WEAVINGS

With courage she shared in the group. It was people gathered to grieve and discover new life. She was there partly because she had lost her son.  He died young. We were discussing how one gets beyond the pain and agony. She said that she had identified her feelings as despair.  Others nodded.  Unrelenting sadness often hardens into despair.

She shared with us that what had helped her was finally coming to accept that this would always be part of who she now is. When she quite fighting despair and accepted it as a permanent part of her new self, she said that it was easier to live with it.

One of the normal ways of trying to deal with pain, sadness, despair, is to try to excise it. We try to get around it or over it. We don't like how it feels. It is a thorn in the flesh.

But, the poignant confession of our friend in the retreat points to a way to deal with that inescapable pain. She realized that it would not go away.  It was too attached to her love for her deceased son. It was part of him. So, she accepted it as part of her. And rather than tear it away, she accepted it and began weaving it into the tapestry of her becoming life.

Loss tears a hole in the sense of who we are and how we know ourselves. We take the tattered threads of the rip in the fabric of our soul, seek to discover the new threads that the loss has given us to weave with, and then busy ourselves with the new identity that we might become.  With trembling fingers, exhausted by trying to hold ourselves together, we tenderly take our pain, our sadness, our despair, and begin weaving our life together.

The tapestry will never be the same. We become new. And that which was and that which is gone becomes forever woven into the fabric of our lives.

MEANING IN LIFE

I see lots of bumper stickers I don’t agree with. Occasionally I see one that makes me think.  The other day I saw this: “The meaning of life is to live it”. I had to ponder that one for a while.

And I don’t think I agree with it. I think the events of our lives are lived. But, I think the meaning of life is lived events storified. That is, I think events happen and we experience them. But what they mean is how we tell the stories of those events.

Stories are like pearls. Calcified life.  Life was lived and then we create stories of the lived experiences. Those stories are the way we want to remember what happened to us. They become the permanent containers for the events we have experienced.

And those stories get strung together like pearls on a string to create what we believe about ourselves. We remember and tell stories that give an image of who we are—both to ourselves and to others. Frequently, those stories are strung together in different ways depending on whether we are trying to tell ourselves who we are or if we are trying to communicate it to others.

The art we create by the stories we tell and the way we string them together is the meaning of our lives.

Now, when there is an event that interrupts the flow of the story—when the artful meaning we create with the way we string our stories together is disrupted by a major loss—we have to re-story our lives. We have to find a way to put that event in the flow to create a new meaning.

So, I think meaning of life is more about how we string together the stories of our lived experience than simply living life. 

TALKING, LISTENING

Why do people seem to need to talk when they are going through a significant loss?  As I said last week, one important reason is that we need to try to put our world back together. When our relationships have been dismembered, we need to find a way to re-member them so that they can continue to exist in us as part of who we are without creating too much dissonance.

But, it is more than that.  Talking things out and telling the stories of our life and our loss is also about rediscovering meaning in life. When we lose someone or something significant, we lose touch with the construct of meaning that we have created. When we were in relationship with certain people and played a certain role in that relationship, our meaning was wrapped up with the existence of those relationships. When they end the meaning we made of our life is challenged. "Did  my life really mean what I thought it meant."

And we remember and talk our way through the loss because we also try to figure out what our life will mean in the future.  By telling our story, our life and our loss, we try to stay in touch with what we know about ourselves.  As we rehearse my life, we discover things about ourself that we think are worth developing in our future.

At it's core, this remembering and meaning making is about reconstructing faith.  We place our faith in that which helps us know how we relate to the world and what we mean to ourselves and others. This is why these losses often produce a crisis of faith. "Can I really trust that life is good, or that God is good?" "How does God really interact with this world?"

This is why it is so important that we find good companions who will pull up a chair and patiently listen to our rehearsal of our life. The re-membering of who we are and the re-constructing of meaning and how we relate to the world around us is hard work and requires all the love and support any of us can give. 

CLEANSING TEARS

What do you do when you are overcome with pain, when sadness absorbs you? What do you do when you can’t find words to express your sadness and anger?

I once wrote the following: “Feeling the pain is . . . . important for helping the body release the toxins created by suffering.  The bone and sinew in the body are scarred by emotional trauma and hold the hurt well beyond the heart’s ache.Tears can provide a healing release for the whole system when they are allowed to flow.” (Lose, Love Live, The Spiritual Gifts of Loss and Change, p.43)

And I would add, Find someone and hold their hand. It helps to know you are not alone.

FLOODGATES OF MEMORY

Endings are powerful events. When relationships are ended, we are often faced with a flood of memories. When life as we have known it comes to an end, the space created seems to be invaded by thousands of memories. It is as all the pieces of our relationship to others were held behind a concrete dam. While we were still in relationship with the other, those memories were released a little at a time. But, when the relationship ended, the flood gates are opened and it is hard to control the flow.

One of the reasons this happens is that we may not want to let that relationship go.  Or at least there are parts of it that we cherish. But, our connections to important people and organizations are so important in our own self-understanding that it scares us to let it go. We may not know who we are if we are not in relationship to that person or institution. Our identity is up for grabs.

So, memories clamber over each other to get our attention. The members of our mental and emotional family were integrated as long as our relationship was a living one. But when there is a death of a relationship, the chaos scatters those stories and we don't know who we are.

So, we remember.  We are litterly trying to re-member what has been dismembered. We are trying to keep the relationship alive in our vision of ourselves. It is terribly disorienting to have important parts of our self taken away by an ending relationship. And because the relationship has been important to us, we have to put it together in a new way within our psyche/soul. Because the relationship is no longer a living presence, we need to construct a spiritual presence.

This is why it is so important for people who have had significant losses to keep telling their story--continually rehearsing what happened. They know that who they are is a collection of all the relationships they have had the the events that they have been part of. They need to integrate the experience of the ending of the relationship with their experience of the relationship. 

And that takes as long as it takes--generally longer than some around them would like. So, be a patient friend to those who need to talk. They are doing hard work of spiritual integration.