GRIEVING

“…death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight, helping us to discover what matters most.”  ~ Frank Ostaseski

After my dad died, everyone seemed to avoid being with me.

Sure, I got plenty of text messages, cards, flowers, hugs, and “I’m so sorry”s. A few people called, and some came round with food. And I appreciated every single one of these things.

But, years later, I finally understand why I didn’t get the one thing I really neededwhen I was grieving: a witness.

Someone to just be with me. To sit there and let me cry without wanting to escape. To listen to me talk about him, and his death itself, without trying to distract or lead me to a happier, more comfortable space.

I needed someone to simplyallow me to grieve, and to be there for me—fully there for me—as I did. To let me turn over and play with that smooth, heavy stone in my heart, again and again, until I could really understand it and figure out how to live with it, because it never does go away.

Avoidance of grief comes easily to us in the West, as a culture that doesn’t generally talk about death. In fact, we avoid the hell out of it, so have almost no idea how to cope with the reality of death, and the grief it brings.

So, our impulse is to make it better, to fix it, to dress it up in a way that seems more bearable, and avert our collective gaze toward something more cheerful.

We are death phobic. We simply don’t know how to answer the question, “Who am I in the face of grief, death, and dying?”

The thing is, how we react to someone else’s loss and grief comes directly out of our own response to this question. And if we are ever going to learn how to give each other what we all really need when we are grieving, we have to figure out our answer.

We can start being fully present enough to witness, and to honor, the ultimate and most liberating truth of life: death.