Grief

Remembering while moving into the future.

One of the challenges of older years is watching people die. James W. Harris  has written on his blog, "Would you rather be remembered or do the remembering?"

Husbands and wives probably have the most intimate discussion of these considerations.

Part of my spiritual practice is to do a daily reading and today's topic is on the spiritual dimensions of grief. There were a few quotes offered for consideration and the one that struck me as most interesting and applicable to my life is "Though painful and unwanted, grief has unexpected creative and transformative power. It is not just an emotional response to loss but a deep unsettling of the soul. In grief you realize that you can't go on as before, and some of the pain comes from losing familiar sources of meaning. You have to reinvent life, imagine it differently. At the same time grief ties you to the past. Because of grief your life remains whole, even when events seem to tear it apart. Grief won't let you forget what life has been like. ..."

Being remembered means we are gone and don't have to do any work any longer on understanding ourselves and life,  but having to do the remembering puts us in the position of having to make some sort of sense of the loss and the meaning for our current life. Making this meaning can have tremendous power in facilitating growth and pushing us to higher levels of awareness of the interdependent web of this thing we call life.

This process of interpretation and meaning making takes a tremendous amount of energy and leaves us innervated for mundane things. Observations when incongruous and absurd aren't funny any more but rather more annoying and not worth a laugh. We become more serious about prioritizing what really matters and attending to that. In the end, most people say that what matters the most to them is family and beloved friends and when they are lost to us, that just leaves us with Love in a rarefied form no longer attached to egos but unconditional from the Transcendent Source that sustains all things.

Doing the little things with great love is what sustains us as we move forward through our grief creating a new life without the physical presence of those we’ve lost. While the physical body is gone, the spirit of the person lives on in the stories we tell about our experience of them. The challenge is to incorporate these stories into the new life we are creating as we move into the future, unknown in its differences without the one we have become accustomed and attached to.