It was unfamiliar, the strong, clear inner voice that spoke so sternly to me yesterday morning as I woke up from the first good night’s sleep I’ve had in weeks.
And the words surprised me. “Stop. Just stop.”
I lay quietly in bed for a while, letting the instruction sink in.
Grief is still new territory. Well-meaning friends ask, daily, “How are you?” and I pause, tongue-tied, unsure how to respond. How can I explain that, though life is apparently back to “normal,” no place quite looks like itself? Everyday things feel strange, my own inner landscape foreign and fragile. My thoughts veer between scattered and obsessive, so that I can’t trust my own heart — fine one moment, ambushed the next. What am I to make of emotions that are so misplaced and unpredictable that each day feels like its own new roller coaster ride, twisting and turning through an unpredictable course of peaks and plummets. I have no idea how I am.
What I do know is that there is a hole right at the center of everything. And I’ve been been circling around its rim like a dervish, trying in vain to fill that terrible, empty place. As if by reaching out to every single person in need, reconnecting with every old friend who’s fallen out of touch, answering every email in my in-box, grabbing for dear life at every friendly hand extended in my direction, I might somehow manage to dispel the darkness and avert my attention from the void.
This is my brain on Concern Overdrive: If I’m busy and distracted enough, perhaps I can escape the sadness. If I’m needed enough, and if I’m helpful enough, perhaps I can strike a bargain with pain: give more and do more, in order to feel less. And if I can throw enough stuff into that dark chasm, perhaps it won’t seem quite so deep anymore. So, I’ve been keeping busy. I’ve gone to yoga class and book group and out to lunch with friends. I’ve hosted house guests and visited my mom and driven to see Jack on his birthday and baked bread and written sympathy notes and read friends’ kids’ college essays and put on dinner parties and taken walks and edited papers and written recommendations and read manuscripts and returned phone calls and donated money to good causes. It’s all a bit of a blur. I wonder if I’ve babbled, or acted weird, or been inadvertently rude. I honestly can’t remember. Part of me has been visible, present, making an effort; but another part of me has been absent altogether, out to sea, riding the dark waves of sorrow and confusion.
I’m not sure where yesterday’s firm voice came from, or even who it was that spoke the word “stop” to me with such conviction. But I was just awake enough to get the message. To struggle, to feel sad, to know loss — this is all part of life. And so I paid attention to that knowing voice, and today I remind myself to be quiet and still instead of frantic and preoccupied. It’s a challenge, to give this time of death and transformation its own mood and space. And yet, I don’t want to run from what is real. Not when my soul is urging me to turn inward and to settle into some peace with what is — this human mystery that is, after all, as natural as day and night, sun and moon, summer and winter.
A couple of weeks ago my son Jack wrote me a note. Somehow, at the time, I managed to read his words without absorbing the simple wisdom he was trying to offer. “Feeling sad isn’t a waste of time,” my eighteen-year-old spiritual teacher suggested. “You shouldn’t try to distract yourself from the sadness, it’s going to come out one way or another. And the longer it is before you start to feel it and process it the harder it will be.”
We learn, as Roethke observes, by going where we need to go. And sometimes, we learn by staying where we need to be. Right now, I sit at my kitchen table, watching the skies clear after a night and morning of driving rain. The clouds lift from the mountains like luminous shrouds, dissolving into light.
As always, I find comfort in the view beyond my window, and in the pages of the books I love, the words of the poets, priests, and seekers who have journeyed through and survived their own dark nights of the soul. “Sorrow will remain faithful to itself,” John O’Donohue reminds us.
“More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.”
You are so wise to listen to your clear inner voice. While I am saddened for you and your deep sense of loss, I feel that you are respecting the grieving process and how fortunate that you are inexperienced with this kind of grief. Your son Jack has offered you wonderful permission to take the time to be sad. Thank you for your honest and beautiful post.
Annie
Test
You are so wise to listen to your clear inner voice. While I am saddened for you and your deep sense of loss, I feel that you are respecting the grieving process and how fortunate that you are inexperienced with this kind of grief. Your son Jack has offered you wonderful permission to take the time to be sad. Thank you for your honest and beautiful post.
Anne
It is so hard to imagine that there is a last drop. But I guess that's part of it – we don't have to imagine, we only have to let the sorrow pull and pull the rope of grief, to trust our own hearts and listen to that wise voice that tells us to stop and feel.
May her memory be a blessing, Katrina.
Much love.
You refer to a Theodore Roethke poem that exists in the pantheon of poems I hear in my head – his words echo, often: "I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go."
The imagery in this post is so beautiful it makes me weep.
I don't know what to say other than you inspire and teach me by your example, your willingness to go deep, even when that's hard, to stay in bed a while longer if that's what is required. To honor this human mystery which is, as you say, as natural as the turning of the earth. Natural, maybe, but scary and foreign. To brush up against it is scary. That that encounter has left you sorrowful, and fragile, is not a surprise. And you are teaching the rest of us. Thank you.
While I cannot relate personally to your sense of loss, I do know what it means to try to displace sadness or lack-of-wholeness through activity. I do think there is some good to be gotten from moments of genuine distraction (hugging a child, laughing at something absurd), but I find those instances to be rare in a period of recovery. As Jack so wisely advised, sometimes we need to sit with sadness, to try it on and wear it around, before we can absorb the lessons from it and release the rest.
I wish you peace and strength on your way.
Your post today resonates with me. I've been feeling grief that has brought to my knees. I am trying to be okay but it's still so difficult and painful to deal with the loss of my parents. My thoughts are with you. I wish you well.
Sometimes you have to climb over the mountain of grief. Sometimes you have to go all the way around the mountain. Sometimes you have to go THROUGH the mountain.
No matter which, there's no set timetable — and there's no avoiding it. Some wise person once said to me "Mental health requires a 100% commitment to reality", and I agree! We used to have much more formal respect for grief, but now after a few days and weeks, it's back to "How are you?", often not being truly open to the full range of answers.
So … Jack is definitely getting to be quite a profound guy! Kudos to him and his parents!
In other news, my Twitter pupil will soon eclipse me in numbers of followers. DId you think you'd see the day?
Elise
Oh, I know what you are talking about so well. There is a great U2 song, "Running to Stand Still" that should become my personal theme song. I am glad you are giving yourself permission to be where you are, even if it isn't a whole lot of fun. I have to tell you that the wisdom you shared with me: "All a feeling wants is to be felt" gives me comfort every day – often multiple times a day. That and Pema Chodron's words: "Stay … stay … just stay."
This is what I know for sure about grief: it doesn't last forever. The God shaped hole in your life right now will probably always be there, but slowly, it will become a sacred place and it will bring you peace instead of pain.
Perhaps today you grieve my grief and I savor your reprieve; tomorrow it may be reversed. I once nearly drowned, literally; for a long time after that I feared the water. Then I confronted my fear, lap after lap at the NYU pool. But only when I am the water am I sure that I will not drown. How can water drown? Namaste & thanks for stopping by the window.
I did the very same thing when my mother-in-law died two months ago. And it was easy for me to run ragged, because with two little boys, they keep me busy, and there's always another reason not to sit and be still. But your son, he is wise. Because yes, the grief rose up despite my best efforts. And each time it did, I was surprised, and would say either to myself or aloud, "I can't believe I'm crying again. I thought I'd be past the crying stage by now." Like you ever really get past the crying stage. The littlest thing will trigger it. Yesterday I went on amazon to do a little Christmas shopping (I know, I am an early bird…I have issues), and I saw my mother-in-laws's name in my list of ship-to addresses. It was so jarring. And then there was the decision of whether to delete it or not. And I couldn't do it.
So yes, I guess this is a long way of saying I am living it, too. And now, I think, while the boys are "resting" upstairs, I will go and be still. Thank you for the nudge I needed.
(and thank you so much for your email, too — very much appreciated that).
“Feeling sad isn't a waste of time,”
That is hauntingly beautiful.
thank you.
Grief is such a personal thing, and yet such a universal thing. Those of us who have had deep losses in our lives truly understand where you are right now.
I got so sucked into a tidal wave of grief when my mom died (I was mid 20s, it was out of the blue) until I attended a grief support group meeting. After hearing all the different types of grief others were feeling, and enduring, it put a much needed perspective on my loss and my sadness. I can still see the walls of that room, the set up of the chairs, and its now sixteen years later.
My heart goes out to you, my friend, as you wade your way through and find your eventual peace.
Hugs
Judy
justonefoot.blogspot.com
Thank you for your eloquent words. Loss is never easy and never truly leaves us, although over time, the pain of loss does subside. Your son Jack is incredibly wise!
I’m reading these words three years later, and finding such comfort in them. My dad is struggling with grief again over my mom’s passing, and it takes him by such surprise just when he thinks he’s doing well. I read him some of this tonight and he asked that I print and mail him a copy. Just wanted to thank you.