Grief by Lucky

A few evenings ago, I was sitting with a group and we were exploring the many losses we have experienced. Fear and sadness were palpable in the room. It dawned on me as the conversation went on that grief was a major part of what we were experiencing. Grief seemed to me to be a piece of all of the stories of loss and all the fears of getting older. Life is changing us. We are being reduced. This is a painful, uncertain process. Even though there are those amongst us who accept being reduced and see it as a natural gift and expression of Life, the process is unpredictable and filled with uncertainty. I didn’t know it then, but the sharing of these losses and this grief set me thinking and has brought me to this point.

I think grief is an essential component of facing the Mystery that seems to underlie all of existence. I am beginning to realize that I am not really letting the unknown into my life if I am not living with grief. This is not a moral imperative. It is an experience. I exist; I know not why. I have a life; I wonder about its purpose. I feel things, sometimes without even a sense of what or why. I care, and I can never be sure of where caring is going to take me. I get to live and die with that reality. Essentially I’m adrift in a big ocean of unknowing. Sometimes this thrills me; sometimes I’m overwhelmed.

In these recent moments, I’m feeling grief. And more specifically, I’m feeling how grief is always with me and always will be. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel sad or depressed about this. This is a humbling realization. It brings home to me, once again, the recognition I have about my existence. This life I hold so dear is really a product of something I cannot fathom. I am old enough now that I can let in that I don’t know as much as I think I do. That means I get to live with Mystery surrounding me in everything I do and every encounter I have.

Mystery thrills and grieves me. What can I possibly say to a friend who is sensing in her husband’s memory loss that she is losing him?  I care about what she is feeling, but I don’t really know how to respond. I know she has already lost him. I know he never was hers’ to begin with. I know all of this is breaking her heart. I know I respect her because somewhere inside her knows this and has chosen to love him anyway. The whole thing unfolds, and I feel grief as a part of how it all touches me with so much poignancy and terrible beauty.

Grief is seeping into my daily awareness. I am used to talking about having grief days as if they indicated something of the tragi-comedic quality of my disabled existence. Little did I know that grief days were going to become grief years, and that my disabled state was related to the human condition. Grief is just a part of my day-to-day happiness about the privilege of my life.

Am I big enough to contain that much complexity? I don’t know. But the Universe seems to be. Grieving puts me in touch with some enormity, which my life seems to serve. I am honored as I am shaking. Grief isn’t sadness about being here in the vale of tears. It is my assent, my willingness to lean into it all, constructed so paradoxically, and to be torn open by its magnificence.

I am Lucky because this realization is slowly descending upon me and not because of all the goodies that were shoveled my way when I was torn apart. Life asks a whole lot from us. Humankind sits in a very interesting place in Creation. I don’t know if we have what it takes to be here long but wow, what an incredible grace period we are in! I get to live my share of it out. And I get to be immersed in the daily torturous/enlightening drama of it — at least as much as I can bear.

I feel grief. It helped me better understand when I heard that the Mayans had only one word for grief and praise. It took awhile for me to begin to grasp their experience.  I had to go through all my cultural and personal assumptions about the poverty of their language, or on the other end of the spectrum, my assumptions about the spiritual superiority of their indigenous ways. I finally got, that grief and praise were both the same passionate exclamation (!) that comes when one feels the enormous complex beauty of this multi-layered existence.

My soul is indigenous to this existence. My homeland is this earth. My family is composed of all the beings who live now, or who have ever lived. I am linked with this earth and each and every one through the amazing grief that presses my heart to take more of the whole thing in.

For a little while I grieve —

I give up my happy, confused,

pained and grateful tears.

I am so lucky!