For the grieving

Good Grief, pastel, 2006

This evening my heart is with all the people who I know are grieving a loss right now - and there are many.  Grief can feel like a dagger to the heart or like a big bag of sand at the bottom of the lungs.  It hurts.  We are human.  We are supposed to hurt.  Rather than trying to escape it, we must dare to embrace it like we may embrace a wounded child - with a clear mind and loving heart.  That is what heals us.

So many people are told not to cry, led by a belief that crying keeps the spirit of their loved one from reaching the light.  I have been taught instead that our tears are an important gift for our healing, and that the extent of our crying honors the breadth of the love we have for the one we have lost. I tell people that inside there is a certain size bucket of tears, depending on how much love we have, and that the only way to empty the bucket and shed its heaviness is to let the tears flow.  A family who cries together heals together.

I have also been taught that it is not the absence of our tears that help the newly-freed spirit from reaching the light.  Rather it is our love for them.  It is the honest heart-felt wishes for their easy journey home.  It is our ability to let go of any hurts that they may have caused us. 

Love is what sends a spirit to the light, even love that glistens with tears. 

I learned that in the spirit world there is no time, and that on the other side they may wait for us to finish grieving - wanting to see us happy again, but that wait, for the spirit, even if it takes us months or years, can be like just a moment to them. They are already in a place of joy and all-wisdom. 

Grief brings gifts - gifts of heartfelt love and forgiveness.  Like with the family depicted above it can bring such connection to the survivors if they dare to surrender to it.  And with surrender, grief can also bring a deep connection to our Creator, as in the poem below.

It's not so bad...

Being sad

Melancholy holds a delicate beauty of its own

Now draw inside and find coziness

Peer out from within

Like watching a rainy day through a windowpane

When questions and reasons are all stripped away

Appears a fine breath of splendor

Acceptance really needs no excuse

We know why there is autumn

But let’s forget that for now

And simply bask in its fragile beauty

For it won't last long

Sit back and release that weighty sigh

Still the thoughts; listen to the calm

Let go

Its now, devoid of pictures of future and past

In the space between anguish and anger

In supple sinking into being

Watch...

God reaches in to touch with magnificence.

Copyright 1983, Kathie Bird