When You’re Falling, Dive

Driving past the church by my mom’s house tonight, I noticed the parking lot was unusually full for a Tuesday evening.  Then I saw a hearse pulled up in front and realized they were having a funeral service.  I don’t know the circumstances of course, but I felt a pang of empathy in my chest for the people who had lost someone right before Christmas.  There’s no good time to lose someone you love, but I imagine it to be more difficult at this time of year.

I’ve been thinking lately about grief, loss and recovery and how with each loss, it’s possible for us to become stronger and more able to recover.  Once we figure out the process, “muscle memory” kicks in and we can find our mode for healing more quickly each time.  I’ve been thinking about these things in part because I recently had to let go of someone for whom I care deeply.  Before you feel too bad for me, let me say up front that this person is still certainly alive and fine.  But for now, the relationship had to come to an end.  I think it’s probably the most “grown up” decision I’ve ever made and it’s one that tells me I really have learned from past mistakes.  It’s good to know that can still happen.

Another reason grief has been on my mind is a bit more serious.  A friend of mine lost a family member to suicide in September.  The family member was a young man and the loss has hit my friend harder than other losses she’s experienced in her life.  But as we were talking about it, she said that the process of grieving is fascinating to her and I could absolutely relate.  When something like that happens…maybe especially with a sudden and unexpected death, in my experience there’s some part of you that becomes the observer.  We feel the pain, but we also watch ourselves as if from the outside.  I’m sure not everyone experiences this, but I’m guessing it might be fairly common.  It seems like a coping mechanism that kicks in—our brain’s way of mitigating unbearable pain.  I wonder if this kind of bifurcation happens to soldiers in the field when they have a job to do, but are also seeing and experiencing things so awful that they can’t really take them all in?

I don’t really mean for this to be a sad post.  Actually, what I wanted to talk about was the other side of grief.  If you’ve been through a deep loss, you might have also experienced the beauty of coming out the other side.  There’s something amazing—and again, for lack of any better word—beautiful about our ability to heal.  To use a well-worn, but true analogy – grief can come at you like waves washing into shore.  In the immediate aftermath of a loss, the waves are unrelenting and can make you feel as if you’re drowning, unable to catch your breath.  Over time, as the storm subsides, those tides still come in with some regularity.  Then there will come a time when you notice you haven’t cried for maybe a whole day, but even as you realize it the wave of grief will come again and overwhelm you as if it had been saving up extra power to make up for the temporary reprieve.  Then it subsides again.  And this, this moment in the aftermath of a hard cry, when maybe moments ago you felt as if you could take no more…in this moment you might begin to see a ray of light over the horizon.  That moment is the one of the gifts of grief. 

I don’t know if I read it somewhere (which is totally possible, since I’ve read a lot about grief) but—switching analogies on you for a moment—I call that moment “the bounce”.  When you were a kid, did you have one of those little “super balls” – the rubber bouncy balls?  If you throw one of those at the floor from even a couple feet up, it will rebound so hard it might even hit the ceiling.  While doing the hard work of grieving, “the bounce” is the rebound that sometimes happens where you experience what seems like almost inappropriate happiness right after your worst low.  It’s one of the many reasons that working through grief rather than “stuffing it down” is a good idea and so worth it.  We have built in mechanisms for recovery and it’s a process that can’t really be skipped.  When we don’t take time to honor our losses as they happen, those feeling don’t go away.  They’ll come out eventually and maybe not in a way you want them to.  In my experience, it’s so much better to feel what you feel when you’re feeling it.

In my life, I’m sorry to say, I’ve had four major heart-breaks and I would group those together with loosing my Dad as the handful of things I wish hadn’t happened.  Until the day my Dad died, I never thought he would.  He was everything to me.  But those things did happen and since I couldn’t change the facts, the best I could do is eventually take something positive from the experiences.  I actually do not believe that things happen for a reason.  But I do believe that we can take the bad things that happen and pull good from them if we set out to do so.  The alternative is just unbearable and since we have a choice, always, in how we respond to everything in our lives—why not choose that path of growth?  It’s also the path that leads us back to happiness.

Because I’ve experienced the end of romantic relationships, now I really know how to heal.  It’s maybe sad that I’ve had to recover from a broken heart so many times, but because it’s happened over and over – I now have faith that good things are still to come.   The first time someone I love left, I seriously and deeply believed that was IT for my happiness—that there would never be anyone I could love like that again.  But guess what?  (I bet you know the answer to this.)  I did love again.  And when that relationship ended, I thought surely…that would really be it.  Then love came again.  Now, like having faith that the sun will rise, I have faith that although I can’t see it right now, love will come again.  And that, my friends, is an awesome feeling to have.  That is yet another gift of grief.  When you’ve been under water and have found your way back to the light and air, you start to trust that it will be possible again.  So the next time you have a dark night of the soul, it’s not quite as dark as before.  It doesn’t last quite as long as before.  The process isn’t as hard as before.  You can find the surface, and…you know how to help others heal too.  That’s really beautiful and maybe the best gift of grief.

So, now I’m going to school to become a counselor.  I want to take what life has given me and figure out how to use it to help others.  When my Dad died, I found a counselor to talk to.  I had never been dropped so far down so quickly and had no way of figuring out which way was up.  Even the process of showing up at the counselor’s office was hard.  Knowing I wouldn’t be there, but for that terrible life-changing loss.  But it was also good.  A time set aside every week to do nothing but let the grief roll in while sitting in the presence of a guide, safe even while being tumbled in the surf.  Since I couldn’t bring my Dad back, the only way out was through. 

I miss my Dad a lot at Christmas.  And I miss the friend I had to let go.  But I just completed another semester of school—another step closer to becoming a professional guide to people who find themselves struggling and stuck.  That’s one more gift I can add to the list of good things that came from terrible experiences – a direction in life I never anticipated.

You just never know what the tide will bring.

xo ~ k