The Life Giving Power of Death
What death and loss can teach us about how to truly live.
Do you know what made me a better person? What helped me become kinder, softer, more compassionate, loving, and alive?
Death.
Yes, you did read that correctly. The loss of my mum and the heart breaking 4 years that preceded it, watching her slowly fade away from cancer, broke my heart wide open. When she began to die (and it was a long, slow and painful process), I had an important choice to make. Either to patch up my broken heart with sticking plasters of busyness, alcohol and work, or to allow myself to feel the pain of this loss completely. To move towards it.
I chose the latter. I grieved deeply with my whole broken open heart. I let my love bleed. I honoured the loss of my mum and her very life with my grief. Because as I always say ~ grief is not the price we pay for love, grief IS love. It is what love feels like when we can no longer see, touch or be with the one we love. I did not turn away from my grief, (even though I really wanted to). I turned towards it and allowed myself to feel it fully. The grief came in waves (still does). Sometimes a gentle ripple lapping at the edges of my heart, and others a full tsunami taking me and my bleeding heart down and under.
My grief about my mother’s death was also complex, because like many of you, we had a complicated relationship. I realise I lost my mother 3 times in total – first as a child when I felt rejected and abandoned by her because she was ‘there but not there’, too distracted by my father’s needs to meet my own. Secondly, I lost her as a young adult, when I rejected her as punishment for not loving me the way I needed as a child. (Revenge as it turned out was not so sweet).
As an adult I had to grieve the loss of this childhood version of my mother. The one who was always slightly out of reach. In doing this, I was able to connect with the mother of my adult years. To see her as a woman first and my mum second. At long last I felt like I had a mother (and she, a daughter too no doubt). Our bond became even stronger after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer at just 64 years old. It felt like we were both finally able to let the love in. And then just like that the third loss arrived, and she was gone.
Found and lost.
Lost and found.
Grieving as an Active Process
The morning after my mum died, I physically felt like my heart was broken. I could barely get out of bed, and the grief, just like our relationship was complicated. I felt the weight of her loss and at the same time felt huge relief that she was no longer in pain and that it was finally over, both for her and for us as her children.
What I have found with grief is that it is an active process to grieve it. We all feel grief, but we don’t all grieve.