Grief: The Weight, the Burden
And how it [can be] a Compassion-Builder
Grief exists and comes in waves.
Grief and mourning has cycles that circle around and around.
Grief gets stuck in the body. And it has to be released and process with emotions, felt and experienced, through the body.
You carry grief, as a weight, within you.
You never put it down. You learn to carry it, this grief, but you never ‘get over’ it.
I think about all the ways that we frame and try to understand grief.
I am perpetually amazed that though we are all mortal beings—apparently except for my narcissistic ex, who believes he will not die and will live forever—and yet—
Despite us all being ‘terminal cases’ in some varying time line or trajectory, we—humanity, at least in this culture—really sucks at grief.
We really are for the most part clueless: we don’t know how to help others grieve, what to say, when to shut the fuck up and not say anything—
Ironic because most all of us will lose someone that we thought that we could not live without and we too will die and leave behind survivors of some kind.
Death is truly such an inevitable part of life—then why don’t we do better with it? After all these millenia?
I think that the sad thing is that it really boils down to people really don’t have much empathy, compassion and understanding in the same regard unless they personally experience loss.
We may feel sorry for others or entertain a moment of sympathy, but for the most part, we really just are self-involved in our little worlds and business.
That is—
Until something happens in our world that shatters us and we become intimately acquainted with death and loss, until we are the ones who are grieving. Then oh the posts on social media certainly take on a new tone and direction.
I have heard it said that those who have recently lost someone get a look about them, in their eyes. You can just tell because there is a longing, a hollowness, a void, but also a splitting open where light and empathy and compassion also penetrates.
The kinder souls use these moments to allow life to teach them something about compassion.
I want to believe that we don’t have to do it this way, as humanity, that we have other ways of learning this lesson so we don’t have to experience it only first-hand, through our own full-fledged loss, in order to have the same level of compassion and humanity for another. But I don’t really believe it’s entirely or universally possible.
Most people can’t get it until it happens to them. Some don’t even bother to care or pretend or exercise any temporary sympathy until it’s their own lived, embodied experiences.
I think the power of sharing and listening to stories and storying through our own experiences—that is about the closest we can get to building that compassion and empathy in another person without first-hand experience.
Even then—not a sure-fire guarantee.
After all, people have to care or give a fuck first.
And again, they usually do only when they are afflicted. So then we’re right back where we started.
I often times wonder about this, in light of my grief journey and life experiences. I frequently speak out about suicide loss, survivorship, prevention. I am quite certain that people get tired of hearing about it.
Perhaps what they may not understand is that I too get tired of posting about it, thinking it, living it.
But I guarantee you—if your mother or father or brother or grandmother or partner or child were to end their life, I am quite certain you would finally invest in the stories.
Only then, sadly, it would be too late.
It happens more easily and suddenly and covertly than you might ever realize…
