grief language

Change

~ Mimi Ray ~ Leave a comment

A resistance to change is a resistance to life itself.

If that statement prompts uncomfortable feelings, you are not alone. It seems that a great deal of what we do, and pursue, in our lives is in fact resistant to the intrinsic nature of life. Thinking about it honestly it’s hard to deny that life is change, hence the many variations of that observation and its expression by poets, philosophers, intellectuals and artists the world over.

There are, of course, changes we accept fairly easily, or at least grumble about less, because we perceive that they benefit us and are generally positive. And then there are the changes and the changing nature of what we prefer that we resist, sometimes to our detriment. I’m trying at any given moment (as I’m fairly certain you are) to exert some influence over how and when change impacts me, and that is not only understandable, but often necessary for my survival both real and perceived.

When I think about the idea that resistance to change is resistance to life itself, and that death is the ultimate change, our resistance all along the way would thereby seem to ensure that when the time comes it will be all the more difficult. I don’t mean to infer that death would somehow not be difficult at all if we weren’t resistant to change, but rather the more frequently we unconsciously brace and maneuver against other inevitable life changes (in relationships, grief, age, and illness for example) the harder we are making it for ourselves and others. And given that culturally we are death phobic, it makes sense to me that a general aversion to change over lifetimes and generations, has been a significant factor in our great fear of death and our struggles with feeling our grief and having it supported when our loved ones die.

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A poet whose work I love died recently. I was lucky enough to hear them live as part of a spoken word evening when slam poetry was just becoming a thing years ago. I told Kissie about it. Now, as I’m trying to place when something happened, the passage of time is marked before and after her death.

“When nothing softens the grief, may grief soften me.” -Andrea Gibson

Regularly Scheduled Grief

~ Mimi Ray ~ 3 Comments

Take a moment to think about what it would mean to schedule some grief time in your life. Doesn’t sound like fun, but as most adults know, meaningful time doesn’t usually fit such a strict definition. Meaningful sounds pretty great to me. So does connective, profound, cathartic, genuine, healing, releasing, revelatory, healthy, enlivening, enriching, and loving. These are all things I’ve felt and experienced because of regular expressions of my grief.

Scheduled grief can be weekly, monthly, seasonally, on designated anniversaries, all or some of those in different configurations, communally and solo. We all schedule time for things that are necessary and important to us: work, social activities, exercise, vacations, hobbies, intimacy, special occasions, etc. If the acknowledgment and expression of our grief is not important and meaningful to us, the culture at large stands no chance of prioritizing it. We give the meaningful people and practices in our lives our most precious gift: our time. And we owe it to ourselves to allow our grief to have a dedicated place in those practices that sustain us.

If you are newly in mourning, it may not be necessary to schedule grief time because the early weeks and months can be so emotionally overwhelming and time consuming. You may benefit from taking breaks from hard grieving, which can be especially exhausting. However, if expressing emotion is difficult for you, even in the beginning, then scheduled grief time could be helpful from the get-go.

Regularly scheduled grief doesn’t have to include weeping (although it certainly can and often does for some of us), nor does it mean allowing negative and overwhelming thoughts to cycle over and over until you’ve pushed yourself into a self-inflicted funk. It can look like allowing yourself some space and time to cry it out, preferably with an understanding grief partner or small group, giving voice to difficult stuff that happened or regrets or “second thoughts” about a loved one’s last days or an ending of some other sort. It can mean sharing stories, laughter, awe, meaning-making, and synchronicities with others who experienced the same ending or share a relationship with the same person, or someone you trust with your heart (a grief walker friend).

Just two days ago, I discovered that August 30th is National Grief Awareness Day. It was so named in 2014, seven months after my sister Christine died, to raise the collective consciousness about the needs (and benefits) of grieving people and the cultural imperative to support grievers (which is all of us) with understanding and compassion. In reading more about it, I found a post on social media from a somewhat well-known grief authority noting that of course we’re all aware of our grief and inviting readers to share what they wanted others to know about grief. The respondents shared some great insights. But I do disagree that we’re all aware of our grief. Talking about something and living in real awareness of it are the not same thing. I suspect that if we were all truly aware of our grief and conscious of how it impacts our choices and lives, the world would be quite different and our culture would look nothing like it does at present.

So although I missed the memo 10 years ago, having a designated day like this is a valuable tool with which to bridge our discussions and learning about an experience we all have, but don’t like to talk about. That said, it’s just one day, and as I have learned, regularly scheduled grief is the ongoing encounter with a fact of life, and a choice we make to care for ourselves and those we love, living and deceased.

Continuing Bonds II

~ Mimi Ray ~ 1 Comment

“I paint flowers so they will not die.” -Frida Kahlo

I love that Frida painted flowers as a way to memorialize their existence and as an act of preservation for something that lives so beautifully and briefly. In the act of painting them, she remained connected to a part of the natural world that she loved, and we can do the same with our dear ones who have died by actions that demonstrate our ongoing bond.

I blogged about the concept and practice of “continuing bonds” not long after my sister Christine died, and 10 years later I find that the things I do to uphold and strengthen our bond are just as meaningful to me, even more so with the passage of time. My conscious actions to maintain our connection feel natural and good to do. A continuing bond can be anything that feels like a sustaining connection between the two of you, just as it does with someone who’s living. Each day, for example, I ring a chime for her and say good morning, upon waking. You can include others to expand the community bond. For instance on May 1, a family member and I texted about this being the beginning of “Kissie’s month” because of her upcoming birthday and today I shared a photo of my tulips with a long-time friend of hers who thinks of her fondly and frequently.

It’s been 28 years since the groundbreaking book on continuing bonds by Klass, Silverman & Nickman was published, and it’s heartening to see that it’s become a more normalized and encouraged grief practice. Let’s keep that trend going because deep cultural shifts take time. There are countless ways to continue a bond — reading the books or watching the films they loved, listening to their favorite music, traveling to places they visited or lived in, writing letters to them, creating poetry, music, or art about them, getting a symbolic tattoo, taking up a cause they believed in, praying for them — the possibilities are as varied and multi-faceted as the people themselves and they change over time. What are some of the ways that you continue your bonds?

It is said that Frida always signed her correspondence with “Remember me.” Maybe she instinctively knew that connections can be sustained with acts of remembrance.

Memory II

~ Mimi Ray ~ 2 Comments

In pondering more about revisiting memories and allowing my mind and heart to be open, I find it helpful to differentiate it from rumination. Rumination is more of a closed loop recollection of an event, as I alluded to in my last post. It relies on the mind replaying the same details and outcomes over and over without an opening. So what exactly do I mean by that? If something happened a certain way and I allow for something else to now be a part of that previous memory, I am not just rewriting history?

Rewriting history would mean a deliberate distortion for a particular aim. To make myself feel better, justify behavior I chose in the moment, etc. That’s not what I mean. By an opening, or an open loop, in regard to a grief related memory, I mean the attitude of mind and heart that there may have been more that took place than I was able to comprehend at the time. It’s an attitude that allows that I cannot at any given time, see and hear and digest all the details around me. It is accepting that my memory of something is not the complete picture – not that it isn’t important or accurate or insightful – just that it might be incomplete. That there could be more and finer detail and perspective than my mind was able to perceive at the time. That attitude allows the opening in which the “memory of a memory” that I missed can bubble up into my consciousness. I didn’t see it at the time or remember it because I wasn’t able to. Maybe the circumstances were just too painful or overwhelming. So it must be looked at again in the mind, almost as if with “the eye of the heart,” like the ear of the heart is to the benedictine practice of lectio divina.

Allowing memory visitation is dedication to a belief that some previously unknown insights are waiting for me to catch up. Their existence and emergence can happen with my willingness and openness. Memories can and do ossify, but who decides when and how? As I shared last time, it’s daunting and lonely to show up for a grief practice that has no social or cultural etiquette. I do it because the revelations and communiqués I’ve received have been sustenance to me and also from some urging to continue that I can’t explain. It feels a little dangerous, too, because of all that’s out there about grief from the field of psychology, especially in the last 10 years. Not that I don’t think psychology can be hugely helpful when it comes to grief, it can and has been vital for me. But it also feels very limiting and outcome driven and overly rational to the point of diminishment. Death and grief can be approached and perhaps understood and integrated more without stripping away all vestiges of mystery.

Dirge Without Music

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Thanks to the graciousness and generosity of the Millay Society’s literary executor, I am honored to share a poem I have returned to again and again for its courage and honesty.

This month marked eight years since Kissie’s death and twenty four since Dad’s, and the mournfulness that suffuses this month of their anniversaries, calls out to me for lamentation. It asks me for a rite, perhaps simple, but lovingly and staunchly given — for no amount of time erases the wonder that they were and the privilege of grieving them.

Dirge Without Music | Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

“Dirge Without Music” (1928) by Edna St. Vincent Millay reprinted courtesy of Holly Peppe, Literary Executor, the Millay Society (www.millay.org).

In Honor of a Time

~ Mimi Ray ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a long time since I’ve written here. And what a time it has been.

The grief of the pandemic has — and is still having — its way with me, as grief does if allowed in. Emotionally rocking me, dashing my expectations and hopes, and showing me things about myself and others I thought I’d rather not see. Exacting unplanned solitude. Exalting togetherness in a way that only the threat of separation can.

In many ways, I’ve cleaved to the solitude and limitation, much of it pandemic-imposed because of underlying health concerns, but some of it self-imposed because the time we are living in seems to be asking something of us and I want to attend to it somehow. Just as I did with my personal grief, and grief in general, when I started this blog in 2015. I feel largely alone in this, too.

My writing lately has gone to journaling, memoir, and plain contemplation, mostly about Kissie and grief. Yet, these past couple of weeks, as the year ends, I’m feeling drawn back here. A couple of friends have mentioned missing my thoughts about grief, especially as it relates to what we’re going through with the pandemic. They have no idea how much that means to me.

I wonder, too, if they’re expressing an unspoken, but persistent sense that as we rush unquietly back to business as usual, trying to recapture what has ended, we may be passing over an important grief and its counsel. Leaving it mostly unprocessed at best and ignored at worst. And are we, in the process, eschewing a “grief practice” this pandemic time might be urging us toward?

I’m impatient and fatigued with discomfort, the moving target of fear, and inconvenience, too. It’s in the cultural water, so it’s herculean not to be. And just as with death and grief, we want to get past it as quickly as possible and get things back to normal and comfortable again. “The top six steps experts suggest to embrace the post pandemic lifestyle” — is what I see most, of course. I’d like to make some space here for other perspectives about a post-pandemic life. Or maybe a pandemic life, first. And the sadnesses, beauties, reckonings, gratitudes, and unexpected clarity to be found here.

Eyes Wide Open

~ Mimi Ray ~ 2 Comments

Many of my wonderings about grief lately have been bound up with the idea of full experience and its effects. It’s a very different concept from “moving on” or “moving past” that we generally hear in one form or another after someone’s death. What does it mean to become a grief practitioner? Sounds a bit frightening at first. Will I be sad all the time? My observations of grievers vary widely and for some it’s not possible or even advisable to go all in, especially at first. Yet for those who do endeavor and have the capacity to enter the experience with eyes open, to grieve like there’s nothing “wrong” with it and breath it in like the air, is there some kind of transformation that gradually takes place?

Not success. Not growth. Not happiness. The cradle of your love of life…is death.

I was introduced to the countercultural notion that being a “practitioner of grief” is the pathway to the love of life. My somewhat obscure instructor, Stephen Jenkinson, is the author of Die Wise (a book I reviewed for the Minnesota Coalition for Death Education and Support) and the former director of palliative care counseling at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. His distilled and revolutionary proclamation about a grief practice is this: ‘Not success. Not growth. Not happiness. The cradle of your love of life…is death.’  He not only believes it’s possible to have an inner life whose joy is rooted in “knowing well” that it will end, but that it may be the antidote to much of the fear and anxiety the dying have about what will become of them and what we will do with them after they die. Will we be able to live as if they never lived? He posits that grief in action is the ‘willingness to remember great sorrow, unsuspected loss, blank pages in the story of who we are.’

Nothing since Kissie’s death has been more real, more equal to the prospect of the rest of my life with her physical absence, than this lived and felt attitude about my grief — that death has always been the cord of connection to my love of life. And that my practice of grief is my continuing cord of connection with her. 

“Grief is a way of loving. Love is a way of grieving.” – Stephen Jenkinson

 

The Thing Is

~ Mimi Ray ~ Leave a comment

A wise friend who understands that grief is cyclical—that it dives down deep and appears to disappear, then comes up gulping—shared this poem with me.

That’s what its been like for me these past months. Going beneath, sifting through the shipwreck of my sorrow. A trove is there, lying quietly, waiting for me.

The Thing Is | Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

For the anniversary of my death

~ Mimi Ray ~ 2 Comments

I didn’t know this poem by W. S. Merwin until recently. On first read it felt so somber, and tonight on New Year’s eve, not the usual fare for ringing in the coming year. Yet, somehow it seems appropriate now, and I hear the gratitude in it. The bowing to the unanticipated and commonplace gifts of the passing year.

The anniversary of your death approaches, Kissie. I think of all the years before when we passed “the day” without knowing it. And when finally, by grace, we saw that unbidden day approaching (an experience I will ever try to somehow articulate) it was indeed a strange garment and still surprising, and the morning birds, somehow, sang.

For the Anniversary of My Death | W.S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day   
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

Each grief a reflection of relationship

~ Mimi Ray ~ Leave a comment

My elderly mother-in-law died seven weeks ago. It was a long decline spanning the last 18 months and punctuated by numerous and increasing health issues, notably dementia and cancer. The end of her life brought a level of care-giving and involvement for which neither my husband nor I were adequately prepared. For me, taking on such huge, additional responsibilities, though shared, was overwhelming, especially while grieving my sister.

What has stuck me most in these intervening weeks since her death, is the nature of my husband’s grief and how intrinsically their distinct relationship has determined the character and nuance of it. This has, in turn, brought my own grief into sharper relief. Each grief for someone is so very personal. It is marked by all that we were and meant to each other, how we interacted, what was shared and withheld, and how — over time — we grew emotionally closer, or apart, and how we therefore arrived at the time of parting. It all comes to bear at last on how and why we grieve, and how we will face our own deaths.

We also bring these very personal experiences to our expressions of condolence and sympathy. So much is framed by our unique relationships and circumstances, that drawing too much on assumed similarities can, at the very least, render the expression less meaningful. I’ve noticed how my condolences to others reflect my own grief and relationships. Though there are many parallels to be drawn and unities to be embraced as I contemplate death and mourning, my awareness of others’ discrete relationships gives me a richer understanding of my own grief, and hopefully, a more mindful appreciation of theirs.