LETTING GO: A HEALING STAGE OF GRIEF
It is normal to feel strong attachments to the physical things someone we love left behind. Those things can quickly become something that we never really put much thought into, toward something that is more precious than gold. But the place to get to with grief is to realize that the one we lost is not in that thing, even for as much as it contains their energy and some part of their essence.
I was painfully reminded of this recently. But first, the back-story: not long after my father died, I went to his wife’s house. I told her that I wanted to go into my dad’s office and take a couple of mementos to have. Instead of her being open to myself OR my siblings, she proceeded to hover over me and question every choice I wanted to make. It was uncomfortable for both of us and brought up a lot of what was toxic in my years-long relationship with her. I eventually put my foot down with her and reminded her that she was not the only one who lost him. That she needed to not be so controlling and allow my father’s children to be able to take a piece of him, to help us deal with the loss.
I only took a couple of my father’s spiritual tools that I know he used because he told me. I took a miniature labyrinth, one of his shirts he was wearing when he died and a set of meditation balls. The shirt I got made into a Memory Bear. There are people you can send items of your loved one to for them to make into a teddy bear. I cannot tell you how pivotal that bear was to my grief!
Well, a few days ago, I was going through some clothes and putting them away. The items I have from my dad are all on the top of my dresser. It has been a comfort in the years since my father’s death to be able to go to sleep at night and see those things up there. As fate would have it, the dresser was moved away from the wall because of a recent touch up of paint in my apartment.
It was moved away just enough that as I got into putting things away, I suddenly heard two large crashes behind the dresser. I looked down and saw that my father’s meditation balls were on the floor, shattered.
My heart sank. A combination of anger and grief came raging to the fore. I felt like my day went from bad to worst in that moment.
So I sat on my bedside. And I took several deep breaths. And I went inside myself. I connected to my own spirit (which Lucumi and Ifa people call the Ori) and soothed the pain. I started to say to myself that, as sad as this moment was, that my father is not in any of those things. That they are representations of a love that continues beyond the grave. A love deep within me.
The sentences I just wrote don’t do the moment justice. I was sitting there for a minute. A good, long minute. Sometimes you have to. Part of letting go, sometimes, is allowing yourself to feel. To REALLY feel things we tend to avoid, because as I said in my last post, our whole American over-culture is death avoidant. Even the process toward burial has been sanitized and we have been largely removed from interacting with the deceased person’s body until the wake (if we even have one).
There’s no way around grief, except through it. Letting go is a significant part of that. I hope all of us find our way, and remember, through the pain, that the heart of life is still good.
