People sometimes ask me if my blog has a specific focus or intent. My main intent is to walk alongside my readers, sharing my experiences, addressing questions people ask me, and learning together.
This post will lean heavily into storytelling and my own experience. It may be a little on the longer side as well, for grief has played a significant role in my life and in forming who I am.
As you read, it is my desire that you might realize you don't have to walk the journey of grief alone and that you might find hope if you find yourself on your own grief journey.
For the last while, grief and life with grief has been in the forefront of my mind. Partly this is due to the fact that we recently lost our beloved family dog at age 13. Partly it is also due to the fact that I have the privilege of sitting in the midst of grief - offering a safe and non-judgemental place - for friends and clients who are grieving.
We often think of grief as something we experience after we lose someone. This is true. However, grief can also happen when we lose a dream, when an expectation or hope does not come to fruition, and when people we rely on let us down.
My next podcast episode will be about the grief around expectations as it pertains to parenting, especially parenting kids with high needs, so tune in there if you'd like to hear more.
For the purposes of this blog post, I want to focus on life in the shadow of grief. I'm sometimes asked how it is possible to keep on living with the weight of grief.
A number of years ago I finally got to realize a childhood dream of visiting Mt. St. Helen's. The memory of the eruption was seared into my recollection. Even though we lived in the Lower Mainland of BC, more than 4 hours north of the volcano, I recall waking up on a Sunday morning with ash coating car windows, stairs, and outside surfaces in general. That was the day I became aware of the fact that we live in the shadow of volcanoes.
As I reflect on living after loss, it feels similar to my experience as a child. We may begin life quite unaware of the fact that the volcano of loss exists. When it does erupt, it may be far away and memorable, but not deeply impacting.
However, I think about the people who lived in close proximity to Mt. St. Helen's. The stories of their fight to live, of how some of them died, and of how many had to fight to live again after the traumatic experiences of that morning and its aftermath have a different impact depending on who you were in the story. Were you directly impacted, connected to someone who was, or were you observing from a distance?
My first experience of grief that I can recall was at age seven. My parents had good friends who had a son who was born with some significant physical and mental challenges. Although by age he was in his 20s, he was physically and mentally an infant. He was unable to move, to feed himself, to talk. When we went over to visit, I would spend time at his bedside, talking to him, reading to him. Although he did not respond, giving of my heart to him began to grow a deep connection for me. I truly cared about him and thought of him as a friend.
When he died, I grieved, but didn't have words for it. I remember feeling an intense sadness. But as a seven-year-old, I didn't know how to process grief. Those who were processing grief around his loss didn't know how significant that loss had felt for me, as I don't recall talking about it to anyone.
Years went by before grief again entered my life in a significant way. My Oma (my dad's mother) who lived in Paraguay passed away quite unexpectedly when I was 13 years old. It may have been less unexpected for the adults in our family, but it had not even been on my horizon.
While she lived far away from me, she had spent several months living with us here in Canada. During that time my relationship with her had an opportunity to develop and flourish. Once she went back to Paraguay, there was a different connection with her and we wrote letters back and forth. I felt her loss, however, she wasn't a part of my daily life in the same way as my other Oma who lived here in Canada, my mom's mother.
My maternal Oma was one of those foundational people in my life. When we came to Canada as immigrants and my parents both had to find work to pay off the debts that allowed us to come to Canada, my Oma became a regular caregiver for me. I spent many days and nights at her apartment, and built an abundance of treasured memories of baking together, walking her neighbourhood, playing on the playground at the park near her place, and just being treasured and loved wholeheartedly.
Her death was completely unexpected. A blood clot that dislodged and traveled to her heart brought about a loss that was far greater than any I had experienced before.
I was 15 years old at this point and starting to feel that the losses I was enduring felt heavy. Most of my friends had not experienced losses like these yet. I knew that Grandparents would likely die before me, but as a child who hadn't known grandfathers because they passed away young, now losing my last grandparent - and the one that had been such a significant part of my life - this felt so hard.
I remember vividly being at the graveside with all my family and extended family. I didn't want to be there and distracted myself with looking at grave markers and hanging back with one of my cousins. The service ended up being a time where I heard so many heart-warming stories about this amazing woman. In spite of my internal push-back at having to go to a funeral, the experience was bearable.
At the same time, I started to have an incredible internal refusal to go to funerals. I felt that at the young age of 15, I had already had far too much loss in my life. Yet life often does not turn out as we anticipate.
I am the youngest of three children. My two living brothers were 11 and 13 years older than me. This meant that in a lot of ways, my relationships with them was very mentor-like. My middle brother married and moved out while I was still quite young.
My oldest brother lived at home off and on for longer, and therefore played a significant mentoring role in the growing up parts of life. He advocated for my ears to be pierced. He introduced me to hair products and styling hair, buying me my first curling iron and blow dryer.
One summer, when he was already married and living in Ontario, I flew out to live with him for part of the summer and got to help with little tasks as he worked to assemble his doctoral thesis. He was someone I grew to admire deeply and hoped to one day emulate.
Sadly, during this season of losing my Oma and going to visit my brother in Ontario, he was already fighting colon cancer. A year later, when I was only 16 years old, I lost my brother to cancer.
I was devastated and felt so very alone in this. Losing a sibling, especially when you are a teenager, is not the norm, so many people don't understand the impact nor know how to manage it. Again, I grieved in my own ways. I wrote in my journal. I had a few close friends who, although they also didn't know how to do this, were willing to learn and just be by my side as I figured it out.
This loss was my most significant loss to-date and it shaped me and my understanding of grief significantly. It opened my mind to understanding grief in a potent and personal way. This allowed me to share my experiences with others and to walk alongside others who were grieving.
When I think back to when I realized this sense began in me - that walking alongside others on their grief journey was something that I felt compelled and honoured to be trusted to do - it was during this time.
Sadly, my journey with significant grief was not to have much of a reprieve. In the years that followed, I lost my beloved sister-in-law in a tragic car accident, my dear father to a very short battle with cancer, my father-in-law to an unexpected heart attack, and one of our aunties who was part of all our significant family events to a degenerative lung disease.
Along with these losses came the more intangible losses of my dad never knowing that I had kids, and of our kids not getting to know either of their grandpas, just as I hadn't known my Opas.
Grief is one of those things that I would never choose, yet it has deeply impacted who I am and the way in which I empathize with and journey with those who are grieving.
The challenge is that when we love, we open ourselves up to grief. I'm not sure that I can say, "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." That somehow feels too hard. But I can say that I know that in loving, loss is an inherent potential.
In my own grief journey, I came to realize that the challenge is to learn to live with this dichotomy, rather than to lose oneself in the hopelessness of the inevitable or to wall oneself off from the potential of love and connection.
Grief expert David Kessler writes about his experience of losing a child to death:
So many of us feel powerless in grief - that it's something that's been done to us. But grief heals the more we engage with it. We regain our footing, locate new strength, and find purpose.
Our thinking about grief is how we make meaning. Our first task in healing is to look at the perceptions, feelings, sensations, and stories we have around loss.
People often ask what I did to persevere and to find meaning in the midst of inescapable pain. For me, it didn't happen by pushing through the pain or pushing the pain aside. Rather, it was by allowing myself to live in the pain. Pain is part of the love we feel.
As I learned to keep walking through life even when the path I thought I would be on was no longer where I found myself, I have learned to live with the reality that loss is inevitable. However, with this knowledge, I also know that I don't want to stop living life.
When my father passed away, my mother said, "I know I feel the loss incredibly, but I want to promise you that I won't stop living and I will engage with life again." This has been how I have found I can go on as well.
Having walked through grief multiple more times since then - losing a close cousin who was also a dear friend, losing two other aunties who were part of our immediate families, and losing, sometimes traumatically, some wonderful furry family members - I know that in the immediacy of loss and in the days, months, and years afterwards there are many dark moments. There are times when the clouds loom menacingly and heavy above us. Yet I also know that in the midst of that storm, there is the hope of a future and less stormy days ahead.
The losses are always present. The people and animals we love and have lost are no longer physically present with us. However, their presence in our lives changed us, and so their significance remains.
Grief also changes how we live. For me, it has brought about an awareness that life can change in a moment. I invest in relationships that I know will be there to carry me through those tough times - family, close friends, caring colleagues - and I try to live with an awareness of the positive impact I want to have in the lives of those around me in my everyday interactions.
Grieving and living again after loss is a journey. It can often feel very solitary, since our experience is uniquely our own experience. Know there are others who can and want to walk with you. You do not have to do this alone.
Grief resources include:
Hospice Society - search for hospice resources in your area. There is often free counselling, information, and access to support groups available through hospice.
Grief expert David Kessler offers online groups for all kinds of losses including some more general and some quite specific. Check out this link for more information: https://grief.com/
Find a counsellor in your area or online. BCACC here in British Columbia has a "Find A Counsellor" tool that allows you to search for the person you need: https://bcacc.ca/counsellors/
When we are in the midst of the storm, it can feel completely overwhelming and never-ending. Yet, in the words of Maya Angelou, "Every storm runs out of rain."
~ Haide
Photo credit: https://ridingthecoasteronredforestroad.wordpress.com/
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