Don't skip this part.

On loss, grief and growing into the depth and breadth of life

I saw a clip on Instagram the other day from the show Dying for Sex where a hospice nurse explains to the main character what will happen as her body moves toward death.

I love that this show normalized and centralized an experience that, if we are lucky enough to love so deeply, we will all go through: sitting with our kin while they are dying. The first time I experienced death close up, I was 17 and it was my dad, dying of cancer in a hospital setting not unlike that one.

I’m 36 now and I’m fortunate to say it’s been this long since I’ve lost someone so close. But two weeks ago, my soul dog, Ellie, died. I was flat on the ground looking into her eyes when she took her final breath.

For 14 years, Ellie was my best friend, my roommate across three cities and nine different homes. She was my first brush with motherhood and my emotional touch stone. She was the vessel into which I poured my love and my reason for getting out of bed in the morning.

She was mine and I was hers.

At 17, I didn’t have the emotional and mental tools I do today. Today, I hold all of these certifications in mind/body modalities. And the funny bit is, none of it helps.

No practice or tool is really a salve for grief.

Tools represent logic, and there is nothing logical about watching the light fade from the eyes of someone you love. There is nothing logical about the muscle memory that activates multiple times a day but can’t complete. There is nothing logical about the toll caretaking or anticipatory grief takes on the body. We can rationalize it all we want, prepare for the five stages, and this and that, but grief doesn’t heal by being sorted.

Grief, as death and birth, is a natural, messy, biological and spiritual process. You don’t move through it. It moves through you. And it moves through on its own terms.

For me, this time around, grief has been very physical. Debilitating brain fog, pressure in my forehead and a vertigo-like sensation like I’m standing on a dock. If I am to interpret that as if I would a dream, of course that’s the way I feel. Across all the moving and growing we did together for 14 years, she was my solid ground, and that ground has abruptly disappeared.

I’ve also read a bit about grief brain. Our brain can interpret loss as ongoing danger. It shifts energy to parts of the brain that deal with survival and away from concentration, planning, regulating … everything I need to function as a “normal” human. I’ve screwed up client call times, pushed out timelines, shown up late, and under-delivered. And for once in my life, I’m ok with that.

Because we are not meant to be normal under the conditions of deep loss. We are meant to be changed by them.

The experiences that undo us in life are not meant to be something we get through and discard. We are not meant to re-build our former selves. We are meant to put ourselves together with those cracks at our center. There, they strengthen our inner compass and show us what’s important. They remind us of impermanence. They presence us to the preciousness of love. Knowing, intimately, what befalls us all in due time, we revel in the beings and doings we love.

Grief also stretches us to better feel the breadth of our humanity and this life.

I happened upon a video last week of David Whyte on weeping:

“Weeping may be the closest experience human beings have to an actual experience of enlightenment. Because in weeping you have given up, you’ve broken down… The reason you’re weeping is you haven’t built a body that can hold that revelation, but now you’re just about to do it. You’re breaking open this controlled edge that you have and so you’re actually becoming larger through the weeping.”

I have cried so much the past couple of weeks. Sobs from the deep lung, that when they come, I let come. And I’ve screamed in both my waking and dream life. But I have also noticed that my joy, when it comes, feels much bigger and wider. And joy too, I let stay for as long as it likes. I finally get Mary Oliver’s words “Joy is not meant to be a crumb.”

We say depth of sorrow and height of joy as if life is linear, but life is round. It is the breadth, the wholeness of everything. It’s all depth. It’s all height. When we stretch and grow and express in one direction, we have grown all the way around.

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I always experience my deepest meditations on airplanes. On my way to New York and New Jersey to be with my family, I was dropped in deep when I heard it:

Don’t skip this part.

Don’t try to push through.

Don’t try to figure it out.

Be in your life experience enough to let it alchemize you ok?

We’ll do it together.