by David Richo
It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.
—Father Zossima in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
MOURNING A DEATH
The passing of someone who matters to us is the most impactful of all triggers. We feel lost in reaction to a loss. In our bereavement, mourning because of a loss, we certainly need—and have—inner resources to call upon. Throughout this book we have referred to processing our experiences. “Processing” means letting ourselves feel fully. Processing is coping, managing and surviving a traumatic event.
Yet, the feelings that come up when we lose someone are often inaccessible at first. We are numb for a while. Our body is wisely preventing our feelings from flooding us. It knows how to grieve little by little or just enough so that we can survive our loss. Denial helps us not let in the full brunt of the desolating loss too fast. This is disbelief, shock, lack of clarity about what exactly happened. All of this is normal. We have to be very patient with ourselves. Mourning takes time and we don’t know how much. Our first step in bereavement is to trust our body to show us the path through, in any form it chooses and as long as it needs to. We can trust that the path can escort us, however circuitously, out of our labyrinth of pain.
We can’t expect to breeze through grief with our full cadre of mental powers. We are at the mercy of moods that shift constantly. All of this is to be expected. The reaction to most triggers is one or two feelings or actions. The reaction to death is much more complex. It happens in zigzag ways, in phases, ever surprising us with its levels of intensity, its inscrutable timing, its power to destabilize us—whether briefly or for a longer period than we thought possible. Here, too, we have to trust that all that is happening is part of the processing—that is, part of the healing. Our body-mind is trying to absorb a deprivation it was not expecting and for which it will never have enough practice. Mourning is a signature experience, unique to each person—and at each loss—in form, duration, and impact.
Mourning harpoons us physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Physically we may experience tears or collapses at odd times, tiredness, weight changes, insomnia, a reduction in our immune response. This is why it is important to eat and exercise even though we may lose our appetite or not feel like engaging in activity.
Psychologically, we feel sadness that someone is gone. We are angry that he or she was taken from us. We are afraid of the emptiness we will feel now that we are bereft of the one who was such a crucial part of our circle of life companions. We experience guilt that we did not do enough, regret for all the times we did not come through for the one we lost.
Other psychological features of grief can include ongoing anxiety, a lack of energy, thoughts of harming ourselves (including suicidal thoughts), obsession with mental images or memories about our lost loved one. All this is totally natural and not a sign that we are inadequate or that we don’t have enough faith or a good enough spiritual practice. Indeed, spiritually, we may find ourselves in a void: We may experience no comfort from our faith or from our spiritual practices. Yet it is crucial to stay with our practices in any case.
Our resources when we are grieving are both internal and external. Internally we acknowledge and talk about our pain. We let ourselves look vulnerable, not try to look strong. We accept the full spectrum of our bewitching moods and bewildering feelings. Externally, we seek support and presence from those we love and respect. We are willing to try therapy if necessary and when we are ready. We remember we are actually being strong, not weak, when we look for help. Indeed, we have become truly unassailable.
It is also important to realize that we do not have to talk about our loss all the time. Just being present with those we love gives us consolation. They can’t take away our pain but they can walk beside us as we trudge through the valley of the shadow of death.
WHEN OTHERS ARE SAD
We sometimes encounter sadness in a friend or family member. Our mirror neurons can make our face look as sad as the face of our unhappy friend. We feel with her. Our resource is compassion, the spiritual practice that helps us and others. We show our compassion by understanding rather than judging. We appreciate how it feels to be grieving, especially since we have grieved so often in our own lives. Likewise, we do not give advice or try to console someone with platitudes.
Our reaction of empathy toward someone we know leads us to the compassionate practice of “staying with.” This takes the form first of all of physical presence. Our presence happens with compassion for another’s pain when we offer her the five As of love—attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, allowing—each a practice:
We pay attention to her feeling and her body language with an engaged focus, and we are free of commentary.
We accept her timing. We do not say, “Snap out of it” or “It’s time to move on.”
We appreciate that the experience of sadness in someone else is entirely individual. It is not meant to duplicate our own. It has its own rules and path and we respect that difference.
We show affection toward the other in appropriate physical ways—for example, holding, if the other is open to it.
We allow the other to let us know how long and how often we are welcome to visit. We ask her what she needs rather than deciding on our own. We make allowances for miscommunications or failed appointments.
All this represents—and makes present—a caring connectedness with another’s pain. Since growing in our capacity to love is our life purpose, compassion is a resource not only to the other but to us as well. And all it takes is presence, being with. In his book Many Ways to Say I Love You, Fred Rogers—famous for his children’s television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, wisely says, “At many times throughout their lives, children will feel the world has turned topsy-turvy. It’s not the ever-present smile that will help them feel secure. It’s knowing that love can hold many feelings, including sadness, and that they can count on the people they love to be with them until the world turns right side up again.”
As we grow in spiritual consciousness of our connection to all beings, we can feel sad for people who are affected by disasters or violence. When we watch the news on television, we do not have to be spectators only. We might say a prayer or aspiration for them. The eighth-century Buddhist monk and scholar Shantideva expresses this aspiration in The Way of the Bodhisattva: “May those who find themselves in a trackless and fearsome wilderness…be guarded by beneficent heavenly beings.”
In our loving-kindness practice, which will be described in chapter 5, we extend love to ourselves, to our nearest and dearest, to people who are neutral to us, and ultimately to all beings. We can also allow ourselves to grieve for ourselves, for those we love, and yes for all beings who suffer losses and who are hurt or violated. Our empathy extends without limit.
Avoiding Our Grief
Mourning is realism. We feel grief because we have not escaped the reality of an ending. Most of us are adept at avoiding that process, however. Five common ways that we avoid grief are by redirecting our reactions, toward revenge, regret, off-loading, the disregarding of boundaries, and indifference. Let’s take a look at each of these.
1. Revenge
A reaction of rage can be a dodge of mourning. A reaction of revenge may likewise cloak our grief. In Troilus and Cressida by Shakespeare we hear, “The hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe.” A loss feels incomplete, imbalanced. Our most primitive way of resetting a balance may seem to be retaliation. We tell ourselves we were hurt so we will hurt back. Then the scales will be set aright again. But this cancels our natural and necessary mourning about our loss. We imagine that if we get back at someone, we will feel better. That “better” is the equivalent of being deluded into thinking we are “better off” because we have avoided the pain of grief. In reality we have lost an opportunit
y for closure in the way the body is equipped to find it.
We always keep in mind that retaliation is the favorite sport of ego. Revenge is not then ultimately about righting a wrong. It is also, as we will see in the next chapter, the angry ego’s way of salving its indignation.
Grieving without needing to retaliate may be especially difficult for men, who so often have been taught not to cry. So many of us men gradually became afraid of our own sadness. The conditioning drilled into us about what is masculine—revenge—and what is not—weeping—remains in us for a lifetime. But we can work on letting that attitude fade out and letting our grief stand forth. This means allowing ourselves to be fully who we are in response to loss, allowing ourselves to visit the milder climates of humanness where tears are granted entry. Allowing is one of the five As of self-love.
2. Regret
Feeling regretful is another way we might be avoiding the full experience of our grief. We may obsess about a recent triggering reaction, bargaining with ourselves about how we might have done something differently so as to achieve a better result. We fall into regret instead of stepping into appropriate grief. Regret is grief that never resolves itself. Instead we spin our wheels in self-pity or self-blame. Regret is a sign that we are not forgiving ourselves and moving on. Since a journey, going on, is built into every one of us, regret is therefore a danger to our evolving as full-on adults. We work with regret by moving past the story of our mistakes to the feelings awaiting closure.
We might be triggered into shame about a choice we have come to regret. The origin of the trigger might hearken back to childhood. We might have been shamed, punished, or rejected for doing what a parent dubbed wrong or bad. If we knew that what we did was not wrong or bad, no trigger resulted. But if we interiorly agreed with the remonstrance, we may now still be triggered into shame. We react by shaming ourselves, another form of regret: “Why did I do what I did?” “How could I make such a mistake?” “How could I be so dumb?” Those are the exact words we used in childhood and we now hear ourselves saying them to ourselves once again. How much of our regret is unresolved grief from our home in a shanty town of long ago?
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in his essay “The Cosmic Life,” wrote: “I bless the vicissitudes, the good fortune, the misadventures of my career. I bless my own character, my virtues, my faults, my blemishes. I love my own self in the form in which it was given to me and in the form in which my destiny molds me.” This is what we can sound like when we forgive ourselves rather than hang out with regret. Ironically, feeling our sadness leads to letting go of it, and then self-blame goes too. We are more likely to forgive ourselves when we have acknowledged our sadness and have let ourselves feel it fully.
We can use an example of how this happens. We are letting ourselves feel our grief about how others have hurt us. Gradually, we feel a shift into letting go of blame, resentment, and the need to retaliate. Letting go of those three is forgiveness. When we apply this model to ourselves, we likewise see what self-forgiveness is. We are feeling our sadness and as it is resolving itself it works as a solvent. It washes away our self-blame, self-hatred, and any need to punish ourselves—that is, to engage in self-retaliation. Now we have forgiven ourselves and we can move on. Forgiveness of others or of ourselves does not mean excusing. It means letting go of the rancor we have held inside for too long. We know we have grown up when we notice an indelible trust of ourselves that has survived all the graffiti the inner critic has scratched onto the walls of our psyche.
As an aside, mention of the inner critic brings to mind a humorous irony. If the inner critic says we are stupid and we believe that about ourselves, we are thereby acknowledging that there is an insightful evaluator in ourselves. Thus, belief in the verdict of the inner critic that we are stupid coexists with a salute to what in ourselves is actually intelligent, worth listening to, the very opposite of stupidity! We can notice this contradiction with a smile and that goes a long way to free us from self-loathing.
3. Off-Loading
We sometimes try to rid ourselves of some of our grief by getting others to feel it with us or instead of us. We might do off-loading of our own grief by telling the story of our loss to others so that they can cry for or with us. We may tell our story with a dramatic flourish to garner the other’s full attention. We count on the empathy of someone else as a pathway into that person’s implicit agreement to take on some of our suffering. We thereby off-load stress from our own bodies into the bodies of others. Shakespeare’s character Desdemona describes this process in Othello:
He hath left part of his grief with me,
To suffer with him.
Sometimes this sharing is healthy. Grief has a shareable dimension. This is why funerals are so useful in expressing and getting through our grief. We are surrounded by others who loved and were loved by our lost loved one. We mourn together and that lifts some of the weight from our hearts. Likewise, when any loss occurs we tell the story over and over to reduce the impact of the grief. All this is how grief moves to closure.
Off-loading is not the same as sharing grief. Off-loading involves shifting some of our own distress onto someone else. This can be motivated by a doubt of or a refusal to access our own inner resources to contain and survive a loss. We look for others whom we consider stronger than we to shoulder some of our pain for us. We place our cross onto the shoulders of a bystander in our story.
We might also become the target of off-loading. Some of us easily fall for it when others tell us their dramatic story of woe about what is happening in their relationship or about a loss of some kind. We feel sympathy, but our involvement may end up being a form of codependency in which we become enmeshed in another person’s issue. Then we might be triggered into becoming a rescuer. The problem with this is that the off-loader does not then do her own work. We are making it less likely that the storyteller—who may need to become a client in therapy—will find the help she needs. In other words, we are enabling someone to avoid the appropriate processing of her grief. A friend can be a therapeutic companion but not a therapist.
4. Disregard of Boundaries
When we present a need to someone and she says no to us, the appropriate response is sadness. We are losing our chance to find the fulfillment we so longed for. Most of us, however, immediately occlude our grief about this lack of fulfillment with blame of the other. We say she is withholding, ungenerous, because she is unwilling to give us what is important to us—she is not there for us when we need her. We grieve not getting what we wanted.
The alternative might be pushing to get what we want, insisting on it. We sometimes do not respect boundaries (the boundary here taking the form of the other’s right to refuse us). We refuse to take no for an answer. We demand instead that the other come through for us in precisely the way we want. Thus, another hideout from sadness is indignation that we did not get our way.
We might then take the no to be a call to arms. We resent the other, believing we have the right to retaliate when she asks something from us. This style subverts trust. Showing we are saddened by a partner’s or friend’s response, by contrast, demonstrates our vulnerability, which fosters the other’s trust in us. We are then more likely to hear a yes in the future, though that is not our motivation. Once we make the decision that we will be transparent about our feelings, no matter what, we find that sense of courage is the only reward we long for. This courage is liberation from the power others have to trigger us so much.
5. Indifference
We sometimes misunderstand Buddhist teaching. We imagine that if we were enlightened, we would not feel sadness about losses. Endings would be much easier for us to handle. But that extreme stoicism and indifference would be inhuman. Enlightenment is the expression of our inner wholeness. That means allowing the full spectrum of human experience, as part of which feelings are a necessary feature. As social beings we are intimately connected to ot
hers. We need one another for survival. We love one another to express our connection in a caring—and joyous—way. A loss ends a connection at least palpably. That matters to beings like us who thrive on a life of collaboration and sharing. Our sadness is our way of showing the importance of our connections.
The Japanese Zen master Shaku Soen was openly weeping over the death of someone close to him. A bystander mocked him, saying, “You are supposed to be beyond reacting to the givens of life and death.” Shaku responded: “It is precisely by allowing my natural reaction of grief that I go beyond my grief.” The words “go beyond” signify the transcendent—here we are in the spiritual realm. It is certainly a delight to realize that what is natural to us heralds what is supernatural in us.
TEARS IN OUR MORTAL STORY
These poppy petals:
So calmly
Do they fall.
—Ochi Etsujin
In the Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil, the hero Aeneas visits a temple of Juno in Carthage. He comes upon a mural showing events in the Trojan War. In the mural he sees his lost companions in the bloody battles in which he fought. Aeneas cries out, “Sunt lacrimae rerum”—which the Irish poet Seamus Heaney translates to mean “There are tears at the heart of things.” There is a sadness built into human experience because all is transitory.
Buddhist teaching describes impermanence as one of the “marks of conditioned existence.” Impermanence reflects a central given of life that there will be changes and endings, the ushers of grief. No one can escape meeting them. No one has been granted an exemption from losses. No one can say, “That can’t happen to me.” All of us are subject to the same unpredictabilities. Certainty is an attempt at permanence, but it is doomed to fail. Indeed, permanence itself contradicts the evolutionary impulse in us and in all things. Only impermanence can accommodate the dazzling vicissitudes of our ever-evolving world.