11 May 2015

Breaking open

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I have had cause lately to think about grief, and about rebirth. My 24 year old cousin was killed in an accident in November, and when I was in the US in April I went to the ceremony interring him in Arlington National Cemetery (he was a soldier, a first lieutenant, an apache helicopter pilot, and one hell of a fantastic kid). As we walked behind the horse drawn casket and to the graveside, I thought about the rituals we have for working through our grief in all different kinds of ways.

The US Army really understands how to mark this kind of grief. The ritual of it was magnificent in its way, cathartic and powerful. Twenty one gun salute, marching band, taps at the graveside set to the percussion of our tears. James’s funeral in November was another kind of catharsis—more personal, more raw, and perhaps the most perfect funeral I have ever seen (can one say that a funeral for a young man not yet in the prime of his life is perfect? I now think I can: James’s death was horrific, but his funeral was perfect). James’s presence was palpable there in the stories from his friends, his three grieving (but so articulate) siblings, his aunt and uncle. The church was alive with the sobbing of the hundreds of people who were there, but it sparked with our laughter too as we remembered his quirky half smile and outrageous hijinks.

These two ceremonies for James have bookended my wondering about grief and ritual in a more daily way. The image of my aunt and uncle holding hands as they walked behind the casket at Arlington will stay with me always. United by their grief as well as torn apart by it, I watched their love for one another deepen as they moved through the tragedy each parent fears the most. There is some way the enormous loss of my cousin has shone a light for me on what it means to grieve in large and small ways, and what it means to mark it well—and how grieving changes us in some way and brings us together.

And here is what we know about heartbreak: it hurts like hell. It sends us into a dark so black we almost forget what light looks like. We curl up, wounded and howling (or, perhaps worse, wounded and silent). And we know that the pain changes over time, but those changes themselves are variable. Heartbreak can tear us apart and make us smaller. We all have images of those who were ruined by their grief, whose lives fall, Miss Havisham-like, into a cobweb-draped stasis. Or it can bring us together and make us bigger than we were before, more able to connect and feel more deeply, more compassionate to others in their grief, more alive and more able to love.

What makes the difference between these two outcomes of the same event? And what about the other, more common heartbreaks we feel: the loss of a job, of a lover, of an image of ourselves we realize will never emerge?  I have been working this week with a group of leaders in a changing market, trying to help their colleagues mourn the passing of an era when business was easy and plentiful and come into a time when business is hard and confusing. I have been watching the grief of those who lost everything in Nepal, the body bags of Ebola victims in Liberia.  The world is made of hardship of such variation that it’s hard to even know how to deal with it. The scale of heartbreak is hardly relevant to the heartbroken; thinking of someone else’s greater misfortune has never actually cheered me up; it has just made me sadder for all of us (and perhaps a little guilty about feeling so sad for something so trivial as my own personal sadness).

But perhaps what I learned from my trip to cancerland, from the grief of the cancer of others, from the heartbreak of my aunt and uncle and cousins and the ordinary grief of our everyday lives is this: heartbreak peels us open. It shatters the normalcy of our former lives, of our former relationships. It reveals our innermost secrets to ourselves. And beyond the searing pain is a new possibility for how we could love, work, laugh again. Rilke says "It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.  Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing."

In the US, cracks in art works are mended as carefully as possible; we want the broken thing to appear to never have been injured. In Japan, when a crack appears, sometimes the owner fills it with gold; it’s called “wabi-sabi”—the embracing of the flawed or imperfect. Here the broken thing sparkles though its imperfections, because of its imperfections.

It is months—perhaps years—too soon to know whether James’s death will bring beautiful things in the world. And of course none of those things will be as wonderful as his capacity to weave a story I would totally believe until his sly grin gave it away. None of those things will make up for the loss of the children and grandchildren he might have had; none of them will save his comrades in the US Army on their next tour of duty. But James’s friends and comrades and family will live in new ways because he’s gone. We are all changed now.

This week marked the death of the other cousin I’ve lost far too young. Mary Ellen’s death more than 20 years ago changed the course of my life—helping me understand that life is short and uncertain, and that love is the only thing that really matters. It was because Mary Ellen died that we moved to Augusta, and it might well be because Mary Ellen died that we moved to New Zealand. The cracks are horrific, and they are coated with gold.

This week I honour Mary Ellen. I honour James. I honour the pain of my clients in their changing worlds, the pain of those who live with grief that never shows up on the news. I believe that it is heartbreak as much as joy (more than joy?) that connects us, ultimately. We could descend into cobwebby darkness; we could caulk over the cracks so no one notices them. But each of these is a loss of the utility of our grief. It is our scar tissue, far more than our perfection, that allows us to see and love one another. Let us hear “our astonished emotions living” and let us hear the astonished emotions of those around us. Let us paint the heartbreak and craft a golden net that holds us all together as members of the heartbroken human race.


In Blackwater Woods
Mary Oliver
Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies

into pillars



of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,



the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over

the blue shoulders



of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its

name is, is



nameless now.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned



in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side



is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world



you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it



against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it

go,

to let it go.











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