Anam Cara

Grief is the experience of finding yourself standing alone in the vacant space with all this torn emotional tissue protruding. In the rhythm of grieving, you learn to gather your given heart back to yourself again. This sore gathering takes time. You need great patience with your slow heart. It takes the heart a long time to unlearn and transfer its old affections. This is a time when you have to swim against the tide of your life. It seems for a while that you are advancing, then the desolation and confusion pull you down, and when you surface again, you seem to be even further from the shore. It is slow making your way back on your own. You feel so many conflicting things. You are angry one minute; the next moment you are just so sad. After a death there are people around you, yet you feel utterly isolated: no one else has the foggiest notion of your loss. No one had what you had, therefore, no one else had lost it. Yet when friends try gently to accompany you, you find yourself pulling back from them, too. In a remarkable collection of modern elegies to mourn the loss of his wife, the Scottish poet Douglas Dunn ends his poem “The Clear Day” with this verse:

I shall sieve through our twenty years, until

I almost reach the sob in the intellect,

The truth that waits for me with its loud grief,

Sensible, commonplace, beyond understanding.

Because your loss is so sore, something within you expects the world to understand. You were singled out. Now you are on your own. Yet life goes on. That makes you angry: sometimes, you look around at your family or the others who have been hit by this loss; it does not seem to have hurt them as much. But you remember that behind the façade they are heartbroken too. You have never experienced anything like this. During grief, the outer landscape of your life is in the grip of a grey weather; every presence feels ghostly. You are out of reach. You have gone way into yourself. Your soul lingers around that inner temple which is empty now save for the sad echo of loss.

Grief Is a Journey That Knows Its Way

Despite its severity, the consolation at a time of grief is that it is a journey. Grief has a structure; it knows the direction and it will take you through. It is amazing how time and again, one of the most consoling factors in experience is that each experience has a sure structure; this is never obvious to us while we are going through something. But when we look back, we will be able to pick out the path that offered itself. Experience always knows its way. And we can afford to trust our souls much more than we realize. The soul is always wiser than the mind, even though we are dependent on the mind to read the soul for us. Though travel is slow on the grief journey, you will move through its grey valley and come out again onto the meadow where light, colour, and promise await to embrace you. The loneliest moment in grief is when you suddenly realize you will never see that person again. This is an awful shock. It is as if all the weeks of sorrow suddenly crystallize in one black bolt of recognition. You really know how total your loss is when you understand that it is permanent. In this life there is no place that you will ever be able to go to meet again the one who has gone. On the journey of grief, this is a milestone. You begin thereafter to make your peace with the shock.

We Grieve for Ourselves

Gradually, you begin to understand more deeply that you are grieving primarily over your own loss. The departed one is gone home and is gathered now in the tranquillity of Divine Belonging. When you realize that it is for yourself that you are grieving, you begin to loosen your sorrowful hold on the departed one.

Part of what has had you holding on so desperately is the fear that if you let go, you would lose that person forever. Now you begin to glimpse the possibilities of being with him or her in a new way. If you loosen the sad grip of grief, a new belonging becomes possible between you. This is one of the most touching forms of belonging in the world: the belonging between us and our loved ones in the unseen world. It is a subtle and invisible belonging for which the crass obviousness of modern culture has no eye. Yet this invisible belonging is one in which so many people participate.

Though the silent weeping of your heart lessens, you get on, more or less, with your life, yet a place is kept within you for the one who is gone. No other will ever be given the key to that door. As years go on, you may not remember the departed every day with your conscious mind. Yet below your surface mind, some part of you is always in the person’s presence. From their side, our friends in the unseen world are always secretly embracing us in their new and bright belonging. Though we may forget them, they can never forget us. Their secret embrace unknowingly shelters and minds us.