Grief is Love: New YouTube Video
I am support of a grief literate culture.
I was motivated to share my writing piece about grief in a video, as I passionately feel our culture would greatly benefit from NORMALIZING GRIEF!
This is a vulnerable piece I wrote expressing a bit my experience with both of my parents passing within a short year and a half time period. I am now inspired to share the depth of my process in a vulnerable manner, in hopes that it will help others in their grief process.
Grief is love
Grief is normal
Grief is an expression of great love.
Here is the piece that I read in this video:
Today I woke up pondering how culture would be better served if we allowed ourselves to FEEL and EXPRESS grief. 🥀
When my mother was pregnant with me, my grandfather died a sudden and tragic death. When I was growing up, whenever the topic of him came up, my mother would clam up and quietly start shedding tears. I did not understand, as a child, why the mention of a man I never met had such a profound effect on my usually stoic New England mother. My brother and I learned to be careful to not talk about him, as it would have this surprising effect on her.
I also did not understand that she hadn’t had a chance to properly grieve him after his death, because she was pregnant with me. My mother had had four traumatic miscarriages before she had me. As she didn’t want to lose another baby (embryonic me), she chose to not make the long journey from California to New Hampshire to attend the funeral. It was her love for me that prevented her from grieving her beloved father with her other family members.
As my own father died one year ago, I now properly understand the pivotally painful effect the death of a father can have upon a daughter. My father was my world, in many ways. I am sure my mother felt the same thing about her dad.
Recently, on an airplane flight, I watched the new release ‘A Man Called Otto’ starring Tom Hanks. In the movie, his lifelong wife had just died. As he was besieged with grief, he yearned to die to be with her.
As I watched this movie, I understood some of the complex and heart shattering emotions my father must have felt after his wife of almost 60 years passed in November 2021. He was absolutely bereft without her. My brother and I helplessly watched as he self-sabotaged himself in various horrifying ways. One night he drank and drove and almost drove off a cliff. Fortunately, a tree perched at the edge of the bank prevented his bright red sports car from sliding off the perilous bank. We both felt powerless. There was no way we could fill the ginormous hole in his heart after her death. My mother was his queen, since he was 24 years old. He loved us dearly, but there was no way we could heal his broken heart.
As his daughter, this deeply hurts.
If I could have saved him, I would have.
This was not his, nor my destiny though.
While watching the movie, hot tears rolled down my cheeks, as I truly comprehended the profound loss he must have felt after her death. I am an independent type and the longest relationship I have been in was for 7 years. I cannot understand the depth of connection one would feel from spending a lifetime with someone.
I ask myself:
What if we lived in a world where grief was a normal expression after experiencing loss?
What if we lived in a healthy society that would hold and comfort the bereaved through ritual, ceremony, song and dance?
What if grief was a culturally understood emotion and tears of loss were supported and welcomed from those going through the pain of loss?
What if grievers were held through the process of grieving?
What if it was understood that after experiencing a loss that the grievers are tender and need more love to journey through the shadow of grief?
Speaking from my own personal experience of enduring countless deaths of those closest to me in the last 7.5 years, grief can grow us if we allow for the process to MOVE THROUGH US.
My father ended up dying tragically in March 2022, just four short months after the death of my mother. This was absolutely devastating to me.
My dad was my world. Before he died, I didn’t realize how much I shaped my world around his large, loving and boisterous presence. He was a constant presence, so how could I understand how much he meant to me?
I’ve been in a deep state of grief the last year and a half after my parents’ death.
I loved my mother dearly, but my father was the one who was emotionally accessible to me. I mirrored him in so many ways. He was loud, big in body and expression, unpredictable, goofy and crazy in the most wonderful ways. He was from Kauai, Hawaii, where I live now. His bright Hawaiian shirts were a metaphor for his large Portuguese loving heart.
My mother was the stable and calm one in our family. When she declined, as cancer and cancer treatment slowly ravaged her body, I realized how much she held our family together. She was the solid one who patiently endured my father’s occasional tempestuous moods.
This year of grieving has cracked me open. I have learned once again just how grief pushes us to levels and layers that can hold exponential growth, if we allow grief to move fully through us.
Throughout the many deaths I have experienced of those closest to me in the last 7.5 years, I remind myself of Leonard Cohen’s words:
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
I allow the grief I feel for both of their deaths to creep into my heart.
I allow it to transform into love.
I know they are still and always with me, not in body form, but as my angel spirit guides helping to lead me through my life.
For this I am grateful.
I am grateful to feel
I am grateful to be alive.
I am grateful to feel grief,
As grief is ultimately love.
I loved deeply,
Therefore, I grieve deeply.
And this is as it should be,
This is normal.
Grief is a normal expression of being alive in a human body.
And so, in turn, I give you permission to grieve the loss of your beloveds. I give you permission to grief whatever it is that cracks your heart open. The death of a pet, the loss of a job, a house, a relationship, a situation, your health, a way of being, a beloved, the current environmental and social crisis or whatever speaks to you.
Please feel it
Please express it
Please release it.
You deserve to heal
You deserve to shine!