Secret Gifts

As I was getting ready to send out this month’s newsletter, I reminded myself that I had made a New Year’s resolution to get back into writing something of substance every month. This was something I did for all of my time at Samarya, and in fact, resulted in my book, No Gurus Came Knocking.

But as I approached this month, I felt like I had nothing to say, nothing new to write. I said to a friend, “I don’t want to just keep writing about grief” even though that is what is on my mind and heart every day. Grief can be so exhausting, I imagine it exhausts others to hear about it as well.

My friend responded, “But the people who read what you write want to know what you are thinking, they want to know how you are processing things. It’s helpful.”

I thought about that a bit, and then realized there is something that I can share about my grief that does not feel like the same old thing. But it has been something that I am often afraid to share.

See, grief and loss actually do have their own redemptive aspects. I sometimes call these the secret gifts of grief, or the “awe-full” gifts of grief. But it is scary to share about them because I feel like if I do,  people might think I am “all better,” or that I have “moved on,” or that there was something good about any of this, or some other thought terminating cliche. None of these feel true. What it feels like to me is that these things have happened. These people I love have died, in quick succession, and I have had to face ever-changing realities and new dimensions of myself and the world around me. It’s not that “I am so strong,” but that this is my reality, and that this reality brings other new realities. And while I never would have wanted any of them at this cost, these new realities can and do direct my days and my thoughts and my growth in many new and sometimes liberating ways.

After my sister died, just four years ago, I fell into a deep depression. It was the first time in my life that I truly understood what depression was. That it is not just feeling sad, and it is not just the grief, but it is an all encompassing feeling of malaise, crushing fatigue, dread and kind of just not really caring about anything. It took me sometime to be able to identify the depression as caused by, but separate from, the grief itself and the aching feeling of missing my sister.

As I began to understand and manage the depression, I began to move out of it, and started to be able to face life again with joy and hope.

Then last year, my brother died. Unlike Erin’s prolonged illness and the ability to say good-bye, Tim died in an accident. He was here and then he was gone. It was - and is shocking - earth shattering, and the worst thing I could possibly imagine happening. The trauma, the loss, the story, the just not seeing him again, felt unbearable. 

As I began to process his death, I said many times to friends that I could not do what I did after Erin’s death. I could not just fall deeper into depression, so the only choice I had was to live life fully, to honor both of their deaths by living more, loving more, taking charge of my life more, having all of the love and delight and adventure I could in the time I had alive. I did a therapeutic mega-dose of psilosybin, something I had never done before, and started on a process of nesting in my home, fixing things that were broken, repainting, replacing windows, buying new throw rugs, making my home the beautiful sanctuary I needed. I wanted to create order, beauty and a sense of expansion. I wanted to rebuild myself in a way that honored life fully. 

When I went to Guatemala this Christmas and New Year’s, I promised myself I would come home and restart lots of other things I had loved and let go, including writing, and playing music, promoting retreats and traveling to teach.

And then my beloved nephew, my boy, my everything - Erin’s son, died by suicide. And everything shifted again. Suicide is a whole other animal. What I thought was the absolute worst seem to get even worse. I stayed inside for about two months, barely talked to anyone, barely dressed or showered, just tried to make it through day by day. And in that space, from that dark place, a new dimension of self arose.

I began to see myself as both infinitely more powerful and exactly that much more spacious. I felt (feel) more clear on what I care about and what I don’t, what I will tolerate and what I won’t, what my values are and how I will stand up and speak up for them. I feel less entangled, less “hooked in,” or co-dependent with anyone or anything, and at the same time I feel more open to possibility than ever, more soft around other people's processes, more patient and open to how things might change for the better - whether my band, my family, my friendships, my work. I feel a sense of equanimity in myself that I have not experienced before - much more clear, and much more yielding.

And finally, I have the gift of a deep and embodied experience of profound grief. I can be an ally to others who are in that process. I know what it feels like, I know how isolating it can be, and I know how long it can take to move through. And I am glad to have that embodied knowing. 

I often teach about the idea of parallel streams related to loss. There is the flowing river of life, where everything just is. Things - including awful, unimaginable things - just happen. We can question and question and drive ourselves deeper into grief and despair - why? why now? what could I have done? what if this or that didn’t happen?

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes we have to question - things like questioning medical care or wrong doing by police, especially if you are black or trans in America, for example.

It is natural, and right and just to seek answers and hold people accountable.

With regard just to grief, at some point maybe we have to let go and simply allow what has happened to be. Because there is no other way. There is no other reality. This is the flow of life. 

It has been my experience that when we let go of questioning, we allow our grief to become “pure;” it is allowed to exist on its own, to flow through in its own way, for us to be completely present with the agonizing experience that is loss of someone we love. This is when we fully enter the second stream, the stream of profound grief, that flows right along side the stream that is the flow of life itself, filled with both anguish and joy unspeakable.

One does not negate the other. Knowing that death is a part of life, that these things happen, does not lessen the experience of grief. And expressing and nurturing our grief does not in any way make us unaware that this is part of life. People have grieved since the beginning of time. We intuitively know how to do this. This grieving too is a part of life.

Each of these streams - the flow of life and grief itself - need to be nurtured and allowed equally and in their own time. They should not be mixed or conflated. I have so often heard spiritually and religiously minded people talk about death as if just because it’s “just a part of life, or “God’s plan,” or that it shouldn’t hurt.

But it does.

And.

There truly is no way out but through. And in that process of moving through, we learn a lot about ourselves and others. And some of those things are really valuable, even if we would not have been willing to pay the price for them. They are ours now.

The artist and musician Nick Cave, in his Red Hand Files writes, “We each have our reserves of sorrow that rise to the surface, provoked by one little thing or another, to remind us we are human and that we love and that we are a part of the great human story that flows along the ancient waterways of our collected and historical griefs. This breaking down is not something from which we need to be saved or cured, but rather it is the toss and tumble of life, and the occasional losing of oneself to the sadness of things is an honoring of life itself.”

As we honor life, we honor death as a part of it, and we honor those who have died before us. In this honoring, we may be able to find these secret gifts, these opportunities for evolution and becoming more of who we are, more of the best of what we might be and become. It’s sacred and brutal work, but work we were meant to do. I am glad to be doing it here, with you.

The Way It Is 

Over and over we break

open, we break and

we break and we open.

For a while, we try to fix

the vessel—as if

to be broken is bad.

As if with glue and tape

and a steady hand we

might bring things to perfect

again. As if they were ever

perfect. As if to be broken is not

also perfect. As if to be open

is not the path toward joy.

The vase that’s been shattered

and cracked will never

hold water. Eventually

it will leak. And at some

point, perhaps, we decide

that we’re done with picking
our flowers anyway, and no

longer need a place to contain them

We watch them grow just

as wildflowers do—unfenced,

unmanaged, blossoming only

when they’re ready—and my god,

how beautiful they are amidst

the mounting pile of shards.

~ Merry Wathola Trommer