CREATE A MEMORIAL

Significant relationships are rich and complex. Your relationship with someone you love is deeply conflicted and filled with tenderness and tension, desire and duty, affection and anger. Such a relationship that has lasted a long time has woven a fabric of knowing and caring that wraps itself around you and sustains you.  It is a necessary part of how you know yourself.

When that relationship ends because of death, divorce or someone moving away, the disorientation and pain can be really frightening. The temptation is to avoid the pain and to to stay busy or to depend on some drug or alcohol to protect us from feeling it so sharply.  We may just move on and pretend that it didn't really matter that much.

But as I have said, re-membering is important to the creating of a new relationship with the departed person. It helps us organize the memories of the person so that we can continue to relate to their presence that still lingers after their absence has become real.

But remembering well is also a way of shrinking the size of that person's presence in our lives so that it becomes "pocket-sized". When that presence is smaller, there is room for new life.  It is helpful to remember the person long enough and well enough that you can create some small reminder of the essence of the meaning that person had in our lives. When their presence becomes memorial-sized, we are able to honor their memory but move forward to grow the new relationships that will enrich and sustain us.

This is why nations and cities create memorials of significant events in their history.  The past matters. Memorials honor the complexity and the rich meaning of events where fundamental change occurred and many sacrificed so much as a result of the event. But, the past can't control the future. It needs to be honored but not become a prison.  Memorials help us remember and be free to move forward into the new world.

When you lose someone significant in your life, create a memorial that can remind you of their meaning for you and free you to live the new life that you have been given.

FORGET AND MOVE ON

One thing people who  have had a significant loss often hear is "You have to forget it and move on." It is the desire of friends that we continue to live our lives. They don't want us to hurt and they don't like the feelings they have when we do hurt.

But, when things fall apart, one of the most natural thing to do is to "re-member".  When things are broken and scattered, we want to put them back the way they were.  We want to "re-member" them.  That way we don't have to deal with the pain of brokenness or the the chaos of scattered pieces of our lives.

But, I think re-membering is also important because that which is lost needs to be integrated into the life that we live moving forward. The loss of someone or something that has been significant in our self-identity has to be processed in a way that we can move forward. Our past doesn't just disappear.  It isn't simply forgotten.  Our past has to be reintegrated into the self that is moving forward.

So my recommendation is that we re-member our past so that it can be integrated into our new life as part of who we are but in a different relationship to  our lives.  Whereas it might have been central to the way we do things, now, it might be more peripheral.  If your job was central to your self-understanding when you were employed, it now may be important for your understanding of who you have been and who you might be, but it isn't as central to who you are right now.  It has to be re-membered in a way that you can carry it forward in your life to give you courage and strength to move into the unknown future.

So, re-member well.  The past remains part of who you are becoming.

DIAGNOSIS

Grieving is what happens when there are endings.  When you have trusted your life to be lived in a certain way and then something happens to cause you to question whether it will continue to be lived that way, grieving begins to happen.

That is why a diagnosis is an occasion for grieving. If you have been able to be independent and self-supporting and then you are diagnosed with a disease that might compromise those self-supporting activities, you have to learn to live again in light of the new reality.

Because of this, we start acting in ways that we may not like.  We name our losses and feel the pain of fear and anxiety that comes with uncertainty.  We find ourselves getting angry at others, even those who have not had anything to do with our situation.  We get angry at others who are not threatened like we are.  We begin reminscing about days in the past when things were good. We look around for someone or something to blame and assign guilt.  

But, for us to be free to live with our disease or our altered circumstance, we need to be freed from our guilt and our pain.  Over time a forgiving spirit can emerge.  I don't think forgiveness is something that someone simply decides to do.  I think it is often a gift that comes to us when we work through our losses and when we gain strength to imagine new and different ways of being. We are resilient people and it is possible to discover new things about ourselves and new possibilities for our lives.

The emerging of new life can be terribly painful. Don't let anyone talk you out of your pain. But, find some friends to talk with about it. Shared pain can be more manageable. Explore your new new limits.  See what you can do with the new reality. It is not easy but it can be redemptive.  

TEARS

Some of us were raised with this directive:  "Grown men don't cry." Not everyone got the message.

Recent news from the sports world is about Knowshon Moneno and his tears. Moreno, a star player for the Denver Broncos of the NFL seems to not hold back his tears.  The publicity is about how generous the tears are, but some comment on how sentimental he seems to be. 

Now some of us were led to believe that tears were a sign of weakness. We look with wonder on a grown man who shed's tears without shame. We were taught that to be strong one had to buck up and not express our emotions. 

But, my experience of deep grief has taught me something different. "Tears are an important way for us to find release from the pain of our loss. Some people would advise us to give up our pain and get on with our lives. They believe the cure for grieving is just deciding that you are over it.  My experience suggests that pain and sadness are not something we can choose to surrender so easily.  Pain has to give up on us. Tears are a way of helping us rinse out our souls so that the sadness releases its grip on us. (Lose, Love, Live: The Spiritual Gifts of Loss and Change", p. 44)

But, it is more than being freed from the pain. Tears are also a sign of strength. When we are weak, we cannot allow ourselves to feel because it threatens our self control.  But, when we are strong, we can stand the feelings and we can express them.  So, in our learning to live without someone or something that matters, when we are overcome with tears we can take courage because we are gaining strength for living a new life in the future.

I am glad young men didn't get the message that "grown men don't cry." When macho men in the NFL are not afraid to express their sadness, there is hope for better healing of the heart.

GROWING SPIRITUALLY

Anger is part of the normal feelings that one has when one has had a significant loss.  But, it is more than that. I reflect on that in my book, "Lose, Love, Live:  The Spiritual Gifts of Loss and Change."

"Being in touch with our anger and fear and anxiety is a vital part of growing spiritually. To grow spiritually requires centering our lives in that which can sustain us in the midst of the changing world around us.  Spiritual strength is the ability to stay on course even when the winds of threat and fear would knock us off.  If we are in touch with our fears and our anger, then we are more aware of what we are putting our trust in.  To trust our souls to those things that can be taken from us is to be vulnerable to manipulation by the powers that would control us.  To trust in the energy of life that creates and re-creates us, ever calling us into a new world, is to be defined by that which has eternal qualities."