The lessons of grief and death
Happy October Dear Ones!
I absolutely adore October-December, they are without a doubt my favorite months. I was just listening to a deeply moving and timely podcast, as I prepare to set up my Samhain ancestor altar, about communing with the dead. This conversation between Perdita Finn and Kimberly Ann Johnson highlighted and helped me remember so many beautiful things I have learned in my apprenticeship with grief, some things which I feel called to share.
As some of you may know, October 19th 2019 my best friend and soul mate died suddenly of a fentanyl overdose. Our relationship was complex, enriching, beautiful, dysfunctional and painful- and never the less- he was my human everyday for the 15 years of our relationship, so his death obliterated me.
This October is the first time in 4 years that I am approaching this anniversary with reverence and gratitude rather than the heaviness of sorrow that literally brings you to your knees.
What I am REMEMBERING deeply this time of year is that the grief that comes with loss is always worth the love.
I find myself saying “I would do it all again.”
And I find myself KNOWING that I will have to, someday. My husband could die before me. My beloved fur baby will die. My parents will die. Everyone and everything, even the oceans and forests, will die.
And knowing the depth of the pain that a loss so near and dear brings does not scare me away from loving, but instead invites me to love even more ferociously.
I don’t fear the grief that will surely come again, over and over, but instead welcome it’s heart-wrenching lessons.
Because the love is always worth the grief.
I read a poem recently, I’ll include it below, that speaks to loss and death offering us this golden cup, and it will take us a long time to learn how to drink from this golden cup, but we will learn, and we will see it as a gift.
The gift of grief is a presence like you’ve never known before.
The gift of grief is knowing that relationships don’t end when one person dies, but sometimes, they really just begin.
The gift of grief is knowing that everything is just coming and going, over and over again. Reincarnation becomes less abstract when you hold dirt and realize it is the bodies of the long dead in your hand.
The gift of grief is a willingness to love boundlessly, endlessly- knowing that even after death, love lives on.
The gift of grief is the willingness to feel the extremes of humanity, to hold the weight of paradox, to hold the complexities of what it is to love and to be human.
After many years in the underworld, starting even before my best friends death, I have arrived in a place of love.
Not always joy or blinding light. But love.
And resilience. Definitely resilience.
And to be here, knowing what it took to get here, I treasure it with all of my being.
I sip from the golden cup that I earned in my apprenticeship with sorrow
And now, today, I also appreciate that love and joy and contentment can also be tools of growth and evolution. We don’t need to constantly do shadow work or trauma healing to be better- pleasure and simplicity are as- if not more- powerful.
But to love fully after your heart has been hollowed by loss, that is a gift of this human life I pray we will all, sadly and joyfully, embrace.
I know many people who honor an anniversary of a loved ones death in October and November (isn’t it interesting how so many people seem to die in Autumn) and so if that is you, know that my heart is with you in your grief.
May you find comfort in knowing your dead beloved is with you always, supporting you and loving you. Reach out to them. Ask them for something. Offer them your gratitude.