From ROTB (Religion Outside the Box) on Loss and Mourning

I get this email regularly. This is part 1.

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Sunday, January 31, 2010
(4/40) Loss.

This is an article about loss that was written by Frank Ostaseski, the founder of Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco.

Loss

Loss is the first period of grief, and it’s visceral. It’s like being punched in the belly. It takes your breath away. Even when death is expected, our bodies and minds can’t seem to take it in right away. We don’t want to accept the reality of this loss; we don’t want to believe that the person we love has died. And at the same time, acceptance is the task in this period.

Shock and disbelief usually give way to guilt and regret. We judge ourselves mercilessly: “I should have taken her to the hospital sooner. We could have tried other treatments. I wish I’d spent more time with her. I wanted to be there at the moment she died.” Our capacity to be cruel to ourselves never ceases to amaze me. At our time of greatest vulnerability, when we most need our own kindness, we club ourselves with self-judgment. If we could only just stop for a moment and listen to the sound of our voice, surely our hearts would open to embrace this pain.

Mourning

Grief may be the greatest healing experience of a lifetime. It’s certainly one of the hottest fires we will encounter. It penetrates the hard layers of our self-protection, plunges us into the sadness, fear, and despair we have tried so hard to avoid. Grief is unpredictable, uncontrollable. There are no shortcuts around grief. The only way is right through the middle. Some say time heals, but that’s a half-truth. Time alone doesn’t heal. Time and attention heal.

In grief we access parts of ourselves that were somehow unavailable to us in the past. With awareness, the journey through grief becomes a path to wholeness. Grief can lead us to a profound understanding that reaches beyond our individual loss. It opens us to the most essential truth of our lives: the truth of impermanence, the causes of suffering, and the illusion of separateness. When we meet these experiences with mercy and awareness, we begin to appreciate that we are more than the grief. We are what the grief is moving through. In the end, we may still fear death, but we don’t fear living nearly as much. In surrendering to our grief, we have learned to give ourselves more fully to life.

Letting Go

This is the painful period that goes on for some time, months, even years. When someone we love dies, it’s not a single event. We keep on losing that person. At holidays, times of difficult decisions, or in those little personal moments we want to share, we are painfully confronted with the absence of the person we love. We see clearly the roles that person has played in our life, and we grieve for those also. We don’t just lose our wife when she dies. She’s the person who worked out all the battles with our kids, or made the money, or the one who touched our body with love and tenderness. When our parents die, we may find ourselves feeling fragile. They were the buffer between us and death, and suddenly we are more aware of our own mortality. This is the period when we feel most alone. Friends drop away in exhaustion. Others tell us to keep busy or to get on with our life. This is the individual’s fear of pain and our cultural predisposition toward avoiding anything unpleasant. Advice doesn’t help. Listening does.

Moving On

Grief is like a stream running through our life, and it’s important to understand that it doesn’t go away. Our grief lasts a lifetime, but our relationship to it changes. Moving on is the period in which the knot of your grief is untied. It’s the time of renewal. Not a return to life as it was before the death you experienced - you can’t go back, you’re a different person now, changed by the journey through grief. But you can begin to embrace life again, feel alive again. The intensity of emotions has subsided some. You can remember the loss without being caught in the clutches of terrible pain. The armoring around our hearts begins to melt, and in this period of moving on, the energy that had been consumed by resistance is now available for living. Now we move forward, but we’re not abandoning the one we love. We understand that even when someone dies, the relationship continues. It’s that the person is no longer located outside of us. We are developing what we could call an internal relationship with this person, and that allows us to reinvest in our life. If we follow the path through grief to wholeness, we may discover an undying love.

- Frank Ostaseski

Frank Ostaseski is the founder of Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, the first Buddhist hospice in America.

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Part 2

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MOURNING

I often counsel the bereaved.

I'd like to pass along four bits of general advice that I give to mourners.

Mourning is a part of the life cycle. I know many people would rather not deal with it. Death, after all, is quiet a taboo topic; but it's still real and something that we all need to be faced. So, why not be a bit more prepared?

(The scheduling of this week's newsletter about mourning to follow last week's about loss is not coincidence.)

My hope is that you don't need to take any of the above advice any time soon.

-RB


Permission
There is no one correct way to mourn. Really. Honest. There isn't. Please, please, please do not think that you ought to do anything other than what feels appropriate to you. Do not try to do this or that to take care of other people. Take care of yourself. Give yourself the permission to mourn as it feels appropriate to you.

Waves
When you are mourning, emotions and memories come in waves. They will come and leave on their own accord. You cannot control waves in the ocean; neither can you control emotions or memories when you are mourning.

At times, emotions will be overwhelming and take you without warning. You won't be done with them until they are done. You may try to delude yourself that you are in control of them, but you're not.

It's the same with memories. Memories you didn't even know you had may arrive seemingly from nowhere; and, again like waves, you are not in control of them.

The List
As people dislike dealing with other people in pain, mourners will be consoled. Or, better put, people will often try to console mourners. Of course, it's an impossible thing to do, right? You can't really say anything. Consequently, the intended comfort will, often, miss the mark.

Let's think about it... Even under the best circumstances, kind words and deeds cannot take away the feelings of pain and loss that mourners face. Words intended to comfort don't work. What then happens, when the first bit of would-be comfort doesn't help, the would-be comforter will usually make a second effort to comfort which also doesn't help - this often leaves both feeling worse.

Here's my suggestion to mourners: maintain a list of the 5 least comforting things you hear while you are mourning. My rationale is that if you make it part of a game while you listen to some ridiculous things that are supposed to pass for comfort it might take a bit of the sting out.

Walk Around the Block
After a week of mourning (or a week after the death), take a walk around the block either by yourself or with loved ones. This ritual is ancient and unbelievably effective. The mourning doesn't end with the walk around the block, but something shifts.



With love,

Rabbi Brian

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