The Sacred Process of Grief

The Dark Night leads you back to Love

Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash

The Unbroken, by Rashani Réa 

There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.
There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctified into being.
There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.

---

I want to talk about grief. No. I need to talk about grief.

As an interfaith/interspiritual minister, chaplain, and an End-of-Life Doula, I spend a tremendous amount of time with people in grief. I pass countless hours listening to stories about departed loved ones or other losses, the heavy weight of sadness that drags people down into the depths of despair, and the intense fear of the future and of change. I do my best to hold that grief with tender hands.

Through my training, I know all the theory of grief, the stages, and the “it takes all forms and lasts as long as it lasts” truisms. I can quote the scripture, the teachings, and the sayings that are designed to help people manage grief. “It’s all impermanent,” “God gives and takes away,” “It’s perfectly normal to feel grief,” “This too shall pass,” etc. etc.

Yet, even with all that experience and knowledge, when loss hit me last month, I felt as if I were drowning in a raging sea of grief. While my training helped me understand what was happening, and my spiritual practices kept me afloat, none of what I knew helped ease the pain of what I felt. The mind is one thing, and the heart is another. The unimaginable strength of the waves of pain broke my heart open and crushed it to the ground, and words and theories were useless.

Grief is a sledgehammer designed to reduce you to rubble. Like a tsunami that crashes violently against the shore, it wipes out everything in its path, shattering structures, splintering what once was solid, and submerging what remains under tempestuous water. It makes you question everything you’ve ever known, everything you’ve ever believed, and leaves you in pieces that you doubt will ever be put back together.

For over a week after my beloved cat, Dusha, was killed in a trap, I wandered around in a fog, tears constantly streaming, and each wave pushed me further down. I went through all the classic stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance -- over and over and over again. I learned that everything I’d ever heard or read about extreme grief is true: I couldn’t read. I couldn’t write. I stopped eating. I slept most of the day. And when I was awake, every moment seared. Staring out the window, I couldn’t see the bright budding of Spring: I only saw dark clouds of pain.

At some point, I realized that I wasn’t just mourning this particular loss, but all losses. Grief, it seems, can be cumulative. Like interest, it compounds. All the previous losses that I somehow held at bay came flooding in. This recent grief cracked open the bulging dam of my heart enough that I simply couldn’t hold it together anymore.

At some point, I realized that I wasn’t just mourning this particular loss, but ALL losses. Grief, it seems, can be cumulative. Like interest, it compounds.

In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller outlines the Five Gates of Grief. Like a stadium with many entrances, there are different doorways through which grief enters. Weller describes them as follows:

1. Everything you love, you will lose

2. The places that have not known love

3. The sorrows of the world

4. What we expected and did not receive

5. Ancestral grief

When my heart was cracked open by a singular loss, it was as if a raving mob of sadness stormed the gates. Every entry was overrun, and the guards were overwhelmed. I had no idea there was so much I had yet to fully grieve.

I wasn’t just grieving the loss of my beloved pet, but all loss of loved ones, relationships, dreams, goals, illusions, and hopes. Tumbling in the tidal wave was the suffering of people in wars in the world, our degraded environment, trust in my government, faith in our human capacity to do the right thing, the suddenly visceral oppression of my ancestors, and my own sense of self and purpose. Everything that mattered was being washed away or felt like it was. And I was powerless to stop it.

Trying to hold on in this torrent, I understood – again - that sometimes, it takes something strong enough to overpower you to force you to surrender. This seething storm of grief was strong enough to defeat me. I let go. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but an absolute inability to fight anymore. Limp, I was carried along by the swell, and all I could do was allow the grief to take me, even if I had no idea where that was.

This seething storm of grief was strong enough to defeat me. I let go. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but an absolute inability to fight anymore.

When the crowd of sorrows began to dissipate some days later, I was wrung out and exhausted. Raising my heavy head from my pillow, I looked out the window. Through swollen eyes, I saw the yellow daffodils and purple lilac buds in the sunshine, as if for the first time. The birdsong was joyful music to my ears that had only heard sobbing self-recriminations. I ate some food and relished the taste of an apple, cheese. A hot shower was sheer bliss. Effortlessly, a sense of the wonder of life returned.

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A friend of mine recently gave me a new way of looking at the word “enlightenment:” it’s where the light comes in. (Cue Leonard Cohen.) Now, I can see that the loss of my beloved pet didn’t just open the gates for a horde of griefs, but it was also the chisel that made a hole in the bulwark for the light to get in and clean me out of all the old resentments, illusions, anger, fear and pain that I was still holding. It showed me the depth of my heart and what it feels like to be swallowed by darkness. It showed me how “this too” is part of being human. And then, it reminded me how truly precious and sacred life is – all of it - and how much I love it.

Grief and love are two sides of the same coin; you can’t have one without the other. We grieve because we love, and if we love, we will grieve. Grief is part of life, and there’s something profoundly transformative about allowing it to happen. This is why the Dark Night of the Soul can be the precursor to spiritual awakening.

We grieve because we love, and if we love, we will grieve. The only cure for grief is love.

Many of us are grieving right now. Almost everyone I know is suffering loss – personal losses and global ones -- and the barricades are straining. We have lost so much that we love. We are losing so much. We stand to lose so much more. We are living a Dark Night.

I suspect that underneath the outrage, anger, and embattled righteousness many of us experience is a raging mob of grief, pain, and fear determined to crush our love of life. But we aren’t acknowledging it.

Instead, we mask it with words and actions, thinking that if we just yell loud enough, plaster our Instagram pages with slogans, or meet injustices with more injustice, we can somehow manage our grief. We really don’t know how to grieve in this culture, so we power through or we stuff it down, anchoring it with spiritual bypass or platitudes. But that will only work until something big enough – or painful enough - forces you to your knees.

I would like to suggest that we need to allow ourselves to be cracked open by the grief. Allow it to break our hearts. Allow ourselves to be flooded with the despair, fear, and deep pain of loss, and surrender to it. We need to howl and wail and pull our hair and dig our hands in the dirt until our fingers bleed. We need to allow ourselves to fully grieve the loss of the things we love and let the light pour in to heal us and show us that on the other side is something even bigger.

I suspect that if we do, we might find another way to meet the world: not from our heads, but from our hearts with deep empathy and compassion for ourselves and others. If we know that we are all grieving, we can hold each other and our world with kindness and care, not anger or hate. It might even bring us closer to whatever we call the Sacred.

If we know that we are all grieving something, we can hold each other and our world with light and love, not fear and anger. It might even bring us closer to whatever we call the Sacred.

I am not past the grief, but I’ve come to understand there’s no need to get past grief. I am learning that grief can be my friend and teacher, and I want to live with it, listen to it, and attend to it with great care; it shows me what I love. It shows me how to love, or as poet Mary Oliver says:

To live in this world
 
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
 
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

I’ve also learned that the pieces that are shattered by grief are never meant to be put back together the same way. When you finally get washed up on the beach or dropped by the swelling mob, bruised and spent, you are changed.

I don’t know exactly in what ways I have been changed, or how I will be rebuilt, but I know one thing: grief has given me a new perspective on what it means to be human. It showed me what it means to love so hard your heart breaks into a million pieces, and what it means to welcome the power of grief and surrender to it, instead of holding it back. It showed me that there are even deeper wells of compassion and love available if we allow ourselves to fully go through the gateways of pain and loss, and that the on the other side of grief is the sacredness of life itself.

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A Blessing for Grief, by Katie Sivani Gelfand

May you be tender and gentle with yourself, and be cared for by those who will envelop you with compassion and presence.

May you know that there is so much beauty in your grief, especially when it feels messy.

May you know that the depth your grief is a measure of the love your heart is capable of.

May you cry an ocean of tears, and never fear the tides of your grief.

May you scream and rage and emote your pain in safe and supported spaces, and may you never be judged for the power of your expression.

May you be comforted by a blanket woven of love, when you feel the harsh and palpable illusion of aloneness.

May you remember in moments of despair that all life comes from the womb of sacred darkness, and that something new will be born from this void.

May you allow yourself to change.

May the pain of your loss awaken you to the pulse of your humanity.

May you have faith in the crucible of your soul, to transform this grief into a numinous song that brings you closer to your own Divinity.

May your experience of loss expand your capacity to extend compassion to others.

May you eventually wear your scars, as luminous gems on the unfurled wings of your heart.

And may you always remember the preciousness of life.