On Grief and Healing

I’ve put off writing this blog post because I suspect it will make some people angry and make others feel threatened because it challenges the way they have defined themselves over the years. But I feel compelled to share it with you now, so here goes.

Everyone suffers loss at some point. Sooner or later, someone you love dies. That is a painful, unavoidable fact of life. What I find every bit as painful as the loss itself is watching the people I love - the ones who are still living - refuse to heal from such a loss.

I bet you know someone who suffered from the death of a loved one, perhaps many years ago, but who lives as if that person died just yesterday. They are tormented by fresh grief every morning when they wake. They just can’t heal. Perhaps they even appear to work at keeping that grief alive, focusing on it regularly to keep it fresh, prodding at it the way we poke our tongue at a rotting tooth just to make sure it still hurts.

Before you start steaming and wondering who the hell I am to say such things, let me share one thing with you. My daughter Anna died in my arms in June 1997, three months before her sixth birthday. I know grief.

I know grief so great it feels like you can’t breathe, then you realize you have no choice but to go on breathing, which is even worse. I know grief so great you wish you could die, but know you can’t. I know the special kind of grief called survivor guilt, which says that if anyone should have died, it should have been me, not her. We’re not supposed to outlive our children.

I have a clue.

And I’m not saying anyone, ever, should just get over it. But healing needs to happen. It may take years, but it can happen. It should happen.

It can happen only if you don’t keep tearing at the wound, ripping the scab off, refusing to let it heal.

And it’s not disrespectful to their memory to heal. I promise.

I remember counting the days…days until the end of the year Anna died. Days until the first anniversary of her death, her next birthday, Christmas. I remember learning to function again, finding normal in life one tiny piece at a time when it felt like nothing would ever be normal again.

About five years after she died, her birthday came and I didn’t need to cry. A few years after that, her birthday passed and I didn’t realize it until the next day. Then the anniversary of her death passed and I missed it.

I was healing.

I will admit, I glanced around furtively to see if anyone would criticize me for daring to move on. There is intense pressure in our culture to define ourselves by our wounds. We name ourselves by them: adult child of an alcoholic; incest victim; angel mother. It’s a powerful force that requires us to look always to the past, never to the future.

That force disturbed me; it’s a sick society that makes someone out to be a bad person for daring to heal.

But I decided to do what was best for me, for my mental and physical health, regardless of what anyone else thought. I decided to heal, to move on. Because only when you move past the grief can you truly appreciate the time you had with that person. Only then can your heart open enough that you know, deeply, what a blessing they were in your life. Until then, all you can feel is the pain because that’s what your heart is filled with. Believe me, I know.

I turned to mythology, the archetypal symbols of life writ large on the human psyche, to help me find my way along a path no one wanted me to take. I chose one archetype in particular and took it to heart.

The image of the dying-and-reborn god is a powerful one that can help us move through hard times. Whether you look to Jesus, Odin, Dionysus, Adonis or Osiris, the promise of resurrection remains. We are all wounded nigh unto death yet, if we allow ourselves to do so, we can live again. The sun rises in the morning, the barley sprouts anew, we breathe in again after we exhale. Every moment is a rebirth if you let it be so.

I cannot imagine my sweet Anna saying to me, “Yes, Mommy, you should always mourn me and never recover. Always be sad. Build your life around your grief and let it define you so it eats away at you until you die.” She would never wish that. What I can hear her saying, very clearly, is this:

“We will always love each other. Let that be enough.”

Are they real?

Are they real?

That’s the question I’ve been asked over the years by all sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons. It refers to the deities I revere and love. (I don’t worship anything in the traditional Judeo-Christian sense, but that’s another post.) The question is, are All-Father and Great Mother, Freyr and Freya, Stag Lord and Oak Lady real?

It’s a good question, one I’m not sure I can answer. I believe they’re real the same way a Christian believes God is real, the same way a Hindu believes Ganesh is real, the same way a quantum physicist believes quarks are real. None of us has actual proof of any of these things; they’ve never been directly observed, measured or photographed. Yet we have faith that they exist and that they affect the world in various ways.

Over the years I’ve considered the possibility that some of my deities might be psychological side effects of the abuse I endured as a child. I first became aware of All-Father and Great Mother when I was two or three years old, during one of the many long days in which my mother locked me in a windowless laundry room from the time my father left for work in the morning until minutes before he got home in the evening. And yes, All-Father and Great Mother are the names I knew them by, even then.

Of course I wanted loving parents who didn’t do terrible things to me and then lie to everyone about what they had done. So maybe All-Father and Great Mother are projections of my own subconscious in grand Jungian fashion, a way for me to comfort myself. I have to admit that as a possibility.

As a young adult I encountered Freyr and Freya, first in fiction (Diana Paxson’s Brisingamen is a great read, if somewhat dated now) and then in ritual with pagan friends. Their energy was familiar yet challenging; I fell madly in love with them the first time they were invoked and continued to work with them from that point on. Was I induced to believe in a fantasy thanks to the powerful psychological elements of a well-constructed ritual? It’s possible.

Then, just a couple years ago yet another pair of deities made themselves known in my life. I was hip-deep in genealogy, digging into my family history and being drawn ever more strongly toward northern Britain. During the day I filled in the blanks in my Family Tree Maker software; at night I dreamed of Castlerigg stone circle and the people who lived there five thousand years ago. Especially, I dreamed of a woman whose ashes were buried in the ground in front of one of the stones. And I dreamed of her gods, the gods of the grandmother of all my grandmothers, the gods of my blood, my bone, my DNA. The Stag Lord and the Oak Lady provided the meat and mast on which my ancestors survived. At least, that’s how they thought of it. It has come to be how I think of it, too.

So am I imagining all this? Am I living in a fantasy world in which deities that don’t really exist appear to hang out around me and affect my life? Are they real, by any definition of the word? Does it even matter whether or not they are?

Ultimately, no, it doesn’t matter. And the reason it doesn’t matter has nothing to do with the strength of my faith or any other religious-type blather. It has to do with one simple, powerful truth: They make my life better.

Now, most of us (at least, those who aren’t nutcase fundamentalists) tend to think that it doesn’t matter exactly what a person believes as long as their beliefs make them a better person. I think my deities do that, but I know they have done something even more important: They enabled me to survive.

They saw me through years of abuse from which I emerged relatively functional; that’s a miracle right there. They gave me the strength to endure nearly six years as the mother of a profoundly disabled child, and fight for her needs and rights every moment along the way. They helped me survive the unfathomable grief of her death and put me on track to finding meaning in life again without her.

They’re with me when I wake up in the morning and when I go to bed at night. They soften my dreams, sharpen my ambitions and remind me to pay attention to what’s really important.

Whether they are figments of an overactive imagination, protective archetypal constructs generated by a damaged psyche or truly ancient energies and entities, they get the job done.

Are they real? The ultimate answer is, it doesn't matter.

What I Learned Down on the Farm

Most of my friends know how girly I am (swirly skirts, jewelry, makeup, perfume) but they also know I like to be hip-deep in the garden and am perfectly capable of repairing a fence or building a cold frame. I’m definitely not allergic to dirt or hard work. This combination confuses people, sometimes.

Over the holidays I did a lot of reflection about how I came to be the person I am now, and I realized something: Though I officially grew up in darkest suburbia with my parents and sister, I learned my life values from my grandparents in the time I spent on their farm.

How much time was that? If it wasn’t a school day, I was there. As a family we spent weekends and school holidays at the farm. My mother sent me out there for long stretches during the summer as well. (She once even tried to give me away to my grandmother, after my sister was born and Mom decided she liked the new child better. Grandmother declined; that’s the only time in my life I ever heard her raise her voice to anyone.)

A small family farm is hard work with little room for frills or foolishness, though there was usually time for play (I was a kid, after all). I spent my days wearing blue jeans and covered in dirt, hay and manure. From my grandparents, especially my grandmother, I learned most of the values that have carried me through life. Those values helped me get through all sorts of things that, at the time, I didn’t believe I could survive.

This blog post is dedicated to my maternal grandmother, Noreen Crews, one of the wisest people I’ve ever known. She passed away a few years back but her common-sense approach to life, and her unconditional love, still live on in me.

In all the time I spent with her, all the dumb things I did, she never framed any experience I had with, “And the moral is…” In fact, she rarely talked about lessons learned at all. She simply lived her values every day and encouraged me to do the same.

I’ve collected up a few of the things I learned on the farm, to share with you. Perhaps you might find them useful, too.

-You have sense. Use it.

-Everyone has limitations; some are just more obvious than others. Don’t let your limitations define you and never use them as an excuse, only as an explanation.

-The difference between people and trash is not what you have but how well you take care of it.

-Don’t stand there waiting for someone to tell you what to do. Figure out what needs doing and do it.

-Assume you’re capable of doing (or learning to do) whatever needs doing until proven otherwise.

-If you choose to have children, do not behave as if they are a nuisance, a bother or something to escape from. You chose to have them. You are an adult. Act like it.

-If you say you’ll do something, do it. Your word is your bond.

-Dream all you want but take care of the real-world stuff first.

I wouldn’t be here today - literally - if it weren’t for the values Grandmother taught me. The best tribute I can give her is to share those values with my own daughter, and be thankful for the time I spent on the farm.