I didn’t even know I’d joined a club
Somehow, in all the reading and thinking about grief that I’ve done since, in quick succession, my brother, mother-in-law and mother died, I never came across this line: “Welcome to the Grief Club: the club that nobody asked to join, where membership is automatic after losing someone they love.” I wonder if it would have resonated with me or if I was still too turned-inward, so wrapped up in my own exhausted narrative to even consider that what I was going through, albeit an awful lot all at once, was an inescapable part of the human experience.
Witnessing someone else’s grief shifted my own
Recently I attended two funerals in one week. Both were for husbands of friends. Both friends are navigating the same stage of life as I am – raising adult children, caregiving for aging parents, and navigating marriage with a suddenly (or, in my case, sporadically) empty nest. I wasn’t just grieving two vibrant husbands, fathers, and sons. I was mourning for all that I know lies ahead for these two bereaved wives in the weeks and months to come. I was heartbroken because I know some of what the three young adults who have been left to finish growing up without their dad will experience in the coming years.
The intensity of my feelings surprised me until I realized that these funerals were both unexpected; death had come way too early for these men. Witnessing the “extra” poignancy of these losses while bearing the still-raw wounds of my own broken heart opened me up. The experiences of my life transformed what I imagine would have been sincere sympathy into deep empathy for the survivors I was there to support.
Not alone anymore
As I mentioned earlier, for five years I have been slowing and mindfully mining the terrain of grief. I have been noticing its ripple effects in my relationships. I have been observing the ways that it challenges my mindfulness practices. I have also been noticing all the ways that my practices have helped to sustain me through these years of loss. What I didn’t realize was that, for five years, a little part of me has been quietly and persistently whispering “All of this death makes you different.” Suddenly, in the wake of these two deaths, a loneliness that I didn’t even know I felt lifted.
In fact I was never alone, but felt lonely nonetheless
The grief of these two funerals served as a powerful and really important reminder for me that we are all living the same sweep of life. Each of our stories begins with birth and will end with death. In between, in a billion different ways, we all love and we all lose. For 100% of us, the blessing of loving and being loved far outweighs the painful cost of loss. This is the universal human condition.
Being on the proverbial sidelines for these two deaths gave me an important shift in perspective. My focus shifted from “my story” to “our story.” And this feels profound. A line from an essay by Mary Oliver (“Some Thoughts on Whitman”) captures what I feel better than I can on my own. It is as if, “my lonely single self” has merged with “the wondrous, never- lonely entirety.” My story, like my two friends’, is part of a much greater, sprawling tale.
Just because the tale is universal doesn’t make the individual, special and important stories of loss – mine, theirs, and yours – less painful. But, when you’re ready (and this could happen quickly or could, as in my case, take years), it sure feels healing to recognize that “my story” is “our story” and, because we share it, we are better able to love one another through it.
How do you get ready?
Two decades of yoga training helped me to engage with my grief in a deep and reflective way. I needed to acknowledge my huge and disruptive feelings. I needed time to see if or how they were affecting my outlook on life. I needed to develop the patience and willingness to allow my relationships to shift in the aftermath of loss (which many times added an additional layer to my grief). I needed to watch myself stretch back into life in new and surprising ways.
It is said that the greatest work we can do for one another is the work that we do on ourselves. Your grieving may well be supported by some other practice than yoga. How we dive into our grief is not important. What is important is that we do so. As we do, we can trust that our losses and the way we allow them to change us will enable us to meet other people’s loss with generous, deep empathy when they join us in “the grief club.”
The Sanskrit word “Yoga” means to connect, to yoke, or to bind together. One of the ways that yoga does this for its practitioners is by developing the awareness that, instead of being isolated and individual selves, we are an integral part of the world around us. This realization combats the foundational klesha (cause of human suffering), avidya (the misunderstanding of who and what you really are – see Yoga Sutra 2.4), and is very settling.