Grief Stricken
Yes, grief strikes, and sometimes it strikes us down. Sometimes, it is a gradual encounter revealing itself slowly and preparing us for a final end; sometimes it is a bolt from the sky sending piercing shockwaves as though a Greek God had dropped from the Heavens and driven their chariot through our body.
We experience many pains in life, broken limbs, ailing bodies, broken hearts but grief seems to have its own special category of pain. It is the pain of powerlessness in the loss of the significant other: our first pet, grandparent, sibling, parent, child, friend, lover, spouse - even the stranger that has significance for us. In losing the ‘not me’ a part of us is also extinguished, annihilated, lost, and the pain of such an event can be complex and excruciating, and not least a reminder that this too will be our unavoidable fate.
When in grief our world can feel rocked, unknown, precarious and untrustworthy, and when we look in the mirror, we can’t be sure who is staring back at us. Grief can be the most disorienting experience and we experience it many times over in our lifetime in varying degrees. We can even grieve for something we chose to give away, give up, lose, set free.
Grief will hit the body and it will react: not sleep, sleep too much, not eat, eat too much, weep and howl, dream and perhaps panic. And all of those important states and experiences will change form as time passes. Every loss, no matter how small, is a transition into someone else as we move through a journey of our own becoming.
Loss creates grief. Grief creates change. Change creates transition. Transition creates the new. Not in a nice neat straight line but often in a messy, untimely fashion. And we cannot escape it, and we cannot, not be impacted by it, and in a profound way every night when we put our head on the pillow, we wake in the morning slightly changed from the night before having lost a little of ourselves as we slept.
It would be crass of me to say embrace the grief because it is fucking painful isn’t it. But we can be with the pain, come to know it, make a friend of it, be compassionate towards it. With patience we can let it teach us something about ourselves, about what we lost, about what remains and about the beauty of having had something precious in the first place, to lose.