Realignment

This post is intended to be experienced as an audio recording – click here to listen. Or, if you prefer, you can find the transcript below.

When I’m dead
Your tears will flow
But I won’t know
Cry with me now instead

You will send flowers
But I won’t see
Send them now instead

You’ll say words of praise
But I won’t hear
Praise me now instead

You’ll forget my faults
But I won’t know…
Forget them now instead

You’ll miss me then
But I won’t feel
Miss me now instead

You’ll wish you could have spent more time with me
Spend it now instead

When you hear I’m gone, you’ll find your way to my house to pay condolence but we haven’t even spoken in years
Look for me now.

Extract from Sip your tea, nice and slow by Lee Tzu Pheng

It’s so true that we only seem to experience true unconditional love for someone once they have gone – why is that? Is it that we let our egos get the better of us and so we quibble over the small things that person says or does, or is that we are constantly living in a state of resistance, and are never really fully in the now, in the “is-ness” of the present moment – or maybe it’s a bit of both. Without fail, whenever I would go home to visit my parents, my Dad and I would spend an inordinate amount of time arguing over the thermostat settings for the house…and now I wonder we spent so much energy on such a trivial thing.

Grief is definitely not a straight line from denial to anger to bargaining to depression to acceptance…there is no clean line of acceptance, and then you’re suddenly done with grief. It keeps coming back over and over in different ways and you have to accept all over again. When I found out last month that my company was making me redundant, I knew that the one person I wanted to talk to about it was my Dad – for his steadiness and counsel. And so with the gut-wrenching realisation that I couldn’t have that conversation with him, came another acceptance that I would have to find a different way to ground myself and work through it.

In the first part of this blog post, I talked about the importance of having your grief witnessed and acknowledged by others. And in sharing this post with you, I ask you to witness my grief. Grief is the wise and patient human emotion that actually enables us to process loss and come to terms with it.

One of the ways in which I’ve been able to both release my sadness and witness my own grief is through breathwork and in particular breathwork for heart opening. Thanks to some amazing free sessions on Instagram, this has been such an important way for me to allow myself to naturally let my emotions surface, to observe and honour my grief and to slowly stitch back together my heart which feels like it broke into a million pieces.

And when it comes to witnessing another person’s grief, I have to say as a society we’re extremely grief-phobic, and so we all tend to be pretty bad at this. Some people avoid you completely because they don’t know what to say…others try to “distract” you with mundane anecdotes as if your mind could ever be diverted away from this huge loss…others believe they are offering you words of comfort when they say “You have to be strong now” when all you want to do is fall apart – and PLEASE KNOW that you have every right to do so. So what can you do to really support someone you care about when they are grieving?

1. Do keep checking in on them regularly – whether it’s a call or a message, and please don’t say to them “reach out when you’re ready” because that time will likely never come
2. Do ask them what they need (and keep asking). The reality is that often it’s difficult to articulate what we need when we’re grieving, but with time it becomes clearer
3. Do hold space for them – and by that, I don’t mean offering advice or counselling, quite the opposite. In fact, one friend simply said to me “You are grieving” and with that I felt held. Another friend wrote in a message “I am just here”. Or just sit with them – no need for words. Hug them, hold their hand and know that this contact speaks volumes.
4. Do help in practical ways if you can – taking the load off by cooking meals, running errands, helping with legal stuff
5. Do realise that the person will be deeply changed and may not be interested to get back into things they would normally do either immediately or ever – their whole perspective on life will have shifted and that’s completely natural

I know that I am changed after losing my Dad and I couldn’t be the same person if I tried. And in this process of resetting and realignment, I am creating a new identity, knowing that my work is not to revolve, but to evolve. And to truly be in the flow of life, the question is who am I now that my father is gone and what legacies of his do I want to keep alive? My story is still continuing…

When we grieve, we expand not only our bandwidth for pain but also our bandwidth for joy…I now look at life differently and know that I don’t want to postpone things that can be experienced now. Because ultimately, there is only now, this moment.

And I know there’s a natural tendency to fear that if we don’t think about our loved one for a day, we’ll forget them or even worse, we feel guilty that we’re not thinking about them in the first place. But know truly that what determines your loyalty to your loved one is your level of love, not your level of pain. And so I continue to integrate the grief into my life – accepting the pain as nothing more than the unexpressed love for my father.

On the eve of the first anniversary of my father’s death (according to the Hindu calendar that is), I hold my patchwork heart with care, still overflowing with love. I am my father’s daughter and I will endeavour to continue his legacy of joy, compassion, unending service to his family, the community and far beyond to others in need. I will keep my heart open, continue his legacy of love and be present in this moment, right here, right now.   And I hope to die empty of all the goodness, creativity and love that I have inside of me.

The TRUE meaning of your life is to die empty of all the goodness that is within you. Deliver it to the world before you leave. If you have an idea, perform it. If you have knowledge, give it out. If you have a goal, share it. Love, share and distribute, do not keep it inside.

Die empty – Todd Henry