No Longer There

I happened upon this post recently and it made me stop, which is something that happens from time to time. You don't always know which post or which words will do that, and you don't always know why, but I saved it which typically happens if it impacts me in some way or if I want to get back to it later.

I was not "grieving" in this moment per se, nor had I had a particularly difficult day emotionally, I was basically just scrolling for scrollings sake.

If you know me at all you know that I am an orphan. My father passed away in his sleep at the age of 66 and my mother passed away 7 years later. There was no goodbye with my father and with my mother it was wholly and completely different. My sister liked to say we had been grieving her passing for years because it really felt like that. But with my mom we were "gifted" her last days on earth by spending those days with her when she was placed under hospice care. At the time it didn't feel like a gift and it didn't for many years after. To say we were ill equipped would be an understatement.

One of the feelings I will never forget, for the rest of my life, was watching her disappear. Literally. Right before our eyes. She didn't have the text book passing. She didn't see people or have conversations with others who had passed. She didn't dispense any words of wisdom. She just disappeared. And that was not an easy thing to witness considering "in life" she was very much there. That feeling, the one of watching her leave, will never leave me.

I haven't read a descripition perfectly escribing that moment, that time, until this came along and I haven't been able to articulate it quite like this either. But it stopped me completely because it's the truth of what happened and what I felt.

We live in a society that implores you, convinces you that grief gets a certain number of days that you can experience it and then you need to move on. You do, eventually, move on, but the grief never leaves. You just learn to sit with it. You learn it will always be there no matter where you are, who you are with, or what you are doing. Grief rewires your brain. Some of it is sudden. Some of it is very traumatic. And some of it is like watching a light dim. They are all different.

I have learned over time to sit with mine. To invite it in for coffee. Or to sit with it at a waterfall or next to a body of water. To walk with it hiking in nature. To drive with it listening to melancholy songs. There is no sense in asking it to leave, it will still be there and it usually shows up as a different emotion that you cannot explain away. C.S. Lewis once wrote "I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief." Others have said anger is just grief with no place to go.

It struck me recently that grief is with me in all of the places that I find God. I don't find him in a church. I find him in a cup of coffee with a view. When I am out in nature. When I am near any body of water. How is it that I am with both grief and God at the same places? Some day maybe I will have that answer or understand it better but it no longer upsets me to sit with it.

I work with many clients who experience grief and not even realize that is the emotion they would associate with what they are feeling. That's because we give grief metrics that we measure it by. Standards we compare it to. A timeline it must follow. An expiration date. The problem is it never expires. I can't compare mine to yours and vice versa.

We will all experience it in some ways more than others. It shows up for all of us.

But it promise you if you invite it in, if you sit with it just a moment and allow it to tell you why it's there, it will change the way you process it.

I saw the body of someone I loved after they were no longer there.