Today I’m wondering if the love we have for a spouse is equal to the grief we feel when they die. Osho says that sadness gives our lives depth, and that the deeper we experience grief, the more happiness we will have, like the branches of a tree symmetrically balancing the extensiveness of its roots. He might also be saying that because of grief, we appreciate more the good things that come to us on their own, and balance is restored. The roots of grief also keep us grounded when we are tempted to think that life is supposed to be completely happy.
Osho’s image is important for those who grieve, up to a point, because to fight back to this place of balance from unending despair is such a relief. It tells us that although our grief is great, so will be our happiness. At a time when we can't imagine ever being happy again, this gives us assurance that we will.
It’s a nice equation, but I'm tired of living proportionally. I want to be all in with life. I don't want to be balanced. I want more happiness than grief, at least 60/40, so that I have a fair chance each day to enjoy life. I don't want to be limited on the happy side of the equation because I haven't suffered enough.
F**k the tree! Okay? Grief broke me, and in being broken I learned how critical it is for those who grieve to have people around who are willing to listen and help as they can.
I need to take risks, and I want to get angry when people who are grieving are being neglected, ostracized, and abused. I want to laugh at inappropriate times if I feel like laughing, and dance when I feel like dancing.
I am going to survive grief not because I am balanced, or because I have hidden strengths that grief has brought out, but because I’m stubborn. If death is going to hit me, then I’m going to hit death back, and hard.
The Personal Paradigm Shift of the Past Perfect
'via Blog this'
'via Blog this'
It’s only now that I am beginning to really come to terms with what losing Lecretia means, and how much she was so foundational to who I’ve become over these past twelve years. With her gone, there is this massive absence, and things that I was so sure of, and that I took for granted, are no longer there. I keep reaching out to latch on to assumptions about life I thought I could be sure of, and find that what I thought was firm and solid ground has given way to an abyss.
All those things that Lecretia meant to me, I am still attached to. They abide in me like hunger and thirst. And when I try and draw sustenance from the same places, out of habit, there’s now nothing. I know that I will need to find things to fulfill those needs somehow – the physical, the mental, the social, the romantic – but I know it’s months or more likely years before that will happen. For now I’ll have to endure this hunger and emptiness and it will always be a feature of who I am. I’ve spoken to a few people who have lost partners and they say similar things. It takes time, and it gets easier, they say, but it never really goes away.
There is this strange sense that I am not mourning often enough, or deeply enough. That the intensity of my grief should be a perfect reflection of the passion I had for my wife. That I have short-changed her memory somehow, ridiculously, by not being utterly inconsolable for weeks on end. But the loss is felt in moments – as sudden pangs or vertiginous stumbles – and then they pass. It’s sorrow but equally a profound sense of unfairness.
And then again:
“… this separation, I suppose, waits for all. I have been thinking of H. and myself as peculiarly unfortunate in being torn apart. But presumably all lovers are.”
The injustice, if there was one, was not the passing itself, which was inevitable, but the timing, which was too soon. I feel for Lecretia’s parents most of all, as although all lovers must inevitably part, children almost always survive their parents, and that didn’t happen this time. And what an extraordinary expression of their love Lecretia was. How great their sense of loss must be.
I am not sure what comes next. I feel unsettled. I think I want to disappear for a while, perhaps visit some of the places that Lecretia had wanted to visit, but I don’t feel like I can until I get Lecretia’s affairs in order, which I have begun to do. I have known people to become reckless and irresponsible with their lives through grief. I don’t feel like that’s going to happen to me. I carry her with me now, and at the moment I feel like I have a duty to honour her memory by being my best self. But I am not out of this process yet, and I think I have some way to go. There is much to do.
In the End, There Is Only Room for Love | Poorna Bell
It has been nearly 30 days since you held the spark of your life between your hands and pressed them shut.
Since then, I have been trying to make sense of the world.
In Hinduism - a religion you wholeheartedly set about getting to know even though I had long lost my faith - we have an 11-day ceremony and a 30-day ceremony.
I've never understood what these were for. But perhaps they are to mark a set of realisations.
By 11 days, I was aware that your death had made me a different person.
Everything looked, smelled and tasted different. People that I had known for years now seemed like strangers in the midst of what I felt, and what I thought they could not possibly know about.
I saw you in everything. I saw you in the sea, imagining you in the shift, turn and swirl of water. I saw you at your graveside, in the freesias you so loved. I saw you in the birds you had encyclopaedic knowledge about, in the double rainbows that lit the sky the day we said goodbye to you.
You were a big, Kiwi man in real life, and yet I saw you in the most delicate of things.
From an essay by Poorna Bell, for her husband:
