In Matt Haig’s lovely book The Life Impossible, a fictional treatise about grief and redemption, 72-year-old Grace goes to Ibiza on a quest. Broken down from decades of loss and anguish, she’s ceased to feel anything at all. Still stuck in the morass that replays her 11-year-old son’s fatal bike accident some 40 years early, Grace constantly returns to sorrow’s intensity, ever set off by images that remind her of her son. At one point, she sees a red bicycle flung carelessly roadside.
“One of the main problems of the world was the continued existence of red bicycles,” she laments. Calling herself an anhedonic (that is: someone who’s nearly numb to the core emotionally, spiritually and physically), Grace has simply been going through the motions of life … existing — but just barely — for many years. When Grace serendipitously inherits a house in Ibiza, it’s a call to action, even if that just means going to a place she’s never been before all alone. One step at a time — or as they say on the Camino Santiago trek “paso a paso,” a phrase that metaphorically signals that this instantaneous action is all we have — just the present time, just the journey, not the destination.
It has been months since the July 4th floods, and I still have nightmares. I wasn’t there physically, but like everybody else in Central Texas, I felt the disaster’s horrors and resulting tragic loss as a visceral gut punch. As a community, we’ve grieved together, something wildly unexpected in today’s divisive times. Part of the reason might be that we’ve all been along the Guadalupe River on a picnic or taken our kids to one of the waterside camps. Perhaps we swam in the gentle waters on a bygone Fourth of July, the cooling freshness still locked in our memories. Many of us knew a victim, or at least knew someone who did. But, I think the real cause of our communal heartbreak — and eventual communal healing — is something the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called “metaphysical oneness,” essentially a deep rooted, unshakeable empathy that hails from a subconscious sense that we are all part of one singular whole, that we are all interconnected. When one suffers, we all do.
I’m not an expert on grief, but I know it’s our natural response to loss. Not just humans, but even animals can feel it. Abundant with seemingly free-falling and wildly turbulent, fluctuating emotions, grief aches. It’s palpable pain, which affects us physically, fractures us emotionally and turns us hollow deep in our core. When someone we care about dies, we can become like Grace, anhedonic — almost dead ourselves. Jamie Anderson’s oft-shared quote, “Grief is love with no place to go” resonates for many. While it doesn’t help us feel better, it does explain what’s happening. This trove of love you safeguarded for your beloved now feels stuck inside you: a lump in your throat, a heaviness in your heart. But that’s not all.
Not only are you missing your loved one, your whole world has been slammed upside down, your future fantasies erased and demolished, your very definition of yourself as a mother, father, sister, partner, co-worker etc. now must be redefined. There’s a domino effect with each death that shifts the world into cacophony and chaos.
In “The Life Impossible,” Grace observes: “There are two kinds of ghosts that torment you when a young person dies. The ghost of who they were, and the ghosts of who they could have been.”
I’d argue that when we lose someone central to our lives, we become a ghost ourselves. A huge void within us simply cannot be filled. Add in that, every death we experience seems to remind us of all the other deaths that came before it, and that one becomes a multitude. It’s achingly difficult to endure.
The death of a loved one marks the end of an era — and endings are hard. As Grace points out: “People you love deeply become elemental. To hear they won’t be there any more is like hearing the air or ocean won’t be. It feels like a fatal disruption to the universe.”
So, when we grieve, we are forced to redefine our world. It’s something most of us didn’t sign up for, but it happens every day. It’s like we’ve been flattened and had to reformulate ourselves, and our new shape isn’t recognizable at all. It’s awkward, broken and lurching, but somehow we go forward.
Grieving expert Elisabeth Kubler-Ross notes that we grieve forever. “You will never get over the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it,” she says. Taking a Buddhist perspective, Paul Coelho wrote: “Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them.”
As a Buddhist monk might tell us, everything constantly changes, that impermanence is one of life’s truths — and that grief burgeons when we resist it. As difficult as it might be, leaning into grief helps us heal. “Healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy,” says Pema Chodron, an American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun. “We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then, they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that.”
So, how do we get better — even if we’ll never be the same? One thing that helps me is knowing I’m not alone. Life is a hero’s journey. We are all walking the same path. We all experience grief and the death of loved ones. We share this communal experience. Sometimes you’ll be the one who is a lifeline to another; other times, you’ll be uplifted by somebody else.
Another more mystical belief I have is that the dead are always with us. Look around, there’s always a sign: perhaps a bird, a shining star, a whispering wind, an urge that feels like intuition. Grace addresses this too in the novel, “When you grieve someone, you see their message in everything. Even in the sunlight on a blade of grass. The whole world becomes their translator.”
Speaking of translating, you, too, can be the medium. And, I don’t mean via a seance. Let me explain: There’s that moment when someone you love passes where you panic, your mind seems bereft of memories. It becomes almost a blank slate, and you might be fearful you’ve lost all recall. But, it’s there, safe and sound within. That’s when I grab a journal to write stream-of-consciousness as fast as I can everything that comes into my head. I don’t stop to read it, correct spelling or worry about messiness. I just write, write, write until the timer rings. Try doing five minutes, three times a day — you won’t believe all the surprising memories that erupt from within in such a short time. The process of penning without censorship seems to bring all sorts of thoughts to the surface. It’s therapeutic, healing and truly a way to draw out all sorts of important incidents you’ve forgotten.
Alternatively, take a photograph and write for five minutes about everything you remember from that moment or day captured in the photo. Or, set a timer and just begin with: “I remember when” or even “I don’t remember.” You’ll be amazed at what goes from within you to the paper.
These are hard times for so many reasons, but we’ll carry the agony of the floods for our entire lives. It will be like a storm in our heart ready to erupt at any time. The PTSD will be prolific. But, stay the course. Envelop yourself in self-care. Collect and store your memories, share your feelings, talk amongst yourselves. We will survive.
Becca Hensley, an award winning poet and journalist, has been a contributing writer at Spirituality & Health Magazine, penned the ruminative spirituality column for Austin’s The Good Life for a decade and has been teaching healing journaling classes since 1981. A former wellness editor, she delves into healing from the inside out in her work. Her work has been published in the Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, Organic Spa, Toronto Star and many more. During the pandemic, she taught four Zoom healing journalism classes a week for a following of worldwide students.