Can we hold grief and hope together? I hope so. True that this note begins with death and grief. It also gives hope in the end, for one way to help ease the suffering or offer ourselves some needed comfort. It would be arrogant to set any expectations or give out empty promises. My hope is that we may open a window to peace and ease. May the view from this window offer possibilities that speak to your heart.
Acknowledging death of someone, especially close, takes courage. We know this, don’t we? It takes radical acceptance of what is, becoming face to face with a truth that is staring us in the face and hard to ignore. The fact of death, grief, loss, stays. Our desire to change such fact may be quite strong, perhaps especially so in the beginning. So are the awareness that a new knowing is added to our experiences, and life is now this way. forever changed. Thoughts will still appear. They will carry us through movies in our heads, scenarios and “what if”s, as we also grasp, in our own way, what is here now.
There is a helpful approach to accompany us during especially tough times. It is self compassion, as well as compassion towards others. Compassion is important for our and others’ well being. It opens the space so that grief and life work may have the room to breathe; they become more nourishing rather than depleting. It carries us through.
Being gentle with our experience of grief is what we can give ourselves as a gift.
It may sound strange to offer kindness and compassion to self or that they can help. There is a different kind of healing in these qualities. We may notice that they ease burdens that we place on our being. I could have said on our shoulders. We often begin with the burden of being “left behind”. That is a much heavier burden on our whole self than just the shoulders. Moving through this sense of heaviness is a process in and of itself. Moving through the processing of grief may be even bigger. It depends on each situation. Is it really this confusing without a clear path, then?
Death is both simple and complex. As birth, it is the other certain end of this puzzle of life. Yet, it is so overlooked, hidden, pushed aside in our Western minded culture. A clear path to include death and grief in our wholeness is therefore not guaranteed for most of us who are “left behind”. I am not suggesting by any means that there should be a prescriptive way to experience grief or help others to do it. What I am saying is that we often instead get faced with starting from scratch to learn to “deal” with it. This learning is repeated more often than may be beneficial and effective for the whole society’s healing from such profound experiences. Especially since they are bound to happen to all of us at least once or more in our lives. If birth is treated in more prescriptively healing and inclusive ways, so could death, too.
Some of us are formulating in our minds what more readily available support structures may be. In parallel, those of us grieving are formulating our own practices to help us in our own ways. My suggestion is always, always, to include compassion, including and especially for ourselves. It may be easier to feel compassion towards another person, to feel together with them what they are going through and move towards helping them through their suffering. It may even feel more natural, culturally assumed that compassion is something we extend to another.
The delight is that we can learn to experience compassion towards ourselves. Maybe not all at once, but we can decide what is needed the most right now and attend to it.
Here are some suggestions for being compassionate with yourself. Feel free to recognize them as your right while you grieve:
What is needed for you right now and you can allow yourself to do, to be?
Self-compassion gives us the gift to honor the process that has occurred to our loved one(s) and us. It may be hidden, but is there only to be discovered. May we notice our need for it. May we give ourselves the freedom to experience it.
With love and kindness.
Yasemin Isler
April, 2017