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.

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.  

SOUL WORK

Soul work is more like life in the forest than your front lawn.

Soul work is slow and decaying, metabolizing the memories of old life so as to enrich the birthing and growing of new life.  As I walk thorugh the forest, old trees have fallen, rotting and fertilizing, absorbing into the soil. Leaves lay dying and decompsoing, creating humus for the seedlings of new roots to take hold.

My front lawn has the priviledge of being cleaned, racked and old decaying stuff carted off.  This is what some people would like to do with the past--get it away--forget it--so that they can bring in chemicals and change the landscape of the future.  While this may create green, manicured lawns, this is not the kind of life that creates soulful living.

Death and loss are a given in life.  The question isn't whether or not they will happen.  It is what we do with them when they happen.  I believe that the way for moving forward requires that we allow the memories to hang around to inform and shape us, nourishing the soul for the new self that is emerging to grow.  Tell stories about what is gone.  Let the words swirl and race across the heart like dried leaves before the autum wind.  Let the words dance and die, decomposing and nourishing your soul.  Too much clearing away the old and dying rather than letting it be absorbed into the soil of the future leaves the future without the rich soul food to hopes for tomorrow.