Marina and Nick (not their real names) came to my support group at hospice every week for several months after their three-month-old baby died of a severe birth defect. Although Nick was philosophical about the loss, he was able to feel and express his grief each week during the sessions, which he said was helpful in coming to an acceptance. Marina’s process was different. She seemed perpetually angry— “It shouldn’t have happened. We did everything right.” She compared herself to friends who had healthy babies and became even more angry.
One Wednesday evening during the check-in process at the beginning of the session, Marina began crying uncontrollably. The group was silent. Everyone understood the depth of her grief and could relate to her devastating loss. They sensed she had finally broken through her anger. Expressing her emotions with the silent support of those who truly understood her sorrow was profoundly healing. After several minutes, the crying stopped abruptly. Marina announced, “I guess I’m done.” She looked surprised.
She later reported this experience had been a turning point in her grief process. She said that before that experience, she had felt the well of grief was so deep there would be no end to the tears, so she avoided them with her anger. She now saw her emotions were like weather—there was a beginning and an end. She began to trust she could weather the storms of grief that came and went—they didn’t destroy her. She saw that she always eventually came back to center. Marina continued to grieve the loss of baby Katrina, but she no longer feared the process. She no longer resisted the emotions that came up suddenly and just as suddenly disappeared. She still felt angry at times but she was no longer stuck in anger with no space for the other emotions of grief.
As counselors at hospice, we advised our clients that the nature of grief is to come in waves and to allow the waves to wash over them. Sometimes, like Marina, we find these waves overpower our resisting system, and we have no choice but to surrender to them. And in that surrender, there is a sense of peace and relief that comes with dropping our resistance to the inevitable. It takes energy to resist ‘what is.’
Many clients shared with me that they had never felt so alive as when they had experienced a loss. I could relate. When my dad died, I was surprised to feel a heightened sense of connection and a depth of feeling I hadn’t experienced before. Loss invites us to release our resistance to life and allow Nature to take over. It invites us to surrender the ego, to become one with life. In resisting ‘what is,’ we are resisting our lives. The sages tell us we are the stillness at the center of the vibration between two opposite poles—gain and loss, pleasure and pain. Our lives will always oscillate between these poles, but we are not the continual movement.
Surrender is an unexpected gift of grief and loss. And I have also observed this surrender in hospice patients when they accept there is nothing more to be done to keep the body going. We humans seem to require being faced with dire circumstances before we can learn the deepest lessons of life. The purpose of the spiritual path is to help us face the inevitable challenges on our life journey and give us the opportunity to evolve into greater freedom. And maybe we don’t need to wait until our final breath.
We may never be confronted with a loss as devastating as Marina’s and Nick’s, but we all encounter ups and downs in our lives, and we will all face the ultimate loss—our own mortality. Can we learn to allow life, with all its twists and turns, to be as it is? Can we learn to flow with what is? Can we learn to live in alignment with Nature and to see we are an intrinsic part of Her perfect design? Even our resistance is an aspect of Nature’s perfection.
Consider This: Connect to the stillness at the center of the ups and downs of your life. Recognize you are that stillness.
