we are heartbroken, time has no meaning and grieving can go on for a long time. The practice of being kind and gentle with ourselves when we are heartbroken is very important. It is vital that we have compassion for ourselves and our own struggles. To look down the road at years ahead without the beloved is too painful, too overwhelming. It is better to focus just on today, to ask our friends, angels, guides, ancestors, power animals, God and any other potential helpers to assist us in simply getting through this day.

Grief and loss are merciful because they come in waves. After the tsunami threatens to obliterate us, the tide recedes. The tears come in floods, they recede, and then we wash the dishes. It’s like trying to get the house straightened while the baby is asleep. We do what we can when we can. The tears and the washing up all have to be done sometime. We can run, but we can’t hide.

In the early days of grief this is our job: to get out of bed when we don’t want to, to wash and dress and eat even though we don’t feel like it or indeed feel anything at all. We have to stagger through the day’s work like the walking wounded that we are.

When the heart is broken, the soul throws out its net to catch the pieces before they drift away forever. That’s because the nature of the soul is wholeness. It uses small gestures and simple pleasures to begin to bind the broken shards back together. It uses the soft words of a friend, your dog’s paw on your knee, the sound of your cat purring. It uses the warmth of the first spring sun on your face after a long cold winter.

With every day that goes by, our souls are at work, slowly supergluing the broken bits back together. Our job is to just hold on. And get through it we do, even though it feels like we never will. Quite often the main source of pressure on us to progress or “move forward” is ourselves. It is kinder to hear those harsh inner voices and just ignore them, and instead allow ourselves to just get through another day as we heal. Moving on will come in its own time.

The Experience of Loss

Love will always know its own, for love is the greatest force in the universe. Love will always attract its beloved and love will always meet its love, for nothing can prevent the union of those who love.

Silver Birch, when asked how we can find our loved ones in spirit after we die.

It might bring great comfort at a funeral if instead of saying, “Remember man thou art but dust,” the minister said: “Remember man thou art but love and into love thou shall return.” It would be more accurate, too.

After a time, grief subsides. When it subsides, loss is left. However impossible it seems while we are going through the anguish, we can come to a place of acceptance. As weeks turn to months and years, it is as if the sharp edges of our grief are rounded down to become more bearable. We may get to the place where we would not wish to have the person back if they were suffering before they died. Or maybe we can find some sort of reason why they are gone, something that is meaningful and valid to us. But the space where the person – or animal - used to be is with us forever. Loss can resonate for many years, catching us unawares.

After my father died, I experienced loss like an underground river that would erupt from a hidden place at the strangest of times. Out cycling in the sun in the back lanes of the Majorcan countryside, tears spilled from my eyes when I saw the beauty of the place and hoped that my Dad’s place in the spirit sun was as beautiful. Months later, after a relatively calm period of acceptance, over breakfast one morning I suddenly realised I hadn’t seen him in four years and a wave of loss washed over me. “I miss you,” my heart cried.

As Silver Birch says, “Those you love and who love you are never lost to you...sometimes you are sad and shed tears and wash your loved ones away.”

In moments of calm stillness, when we are not submerged in grief, we may sense them close to us. This is real. We are bound to our beloved ones by a matrix of love, energy, attention and devotion. This matrix is woven into the fabric of our cells. That is why, if we can allow the understanding in, our beloved is not lost to us through physical death. They are literally part of us, always with us. As Lynne McTaggart says in The Field: “Things once in contact remain in contact through all space and time.” 8 The theory of quantum entanglement essentially says that once we have shaken hands with someone, our atoms are forever connected. Once we have loved someone, the love remains even when the body is no longer present.

Gentler Questions

Grieving is the process of trying to come to terms with the shock and trauma of separation from our beloved. Love is so central to us, that to lose a beloved is akin to our own death. In the days, weeks, months and years after a huge loss, we are unconsciously trying to give birth to our new self, the self we are without the loved one. We are unconsciously striving for the wholeness that we felt with our beloved. We are unconsciously trying to integrate the parts of ourselves that have been wandering in the wastelands of pain. In this context, we have to ask the right question to help ourselves, because to ask the wrong question is like pouring bleach onto an open wound. The wrong question such as “Why did this happen?” is not just useless, not just crazymaking, but actively heaps anguish onto suffering. We cannot know why things happen until we are back in spirit and able to access the bigger picture.

A gentler, kinder, more useful question is: “How will I get through this day?” (Or this hour, when things are really bad.) Another gentle question is “What painful thoughts can I let go of now to make space for comfort to come into my heart?”

As my grieving for my father changed shape, I learned this: If we are lucky enough to have a precious moment to hold on to, we can choose to focus on that, as opposed to the painful ones. I chose to remember one early winter day. I had helped my Dad with his walker onto the concrete in the back yard. He sat on the walker in the wintry sun. One of the cats basked in the sun beside us. He dozed for a while then woke suddenly, looked around at the sun, the cat and me and said “Peace.” Then he promptly fell asleep again.

If we have such a nugget of comfort, let us be keenly aware of it. That way, we can gently pull it out of our pocket to feast on when we need the sustenance most, like a life-giving glucose sweet when we are in danger of dying of hunger.

Sometimes how others cope with loss or trauma can inspire us. A woman I know came home from work and found her husband hanging in the shed. This had happened three years prior to my meeting her. This woman had the most positive life force and attitude to life I’ve ever seen. “How did you get through it so well?” I asked her. “I found one good thing to focus on each day,” she said. Whether it was a flower in bloom or her pet dog, that’s what she focused on with gratitude. She narrowed her focus of attention to that one good thing each day, which in turn gave her heart and spirit time to heal.

I met an artist who was doing a retrospective of the last four years of her work. “That’s how long it took me to process my father’s death,” she said. At the time, I foolishly thought that was a bit excessive. Now I know differently. Four years after the loss of my own father, I understand what she meant.

Society gives the message that we may be allowed grieve for a few months after the death of a loved one. But the heart doesn’t care about clocks. As Blaise Pascal said, “The heart has reasons that reason knows not of.” 9 It can be a lonely journey. There are few people in whom we can confide the depth of our ongoing grief and loss. We are expected to just “get on with it.” It helps the process if the grieving person feels they can speak openly of the difficulties involved; how they may have become isolated, not having had the emotional energy to answer letters, texts or phone calls. How they put their head down and cried when trying to figure out how the boiler works, because that was always their partner’s job. How they don’t have the energy to do the things they used to love, that nourished and supported them; how they fear going back to work or their club activities, because of a dread of being unable to cope. How they saw a neighbour while out shopping and went home to tell their spouse, forgetting he was gone. How they saw a blue scarf the colour of their child’s eyes, which set them off crying in the middle of the department store. We need to listen to their pain and give them the space to breathe or cry or be angry or lonely. Because there is nothing surer - our turn will come.

I spent a lot of time holding my father’s hand in the months leading up to his death. I was lucky to have the chance to do so. I became familiar with its weight, the calluses from years of hard work, its’ shape. The dark hair on the back of his hand and fingers. The warmth of it as the blood still fed his body. The hand of hands that had worked so hard. That had held mine as a child, warm and comforting. At his funeral, as I looked into the hole in the ground that held his coffin, a roar of grief erupted from me as I realised I would no longer have his body, his person to look after. His absence would be my companion for life. I miss holding his hand. I miss everything about him, and it’s been years. In my heart, I will always miss him. I miss his presence. His absence is with me always even though I know in my heart we are still connected by love.

Looking back now however, I understand this: I didn’t need to give the pain as much time as I did. We can recover from the loss of a beloved; we can come to an accommodation of their absence as a constant presence. On my next cycle of grieving, I hope to recover faster, because now I have integrated what I learned from the most recent loss. It is okay to recover our wholeness and feel better. And the sooner the better. It is what our loved ones in spirit want for us, because they are feeling great where they are. They are wrapped in the cocoon of unconditional love from which they came, from which we all came. They are okay now. They are safe and well.

Visualisation: Lovingkindness Meditation

Switch off the phone and make yourself comfortable. Take some deep breaths to centre yourself. With each breath you take, allow yourself to become more and more relaxed. Soften the eyes, chest, and belly. Let the shoulders drop. Bring your attention to your heart. Place the first two fingers of your right hand on your heart. Breathe in and out, as if the heart and the breath were one. Let your right hand drop gently now onto your knee. Now imagine yourself as a young child. Bring that image or sense or knowingness into your heart. Imagine pink and green light surrounding this child and all the gifts it brought into this world to share. Keep your body and breath soft and gentle. Now imagine or sense your heart expanding as you bring a beloved person or animal into your heart. Surround them with green and pink light and love. Feel your heart soften even more. Expand your heart beyond the room, the city, the country until it encompasses the whole world. Let that loving pink and green light go to every sentient being, every animal and insect and bird, every plant and tree and flower. Let it go to the earth itself, and the ocean, and the sky. Let the entire world and everything in it be bathed in the gentle light of lovingkindness and know yourself to be connected, supported, worthy and loved simply because you exist.