On Grief

When my father died of cancer almost nine years ago, it was the catalyst that caused my transition from what Terry Real calls "covert depression" into "overt depression". I began having two-hour panic attacks almost daily, my depression descended into a dark place that caused me to completely lose all sense of myself, and my already problematic addiction spiraled into unregulated substance abuse that had no bounds. The best way I can describe his loss is that it felt like it tore my sense of self apart at a molecular level:

He was my oldest and best friend: A lighthouse, always shining a light, always showing me how to get home in the storms of life. Without him, I was lost.

My experience of grief was like being in a small wooden row boat, lost at sea in a terrible storm. Even when I summoned the strength to try and row that tiny boat, I couldn't see the shore, and I had no idea if my efforts were pushing me away from danger, or toward it. Every wave of grief that crashed over the creaking bow of my little ship of sanity felt like it was sure to either sink me, or finally crack that boat and leave me desperately treading impossible waters.

It's been used a lot, by many people, but I like the wave analogy of grief. At first, the waves are relentless, one after another, and for a while it feels like all we can do is try to survive them. Eventually, we start to row our little boats in between the waves, and even if we don't know what direction to go, it feels like doing something is better than simply waiting for the next wave. On some level, we reach a point where we decide to either get busy living, or get busy dying, so the rowing gives us purpose, even if it does nothing to stop the waves.

And one day, if you keep rowing the boat, you realize that the waves are coming less often, and with less intensity. And also, you have become good at pointing the ship into them at just the right angle, and riding over them.

This is the turning point for grief:

When we stop fighting it, our experience fundamentally changes. We surrender to the waves of grief with a calm determination that allows us to relax, accept whatever they bring, and we know that like the last hundred waves, we will survive this one too.

And then, all of a sudden the grief brings something else. It brings joy. It brings living memories of the wonderful moments that are etched into our minds of the person we lost. It becomes a beautiful testament to the life we no longer get to share, and it keeps the person we lost alive inside us.

The movie Wind River, has a touching scene where a man who has lost his daughter is talking to a friend who also just lost his child, and I think it so eloquently describes the strength of this process that I'd like to share it here with you:

"You can't steer from the pain. If you do, you'll rob yourself… You'll rob yourself of every memory of her. Every last one. From her first step to her last smile."
— Wind River (2017)

For me, the key to this wisdom is:

Let yourself grieve.
Let yourself feel the pain you are already holding.

The more we resist the pain, and hide from it, the worse our experience becomes. The way out is actually through the pain, not around it.

And in this wisdom, is actually something so profound that I want to spend a moment talking about it:

There is pain, and there is suffering, and they are fundamentally different things.

We don't get to choose our pain, but we get to choose how we experience it. This is actually the secret to surviving and even thriving through chronic pain (physical or emotional). If we fight it, if we resist it, if we rage against the universe and scream "why me?", we transform that pain into suffering. Pain is something we can tolerate and live with, but suffering tears us apart slowly. The difference is acceptance.

I think the most beautiful expression of this wisdom, that I have ever heard, was actually said by actor Andrew Garfield about the death of his mother:

"I hope this grief stays with me, because it's all the unexpressed love that I didn't get to tell her."
— Andrew Garfield

So, my hope for you, is that you reach the place where you hope your grief stays with you. I hope you reach the place where you learn to welcome the grief in, and you offer it a seat, and you say to it "Hello again old friend, what do you have to teach me today?".

The first step in this process is letting yourself grieve, and expressing your grief in words, and therapy is an excellent place to do that.

When you are ready, we are here.