July 2024
I swim in the sea practically daily – yes, even in winter – and I get to watch the rhythm of the waves, the surge, the fluctuations of swell, in preparation for entering the water. After all I don’t want to get rolled over by entering in the middle of crashing waves. I watch and wait, and then enter. There are good moments, and not so good ones.
Everything is in process, nothing happens in any other way. We live, we die and although we can look back at our life and decide to discern stages, while we are living everything is in process. Such a realization is quite liberating.
Over my lifetime, quite a number of friends, and family have died. These are people I have cherished. These are those I have learned much from; learned how to be empathic, generous, loving, as they were to me. Some I was pre-warned of their coming death, through dreams and careful observation of skin tone, lightness of being, and the like. A cello teacher and friend had stomach cancer and was dying from it, but on the last day of me seeing him alive, he sat down and played the cello finally free of his old desire for correctness. He played like a glorious angel and in that moment I saw love in all its playful joy.
When my cellist friend died, I remembered (and remember still) his liberated and liberating music making. There was no grief, per se, just a profound sense that death is not dark and miserable; it can be joyful.
I used to volunteer at a palliative care unit here in Perth in the late 90s and there I witnessed several passings. One woman called me in to be with her. She wanted me to give her reiki. Now it turned out that I didn’t know what reiki actually was but I knew it was a healing. I knew I didn’t have a choice, I had to conjure up something or other healingwise, and so I did. In this process, I laid my hands not on her body itself, but hovering above. I could feel a strong energetic pull and “saw” a golden light emanating from this woman, and that’s what I entered into. That night she died, peacefully.
Life is process. Like wave over wave of lives, intermingling, coming apart, we meet and depart. Death can come after a long life, like my father who died nearly 101, and suddenly, in a crib. It comes in utero, it comes at birth, it comes crossing the road, it comes after a long protracted illness, it comes in war, in murder, in suicide, it comes …. It’s inevitable.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the psychiatrist, was instrumental in changing how much of the world viewed death and introduced to us how the grieving process might proceed. Most of us are familiar with the stage theory of this process, but few realize that Kubler-Ross didn’t originally develop these stages to explain what people go through when they lose a loved one. She actually developed them to describe what patients go through as they come to terms with their terminal illness. The stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance were only later applied to grieving friends and families who seemed to go through a similar process after the loss of their loved ones.
It's unfortunate that the stage theory of grief has so much traction, because – in some quarters – not adhering to these stages is seen as pathological.
Grief at the loss of a loved one can follow any course. Life, with all its richness of emotions, is process. A thanatologist friend and counselling colleague of mine uses the sign of infinite to illustrate this process. We can feel sad, happy, depressed, whatever, whenever. We are not bound to any stage theory at all. Feelings of loss, and I feel them sometimes very strongly, can take us up and surge through us, to another place, and that’s alright. Feelings of stuckness are more problematic, but that too can pass. This is when talking about it with a trusted person is all that is required.
