Tag Archives: loss

Standing up…

Posted on by
5

Conversation may be the beginning of connection.  Continuing the conversation is a way to deepen connection.  I suppose not every conversation needs to be continued. Maybe some are pretty complete in and of themselves.   But those that bring understanding and growth?  I think we are in desperate need of continuing those.

I wondered which GrowthLines conversations were waiting to be continued.  I wanted to see which posts struck the deepest chord with readers.  I was a little surprised to discover that Dominoes falling, had been viewedDSC_0090 more times than any other. I reread the words looking for clues to their impact.

When the dominoes of life start falling, words have the power to help and to heal.  Words offer understanding.  They give us permission to stumble in our grief.  Words bear witness to what we already know by experience.  That loss will come, over and over again, and will lay us low.  We need those words of understanding, both silent and spoken when we’re swept under waves of loss and grief.

Maybe we also need words that bear witness to what we’re not so certain of.  That we can stand again. That we can pull ourselves upright.  Put one foot in front of the other.  And begin to walk, again.  Choose to sit and speak words of comDSC_1428fort to someone today.  And when they are ready to rise and walk, stand with them and speak words of hope and encouragement.  I know we will fall under the weight of loss.  I believe we can stand again.

“The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.”
― William Hazlitt, Selected Essays, 1778-1830

Leaning in…

Posted on by
10

I was listening to a Hazelden webinar on adolescent suicide.  The presenter talked about the importance of engaging the suicidal teen, encouraging them to talk.  She identified the three most important words to say when you’re the one being told, “Sometimes I feel like killing myself.”  What were the words she thought had such power to connect? “Tell me more.”  Three small words with the potential to change the course of a person’s life.

“Tell me more.”  Three words that invite someone to share their pain and confusion.  Why are those words so often left unspoken?  Perhaps because encouraging someone to hand us their pain may be the right thing to do, but it is rarely the easy thing to do.   In fact the willingness to stand and hold another’s pain often leaves us facing our own discomfort.

“Tell me more.”  I replayed those three words as I went about my day.  I thought about how they fit other situations.  How powerful those words could be with those who grieve.  How in the midst of grief we long for someone to ask us to tell them more about who and what we have lost.  How holding the pain of someone else’s loss feels uncertain and uncomfortable, and so we hold back.

I was still chewing on the benefit and difficulty of “Tell me more”, when my weekly dose of Modern Family came on.  It is Phil Dunphy’s favorite day, leap day.  He has big plans to do something out of the ordinary to celebrate.  But as the day continues, things begin to fall apart.  Phil pulls the two boys, Luke and Manny aside in an attempt to salvage their celebration.  He leans toward them and says in a low, somber voice, “I have a plan.”  The boys just stand there.  Phil adds, “It’s kind of traditional to lean in when someone says they have a plan.”  Both boys immediately lean into the circle.  No hesitation. Focused.

That’s when it came to me.  What Phil Dunphy had to say was important.  And when someone has something important to say, we need to lean in.  To lean in and embrace what is being said, giving the words, the feelings, and the person our presence. Perhaps no territory feels more uncertain and overwhelming than the landscape of grief and loss.  When we find ourselves in the presence of wounded travelers and their story, needing to lean in, our first impulse may be to just stand there.  Sometimes we even step away.

Forty five years ago, John Drakeford wrote a book titled, The Awesome Power of the Listening Ear.  It was a book about the “power of simply listening to others”.  I think Drakeford’s intent was to help us push past discomfort to a place of leaning in.  A place of inviting others to tell us their stories.  What if in the presence of grief and loss, we begin to lean in, and quietly say “Tell me more.”

“Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.” ~ George Eliot

Parting the water…

Posted on by
14

“I fish better with a lit cigar; some people fish better with talent.” ~ Nick Lyons, Bright Rivers, 1977

My dad loved to fish.  I can close my eyes and see him sitting in his boat with a big “stogie” in his mouth and his fishing line in the water, waiting for a bite.  I can smell the pungent cigar smoke and the fishy lake water.  I can hear the water lapping against the side of the boat.  I can feel the hard seat of the boat, and see my dad’s hands letting line out, reeling in, rhythmic whether the action was fast or slow.

At least one of those memories includes a trot line.  We were sitting in the boat, waiting.  I became aware of another fishing boat moving slowly toward us.  They were checking their trot line.  One of the men would reach into the water, pulling the line up out of the water, into the air, to check that hook for fish. Even though he was only checking that hook, I could see other hooks rising out of the water.  At descending heights, all connected by the wire that spanned a section of the lake.

It was a simple and beautiful sight, that line of hooks.  Each rising in its turn out of the water as the fisherman held the one hook he was checking high in the air.  There was the light reflecting off each hook.  The water parting like a small miracle as each hook emerged.  Droplets stretching from each hook until they let go, falling back into the lake.

At some point in the loss experiences of adulthood, I remembered that trot line, and realized how much it was like the presence of grief in our lives.  All those losses put to rest below the surface, pulled up through the waters of our heart by today’s grief.  Grief upon grief, as though this day’s sorrow alone is not enough. And so it goes with grief and loss.  A line connecting past and present.  Pulling other hooks into the air to be held again, felt again, lost again.

Perhaps one of the biggest differences between this side of death and the other, is that death is an event. Living is a process.  A process that changes us through an unpredictable mixture of joy and sorrow.  The process of becoming in this life can be complicated and messy.  Sometimes losses happen too close together and joys seem few and far between.  Isn’t it ironic that part of how we learn to live through loss is that we lost, and did not die.  That our ability to feel the depth of our joy is its contrast to the loss that preceded it.

“If you ain’t got no pain in your life, how would you even know when you was happy.” ~ Black in Cormac McCarthy’s  Sunset Unlimited

a motherless child

Posted on by
25

“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.  Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.  Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home,”.

Reading this post may be like sifting through a pile of scattered thoughts.  A reflection in itself of the fact that losing a parent is an experience that covers the lifespan.  My hope is that you will see it as a continuing conversation, not a final answer.  And that you may find some encouragement and strength for your journey.

The loss of a parent may be one of the broadest experiences of loss.  No stage of life guarantees us that our parent’s death will go unfelt or unmourned.  No stage offers us immunity from feeling that loss, or facing the change it brings.

The younger we are the more our loss may encompass grieving the parent we never knew.  For a child, the death of their parent can mean living with the nagging feeling of having been left.  Not unlike being left on a hiking trail without our guide, before we’re confident of our ability to find our own way.  When one parent dies, a child often loses the other parent to their own grief.  We may feel isolated as we try to protect the other parent from feeling our shared pain.  Sometimes we arrive in adulthood carrying the wounds of childhood losses experienced before we had an older, wiser, more forgiving language.  A language to help us both describe and soothe our pain.

The feeling of being left can come at any age.  As though the color of abandonment is present for each of us, just in different shades based on the time and circumstances.  When my dad’s mother died I recall him saying reflectively, “Now I’m the oldest living member of my family”. There was sadness, resolve, and a touch of uncertainty in his voice.  I was surprised.  There were ways he had lost her long before that moment, to the dementia that swallowed her up one bite at a time.  And even before that when her 13 year son died suddenly from spinal meningitis.  She was forever changed, and at age 11 my dad lost his brother and became the oldest son, bearing the weight of hopes and dreams not yet lived.  It struck me that all of those losses, sudden and progressive, did not protect him from the finality of that moment.  Of knowing that he would never have more of her in this life than had been gathered from his birth up to the time of her death.  And that in the starkest of realities, the buck now stopped with him.

Our experience of loss may also be colored by the gap between who we needed our parent to be and who they actually were.  We can believe that an abusive parent’s death will bring relief and freedom from our pain, only to discover that in being rid of harm we also lost all possibility that the parent we need would someday appear.  Whatever has been left unsaid, the acknowledgement of harm, the “I’m sorry”, the “Please forgive me”, will forever be unspoken, silenced by our parent’s exit.  It can be a devastating and confusing loss.

Words said that can’t be taken back.  Words never said that we wish could be spoken.  Questions never asked.  Choices never explained.  Stories never told.  All these and more are frozen in time for us when a parent dies.  Their weight varies depending on where we are in this marathon. From being parented in infancy through the love hate race of adolescence.  From the renegotiated relay of adulthood to the discomfort of accepting the baton to run this final leg of the race as our parent’s parent.  And if they cross the finish line before us, to know it is ours to grieve the success and failure of their life, ours to allow them to rest in peace in their death.  Ours to learn to run our own race untethered by what is now behind us.

“I am amputated, inconsolable.  My father has died.
Now I must invent him, perhaps fictionalize, mythologize him.
Most of all, I will have to find a way to mourn him.
E. M. Broner, Mornings and Mourning:  A Kaddish Journal

Grief in hiding…

Posted on by
4

We all grieve.  But each in our own way.  Grief as fact is universal.  Grief as experience is personal.  There are common themes, but even those are shaped by our personal touch.  Regardless of your way of grieving, it’s important to remember two things.  Loss may be an event.  Grief is a process.

What we know in theory, sometimes becomes blurry in reality.  We bring our own histories and personalities to this partnership with grief.  We are still at risk of assuming that others grieve like we grieve.  We forget that differences, like our age, or the number of times we have encountered grief, affect how we feel our grief.  Our experience in the dance of loss affects how we show our grief.

Our acquaintance with grief begins in childhood and continues through adolescence.  Friends move away.  We lose pets. Grandparents die.  Painful lessons about life and the passage of time, happening in an order we don’t like, but come to accept as life’s way.  Sometimes loss happens out of order, bringing painful lessons about time cut short.  Sometimes we are children facing the loss of a child, a peer.

I was in junior high school the first time I faced the death of a peer.  He was a year younger than me.  We didn’t go to the same school, or even live in the same town.  We weren’t best friends or extremely close. Perhaps it made a difference that we had become friends on our own.  Our parents didn’t know each other.  Our respective friends didn’t know each other.  I met him during the summer when I visited my grandparents.  We rode horses together, talking about incidentally important teenage topics.  At the end of the summer he stayed in the country, I went back to the city.  And then the news came that he had killed himself, with a shotgun, over a girl.  He left a note.  “She doesn’t love me anymore.”

I traveled the fifty miles, by myself on a Greyhound bus, to attend his funeral at the local high school. The gymnasium was filled with people from the rural community and beyond.  There were junior high and high school students.  Young people facing the loss of a peer, a death out of order.  I was there to pay my respects to a brief friendship, and perhaps to stand with other teenagers as we each found our voice of grief.

I lost and grieved other peers, all too young to die, as I finished adolescence and stepped into young adulthood.  In the years that followed I have sat with grieving children and teenagers as they found their own way through loss that came too soon, to those too young.  What should we take from young grief? Who should we be to the children and teenagers in our lives who are facing overwhelming and traumatic loss?

We’re used to learning from the wisdom of age and experience.  When children grieve we discover there are things to learn and lessons to be reminded of from the wisdom of innocence.  For the sake of the young let’s remember

  • they are not empty human-like containers who are here but devoid of feelings until they reach the magic age of majority at 18.  Our failure to recognize this means we may be insensitive to the ways their life has been disrupted.
  • not displaying emotion doesn’t mean a child isn’t feeling something.  Are we modeling a variety of ways to express feelings?  Are we respectful of their need to be with us, and to have time alone?  We may fail to acknowledge the hole left in their lives if we assume that silence means there is no hole.
  • they are not adults in smaller bodies.  They are not fully equipped to identify, feel, and express the complex range of emotions related to loss.  We may explain away their emotion by referring to their displays of grief as adolescent drama.  Defining their grief as overstated may allow us to hide our own discomfort with grief in understated ways.  Will we risk being uncomfortable to be with them in these raw moments?
  • they will accommodate us, at their own risk, if they believe we can’t handle shared grief.  If the things they need to say, the questions they need to ask “make” us cry or shut down, they will take care of us by keeping their thoughts and their questions to themselves.  We get to help them know it’s okay to cry, okay to be quiet, okay to step outside.  We get to show them how to grieve, even as grief continues to be our teacher.  It’s not our grieving that harms, but our determination to leave it the unnamed presence in our midst, and children to wrestle with it alone and in hiding.

“Sorrow makes us all children again – destroys all differences of intellect.  The wisest know nothing.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson                                    

Best laid plans…

Posted on by
Reply

The GrowthLines blog is about growing up, becoming a complete person.  Growing up is the process of a lifetime, literally.  Our growth often depends on our willingness to make a change.  It seems only fitting that a blog inviting readers to grow, should be willing to change for growth too.  With that in mind, I hope you will consider joining me in thinking out loud about:

  • conversation by photograph – We’re probably all familiar with, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”  Some say the original quote actually referred to “ten thousand words”.  Either way, we know the power of images to speak.  Bloggers have recognized the benefits of purposeful silence in Silent Sundays, and of using photography in lieu of words in Wordless Wednesdays.  I haven’t chosen a standing title.  I may not hold to a single day.  I do plan to post a single photograph on a weekly basis, sometimes accompanied by a quote.  No explanation or commentary.  A photograph standing on its own.  That’s where you come in.  I hope readers will share their thoughts about the voices and stories in the image.  I’m eager to hear the growing conversation that begins in silence, observation, and thought.
  • a broader view – Since the first week of November, the focus has been on grief and loss.  In the days ahead, the GrowthLines blog will take an expanded look at life and growth by thinking about community, relationships, parenting, and self awareness, to name a few.  I hope you will…, join the conversation by sharing your thoughts on posted topics and by suggesting topics for us to talk about.  (Please keep in mind, it’s not personal if a suggested subject doesn’t become a post topic.)
  • layers of loss – because grief is an intricate part of our experience, we will continue to talk about both the pain of loss and the growth that is possible in our seasons of grief.  I appreciate the courageous fellow strugglers who have taken pain in hand and stepped into this important conversation to the benefit of us all.

Watch for picture, and start the conversation.

Dominoes falling

Posted on by
2

In 1975, Bob Speca appeared on the  Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.  He had lined up 5000 dominoes onstage in varying patterns, including a section that spelled out Johnny’s name.  On the count of three, Johnny reached out with a single finger and pushed the first domino over. One after the other they fell until none were left standing.  All because that single first one had been bumped.  Five thousand dominoes falling forever, in a matter of seconds.  It was fascinating to watch them fall, precisely, regularly, each leading to the next one’s fall, with no chance of stopping what had been started.

I think about those falling dominoes a lot.  To me they are a picture of loss and the grief that follows. Those dominoes remind me that our losses rarely happen one at a time.  There’s the loss we recognize, the first domino falling, bumping into the next and the next until we are buried beneath more loss than we believed could come to one person at one time.

Bob Speca’s dominoes weren’t in separate, straight rows.  There were intersections where dominoes fell in several directions at once, fanning out like the spokes of a wheel or weaving back and forth in a braid.  I could anticipate the direction and outcome of some of the falls, but was caught off guard by others.

Such is loss and the grief that follows.  Our losses rarely belong to us alone.  They intersect, weaving our lives and our grief together.  We may take comfort in the fact that someone besides us is feeling the weight of this loss.  We may be angry that others call this loss their own, when we feel sure it is completely ours.  We do our best to prepare for the losses we see coming.  We feel helpless and sometimes conquered by those we couldn’t anticipate.

We could say that this is the end of the story.  That in 1975, all of Bob Speca’s dominoes fell.  That our lives are defined and dictated by loss after loss.  That that’s all there is.  But we would miss the fact that for the last 36 years Bob Speca has been standing dominoes up, creating larger and more intricate patterns even though he knows they will fall.

Such is loss and the power of our own resilience.  To stand up again and again.  To risk stepping back into life.  To seek connection. To open ourselves to relationship.  To do all this, knowing that loss will come again.

“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears. For tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”   ~  Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Learn more about Bob Speca at Ocean City lifeguard is toppling records one domino at a time.

Faces of grief

Posted on by
6

On May 12, 1986, in the early hours before dawn, 19 students and adults from Oregon Episcopal school left the Timberline lodge to climb to the summit of Mt. Hood.  They hoped to watch the sunrise from the top of the mountain.  Six hikers turned back early while the rest continued to climb.A freak spring blizzard moved in when the hikers were about 100 feet from the summit.  A hiking guide and a student turned back in hopes of finding help.  The nine remaining climbers dug into an ice cave for shelter as the storm continued for three days.  Rescuers found the climbers late in the day on May 14. (The Seattle Times, July 25, 1986, Jack Broom and Steve Bovey.)  By the end of the day only two teenagers of the climbers rescued survived.  One made a complete recovery.  The second had both legs amputated. (AROUND THE NATION, May 19, 1986.)

About four years after the tragedy on Mt. Hood, I heard Doug Manning, author of Don’t Take My Grief Away From Me, talk about the loss of a child.  He spoke about the depths of grief for parents and the process of holding on to their child’s life to insure its meaning.  And then he talked about the lives lost, and saved on the mountain.  He had spoken at a conference in Portland shortly after the tragedy.  He talked about those who died, and about the young man, 16, who survived, thanks to the amputation of both his legs.  He spoke about a hidden face of grief when he said:

“We’re going to have a hard time letting this young man grieve the loss of his feet.  We’re going to tell him how lucky he is that he survived.  But no matter how lucky he is, he’s still going to miss his feet.”

As if the grief of death is not enough, we are faced with the grief of what was lost in surviving. Sometimes the mere fact that we survived becomes our loss, our shame.  That for no apparent reason someone died, and we did not.  We bury those losses inside, keeping them silent because they are without merit compared to someone else’s.

The loss of a home, or a job would never compare to the loss of a loved one.  But what if loss isn’t about comparison, but connection?  What if by being present for each other in all our layers of loss, we can begin to understand our relationship with grief.  What if the loss of lesser things teaches us that grief of any size is hard, and that we can survive it?  Grief has many faces.  We may find the strength and comfort of healing as we learn to see them all.

The language of loss

Posted on by
5

There are a handful of books in my library that I decided to buy before I knew much about the contents, because the title was intriguing.  One of those is Steve DeShazer’s Words Were Originally Magic.  I thought of the title again when I decided to write about “the language of loss”.  I discovered that DeShazer’s title was inspired by these words.

“Words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power. By words one person can make another blissfully happy or drive him to despair.”     Sigmund Freud

I don’t know that the language of loss is magical, but it is powerful.  It has the power to heal, to offer respite, to comfort.  It also has the power to confuse, to limit, and at its worst to harm.  Language is at the center of the things we tell ourselves, how we think out loud with others, how we experience this life. The words and phrases we use are like the weft and warp on a loom that determine the pattern and texture of the fabric.  I wonder how the fabric of our grief might look if we wove it with a different language.  Would it comfort us to know that our experience and expression of grief is not a sign of craziness, but a richly woven fabric of our common journey?

I have sat with many people over the years in moments of grief, but I can only speak with certainty from my own.  I can’t say “closure” or “saying good-bye” are a help to me if they mean I will come to an end of grief, that I will be done with who I lost.  If my job in grieving is to finish, and to finish means to end the relationship,…well, I’m going to avoid that finish line at all costs.  I have no intention of being done with those I’ve lost.  But what if our relationships are not bound by time and space.  What if our grief is not about the end of relationship, but about how relationships change when death comes.

In the movie Shenandoah, Charlie Anderson, played by Jimmy Stewart, is a widower trying to keep family and home together in the midst of the Civil War.  Charlie often visits the family gravesite to talk with his dead wife Martha.  He tells her about the children and the war.  He asks her questions and shares his thoughts.  These private, intimate moments between Charlie and Martha assure us that our relationships continue beyond death.  In the midst of the sadness and pain of loss, Charlie Anderson also finds comfort and the strength to continue.  Even in death, Martha remains his partner for the journey.

When we don’t talk about death, we are at risk of believing that our experience of death is not only unique, but may be evidence that we’re crazy.  We may worry that our ongoing involvement with our loved one means we’re “stuck” in our grief.  We may also worry about what it means when some of our memory seems to be slipping away.  Sometimes we can remember details of a person’s hands, can hear their voice, can see them moving, but their face begins to fade.  I don’t know what it means that we can often call to mind so much about someone we love, while their face becomes a blurry, veiled image.  If our eyes are windows to our soul, perhaps a face that fades in our mind is a reminder that our relationship is no longer defined by a physical body, but now fills the universe.

If we are going to discuss death, we need language.  But experiencing loss and death is not the same thing as the language we use to describe it.  Language can be concrete and limiting.  Loss continues to remind us that it will not be bound by a word.  That it is often gray and messy.  Don’t be afraid of the language of loss.  It’s the willingness to speak our loss into words that creates a language of possibility rather than limitation.

“We’re fascinated by the words–but where we meet is in the silence behind them”
                                                                                                                 -Ram Dass