We come from all over to sit in the Silence together.

At the beginning, two women came weekly and now our small group is adding a person here and there.

We begin with a poem, rest in the Silence, then hear the poem again. After sitting in silence, the words land differently on the inside.

Here was last week’s poem by John O’Donohue. In times of conflict, love seems elusive. I’ve wondered if there was ever a time when grace and mercy didn’t feel simplistic when the gentleness between you hardens. If I drop fully into it though, I feel its demands on me as O’Donohue speaks the painful truth: we mirror each other. We all have a part in the dance. Have you ever heard of the Drama Triangle, a psychological model that describes unhealthy interactions in conflict? There are 3 roles:

• Victim: Feels helpless and dependent on others.

• Rescuer: Tries to "help" the victim, often gaining a sense of self-worth from doing so.

• Persecutor: Blames and criticizes others, often feeling superior

A therapist friend taught our Enneagram group about it and said that we tend to take one of the roles more frequently, but if we have a shred of honesty, we play out all three.

With all that being said, we can do psychological analysis until the cows come home, but that keeps us in the thought loops of the mental center. Silence and poetry takes you down into the body and the heart. Few do it better than John O’Donohue.

Before you read, breathe and pause. Then, read it aloud or listen to me read it in the audio. Notice what word or phrase lands inside of you. In the spiritual practice of lectio divina, you read it 3 times. I like to notice how it lands in each center.

You’re welcome to join us on Wednesdays! Here’s the link to register and you will be sent a Zoom link.

This is one of the 8 passages we explore in our upcoming session of Thresholds. In Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, he identifies the portal of Middle Adulthood:

• Generativity: In this time of your life, is your inner world growing larger? You will know it from the quality of inner fullness and aliveness. If you’re paying attention, you may notice you start letting go of old roles and narratives. You feel yourself opening to new possibilities, previous interests or causes calling to you. Something different begins to matter.

  
  You may notice a desire to leave a spiritual or religious community, civic group or affinity group that mattered to you: it could have been life giving, but now it’s grown stale for who you are now and too small for who you are becoming.
  
  Your group of friends may grow smaller if you’ve tended to have a wide circle of friends. Or if you’re a type who has tended to isolate from people and life, you may feel an unfamiliar desire to reach out and expand.
  
  You may feel an urgency to contribute in a way to others or a future and join a group who shares the same desire.
  
  You may have faced death, loss or an illness in you or a friend and you feel the brevity of life. You stand at your kitchen sink, watch the birds in the feeder, the colors on the leaves change and you think, I’m still here. Now. There’s a poignancy in being alive and you notice small things you hadn’t noticed before.
  
  Generativity is listening to your life and allowing it to change and grow. There’s an expansive feeling of aliveness and sometimes a depth of meaning.
  

• Stagnation: Stagnation is when you notice when you’re repeating old habits, playing old roles, still trying to prove yourself with material things, intelligence, perfection and socially acceptable identities.
  
  One person feeling stagnation said he was tired of being a rebel and revolutionary. His fist didn’t feel the fight and he was tired. He said he realized he wanted to simply enjoy his kid growing up, play his guitar and sit under the pines. What shifted him from irritated stagnation to generativity was an appreciation for some peace of mind.
  
  Another came to the realization how she only wanted to be with the young, as she had become over-identified with youth and the opinions of younger people. My stagnation was my refusal to accept that I’m in my 50s. It’s a big difference to try to act young and missing out on all the experiences that had shaped me and given me a helluva a lot of depth that my younger friends didn’t understand.
  
  If you experience the stagnation part of this passage, you may feel a sense of internal emptiness, lack of growth and stagnation. This may be your soul calling. Stagnation can come in a refusal to face what life is handing to you in the present time.
  

  Stagnation involves feeling unproductive and uninvolved, leading to self-absorption, lack of growth, and feelings of emptiness. You may also feel a normal neuroses that can come with facing aging and mortality. One woman in her 50s who’s always identified with being young, dynamic and athletic said, I wake in the middle night, terrified of aging.

  
  I like to think of stagnation as bound up energy calling me to something different. The midlife call is to continue to grow on the inside. This may elicit external changes in your life…but it’s an inside out call.

Anderson Cooper’s interview with Stephen Colbert hits all the right notes in my soul. I listened to it yesterday for the 3rd time. Colbert was talking about how helpful it is to hear people share their experience of grief and loss…I feel the same. It’s so universal.

It’s popular in facilitation circles to say: DON’T share your story when someone shares theirs.

I don’t agree although I understand the impulse.

It’s a way of saying slow down. Be present. Listen. Be impacted by the other and out of being impacted, something arises inside of you…you share from a different place inside other than the mental center.

You can hear it in the way Stephen and Andrew listen. They’re present to the other. It’s a move from the mental center to the heart and body. You feel something on the inside. It gets through the fear of sadness to the actual sadness itself.

“And I think there's a fear of grief, that grief itself is a form of death, that grief itself is a form of defeat. And we want to stay on top, and we want to win, and we don't want bad things to happen, whereas grief is not a bad thing. Grief is a reaction to a bad thing.

Grief itself is a natural process that has to be experienced, I hasn't used the word endured, because endured sounds like resistance, and you can't win against grief, because you're the one doing it to you. You can't beat you. You know all of your buttons.

You know all of your secrets, and you'll never get around this grief.

The one thing that I have found tremendously helpful is being able to talk about it and hear other people's experiences with it.”

To join our newest Thresholds group for people in the 2nd half of life, click here. Space is limited.

This material may be protected by copyright.

Subscribe now

Share

Does this resonate with you?

I need to be clear: death is a universal thing most of us fear. Acceptance seems barbaric to some and a relief to others. While I have been to the mountaintop of acceptance, I have by no means stayed there. I have my own wily ways of avoidance. Acceptance of dying, is a lifelong practice.

Written in memory of Janice Flood Willis, Pat Flood and Sandy Vollmer, three courageous women who, when the time came, accepted their dying.

They are my heart.

Impermanence

Dr. Lydia Dugdale begins her book, The Lost Art of Dying, with a story of her regret for having resuscitated an 88 year-old who has lived a full life and is dying in the hospital of metastatic cancer. She said his daughters assured the medical team that he would “beat this cancer” that had invaded his bones, lung and brain. Dr. Dugdale writes,

“He had eluded death for so long that his daughters had begun to whisper of his immortality. They believed, or so they told themselves, that he might live forever.”

His daughters begged the nurses, “Do everything you can to keep him alive.” Dr. Dugdale knew a post-surgical life would be nothing but suffering for this man. She also understands a family’s desire to hold on to a loved one.

Dr. Dugdale went on:

“The night Mr. Turner died, none of us knew for certain whether his family understood the immensity of his disease or the misery that would doubtless accompany his prognosis.

We have mastered the art of offering third and fourth-line chemotherapies for ostensibly untreatable cancers. We tell ourselves that we want to give hope, but a last-ditch effort a chemotherapy is rarely the hope our dying patients need.

By focusing on fixes, we ignore finitude.

A Goodreads reviewer read her book and wrote:

I remember when our father suffered through his lymphoma cancer. He had it for 11 years. He was so obsessed with his dis-ease, in finding a cure, that he allowed the doctors to do any procedure on him.

He was so afraid of dying he forgot how to live.

Karen Robert (from a Goodreads review of “The Lost Art of Dying” by Lydia Dugdale MD

You will die. I will die. Everyone we love will die. The magnitude is breathtaking and almost always hard to imagine.

I began Thresholds because of the lost opportunity that comes from denying the reality of aging, death and life’s finitude. I’ve seen its ravages personally in missed opportunities, missed conversations and missed soul deepening that comes when we honestly face the poignant, human limitations of our bodies.

I’ve witnessed the inner conflicts of patients tired of treatments and ready to let go who feel beholden to family members who are wanting to try something…anything…to keep their loved ones alive. Often, underneath this is a denial of death. It’s almost unfathomable that they are here in one moment and in the next, they are gone.

Denial

How to write about the denial of death in a culture so good at anesthetizing it and avoiding the stunning beauty of what’s most simple? Material luxuries, ambition, travel and countless distractions keep it at bay by day. At night, I get texts like the one from my friend who’s afraid cancer will take her from her children the way it took her mother and brother from her.

Denial is a human response to existential dread. We are born, we die. We leave the ones we love most. We have no control over this life and death while imagining we do.

Our protective function of denial catches up with us. We can’t outrun death and dying. I’ve found denial is better as a step than as a landing pad. It’s done me wrong before. I won’t get fooled again, or so I tell myself.

Dr. Dugdale wrote that it is sometimes religious people are most resistant to acceptance. Shouldn’t fervent prayers promise survival? Did I do something wrong that made them sick and die?

New Age denial shows up as aspirational super aging and body vigilanteism. If I take the right supplements, eat the right foods, do enough meditation, yoga and energy work, I can outrun the ordinary vagrancies of aging and death.

Contemplation on Death and Impermanence

Buddhist teachings on death begin with the Buddha’s First Noble Truth: Life is suffering.

When I studied death awareness through the work of Roshi Joan Halifax and Frank Ostaseski, I had a more expansive framework with which to approach the incomprehensible deaths of the loss of my sister-in-law and her baby when I was 20.

Buddhists reflect on anicca, a Pali word that means “unstable” and “impermanence.” It’s the practice of accepting the reality that everything is constantly changing, including our thoughts, emotions and physical states.

The Buddha taught that the root of suffering is greed, avoidance and delusion. In a death-denying culture we’re unprepared for our death or the death of people we love. When it comes, we are so frozen by anxiety and resistance that it is difficult to be present to others or ourselves.

Many indigenous cultures view death as a natural part of life and something to be accepted rather than feared. Many believe that life is part of a spirit's journey, and that death is a common fate for all.

In the contemplative wisdom tradition of Christianity, contemplating on the cycle of life and death connects us to worlds beyond our own. Through attention and breath, we “plug into” an energetic spiritual coherence full of wisdom that can be cultivated daily through contemplative prayer.

This wisdom tradition says that contemplating the cycle of life and death cultivates spiritual substances like courage, acceptance, trust, steadiness and equanimity.

In an anesthetized culture, we feel separate from the natural world and the rhythms of birth, growth, harvest, death and rebirth. We forget we are not only inextricably interconnected in these life cycles, we are actually a part of these natural cycles.

In a technological, post-agrarian, perfected world where we distance ourselves from suffering and grief, we don’t don’t have much practice in being with death.

It can be overwhelming to come to terms with the finite nature of our bodies, and we often don’t see aging and death as a natural process. We have different ways of reacting to our cultural discomfort with death: avoidance, excessive preoccupation with morbidity, excessive medical interventions, controlling our bodies as if working out and eating well will prevent aging and death. In 2024, the actual belief we can avoid death is popular in the tech world (if you doubt this, Google, “how to avoid death”).

I watched the final episode of Reservation Dogs, a comedy-drama TV series (dare I say masterpiece?) that follows the lives of four Indigenous teenagers on a fictional reservation in rural Oklahoma. With the exception of The Bear, few shows deal with the reality of birth, growth and death with such skill, humor and grace.

The show weaves elders, flawed parents, aunts and uncles and incredibly authentic and endearing teens into a gorgeous tapestry of community encounters with the imperfect cycle of life.

As I watched them do life, I felt a pang of envy. White people are so bad at accepting and navigating the book of life and death.

I get discouraged by overly-medicalized aging and death, but I understand it. Unless you’ve been plunked in the middle of it and you’re a person who’s been milk fed on the illusion of control, it’s hard to grasp why most people end up dying in sterile institutions and their death has been prolonged by excessive or unnecessary surgeries, resuscitations and sometimes shamefully intrusive interventions.

I’ve been sitting with this question: What would it be like to weave the acceptance of death and aging with our medical systems? How might end of life conversations change?

What if we drew on and updated meaningful practices and rituals that accept the cycle of life and death?

Acceptance of death:
A counter-cultural practice

I’ve been at the bedside of dying people I love. I’ve sat in the silence with families at the bedside of a dying person and witnessed caregivers, hospice volunteers, medical staff and family members navigate the complex medical system.

I’ve seen how the denial of death can cause more suffering than the acceptance of death. I’ve seen how denial sometimes includes being highly resistant to receiving support.

Sometimes, the patient is frightened of dying. Sometimes, it’s the family’s fear and aching sadness. The loved one may be tired and ready to let go, but doesn’t know how to say it to the people they love. They can see the fear and pain in their loved ones’ eyes.

But there is another way and I’ve witnessed this too. Sometimes, there’s a person in the room who brings a gentle acceptance that our loved one will die. The exhausting cheer and positive thinking can subside.

There’s room for something else for the ones who are ready to receive it. It’s quieter and more tender.

You get to the bone of your love for this person. If the relationship was complicated, you get to the bone of that too. You see them in their last days and you face your own insides: all the ways you gave and withheld this kind of quiet love and acceptance.

Acceptance doesn’t mean we want someone to die or we are rushing their death. It is letting go of fear, sadness or maybe guilt, anger and resentment. As those soften, there’s more space to feel what is. It’s less doing and more being. You notice you breathe easier.

I once facilitated a workshop called “Compassionate Presence.” We practiced being with our humanity in a field of compassion. Compassion has to be a practice, as I see it. Our brains have a negativity bias which is our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell on these events. The death of someone you love, complete with all the decisions you have to make, can take you down some pretty dark rabbit holes. Compassion for the human condition is so needed.

If your family has ever encountered this difficult decision, you know it is fraught with uncertainty, emotions and differences in spiritual and religious worldviews. During my Mom’s final months and when she died, I felt a mix of gratitude, relief and a primal grief. I had prepared so long for the moment she died yet when they took her away, I felt a visceral “No, that’s my mother. You can’t take her.”

Some tend to idealize, catastrophize or fear this moment. Others spend hours in aching regret and what ifs. I remind people that acceptance means accepting all of it:

• sadness and grief,

• conflicting feelings like resentment, anger, heartache

• guilt

• feelings of being trapped

• irritation with others’ reactions and emotions

• terror and the grip of anxiety in the belly or solar plexus,

• resistance to advice and information

• exhaustion and fear

• feelings of abandonment

• craving for respite

• a broken heart

• change

Death awareness

In an anesthetized culture, you don’t have to deal much with death awareness. You keep it at bay unless you’ve experienced an early loss that ruptured your innocence. For one of my loved in-laws, he was 3. For me and my sibs, we were teens and in our early 20s, that stage in life when you’re figuring out how to be an adult.

I was only 20 when my brother’s wife and baby died. (I wrote about it here) My now husband and I were engaged 9 months later. I came across some old albums and found the quote we put in the back our wedding program. It wasn’t about our marriage or expressions of gratitude to our friends and family. It was a soaked in urgency:

Did my 22 year old self sense the brevity of time when I chose the quote? Did I want to shout, You all will die. See all of it. Pay attention.

I once counseled a young woman in her 20s after brother had died with a lot of questions surrounding his death. She was angry at her friends, her parents, her brother. She felt the same cultural cluelessness I felt when my sister-in-law and her baby died. They have no idea, I’d think. None. No wonder people hide it all away. There are so few places to go with the grief.

Twenty years later, when in my 40s, my dear friend and walking partner, Sandy died of cancer. I was younger and still had that luxury belief that she was supposed to not die.

18 months later, my husband’s mom died in November and his dad died the following June. 3 years later, my husband and I eulogized a close friend after he had a heart attack while playing racquetball. He left 5 children behind. Our friend group was rattled and heartbroken. He was a healthy guy.

I had 3 kids and my body felt different. I kept looking at my husband wondering if Death would take him too. I’d feel frozen and anxious. I created a playlist about death. Music was a refuge from a world that couldn’t talk about the pervasive existential dread I felt. I was raising children, going to school and starting a business as Death lurked over my shoulder. I worried my death obsession would damage my kind and sensitive children.

Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist, wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book, Denial of Death, published a year before his death at 49 from cancer.

He said that the fear of death is the animating principle of human behavior and our search for meaning and the price of consciousness is knowing we will die.

Without the cultural rituals of purpose and meaning making, we have to face our animal existence. I am compulsively meaning-making so his book initially filled me with existential dread, but facing the dread in my 40s somehow paved the way for my 50s and 60s.

I was 46 when my sister was diagnosed with the breast cancer that would take her life 10 years later. I began to wonder if I was cursed by early deaths. I’ve talked with others who’ve had the same thoughts. You feel Death on your shoulder as you swim in a culture of positivity (I don’t call it “toxic” as Whitney Goodman does in her book, Toxic Positivity as I've seen the fallout that comes with labeling human normal, protective human defenses as toxic)

Mostly, the Death on your shoulder feeling when a loved one is diagnosed is a feeling of existential aloneness.

My sister used to say we had a symbiotic relationship. Biologically, this means we are dependent on each other for survival like honeybees and flowers. When I finally let myself Google “metastatic spinal cancer” and read 10 month life expectancy, I couldn’t get out of bed the next morning. She died 8 months later.

After she died, I called a local hospice for grief support. I told him about all the losses. The grief counselor said I was buckling under the weight of cumulative grief.

He said I was like an inflatable bop bags that kept popping back up after loss until one comes and gives a one-two punch. Lost in thought, I drove through a red light on the way to work. When the police officer pulled me over, I had no idea why.

I told the grief group about it. The counselor said, “Look around at the cars driving down the road. We have no idea how many people drive with a broken heart.”

Joy and Sadness living side by side

I began to practice accepting sadness and death. It meant more quiet time with myself and less talking about it neurotically. It was getting distance from my thoughts that took me down rabbit holes of wondering who will die next and if I would be okay.

I found friends and spiritual companions who held a vast space for the confounding, all-consuming, occasionally wordless nature of grief. Well-meaning quick fixes, pithy platitudes and judgments of my sadness…especially when they were coming from me….made the pain worse.

I practiced forgiving myself for emotional unsteadiness, anger and my need to muster up in the face of death and dying. I am not so special. Humans have always had to find their way through the pervasive, ceaseless nature of grief.

Mostly, acceptance of death was a slow-time practice of being with life’s constantly changing nature. It was finding people who could walk with me because they have been initiated by its tidal force or take on the work of being with dying.

In a way that surprises most of us, acceptance of death opens us to this experience not of fleeting happiness that needs to be chased…but an expansive joy with deep roots.

I am now in my 60s. My generation is aging. Most of my friends have lost our parents, a sibling, a child or a close friend. Death and loss weaves itself into our lives. We dress for the funerals, prepare meals in our kitchens and bear witness to the lives of people we love.

When my mom died in 2022, I didn’t feel the panic I felt in my initial encounters with death, but the grief unmoored me in a way I hadn’t expected.

I now hold space for people who are grieving. One of the most common things I hear is some version,

I have known about death all of my life. I had no idea it would be like this.

Pain + Resistance = Suffering

Episcopalian priest, writer and mystic, Cynthia Bourgeault’s teaching on the inevitability of suffering dispels notions of a masochistic god sending you suffering to learn you a thing or two.

Suffering is the inevitable outcome of the conditions of this planet, which include hard edges and finite boundaries.

But this is not random…it is precisely in these conditions and only these conditions that certain aspects of divine love shine forth so luminously.

Cynthia Bourgeault

On the night before my sister died, we were alone. I anointed her head with my daughter’s scented oils. Next to her head, I placed the small Mother’s Day pillow my grandson had crafted for her at preschool. I offered prayers. I asked her beloved angels and guides to companion her as she passed from this world to the subtle realms.

I experienced a fragrance of a palpable, quiet love. I had been practicing for this day. When it came, I was unafraid.

When she actually stopped breathing, it was as Kubler-Ross said. A peaceful cessation. A brief flare. A quiet. I called her husband and gave them time alone. I walked into her living room that overlooked the city and imagined calling my family: She is gone.

But then I wondered, why rush this? They are still sleeping. I sat with the acceptance of her death. The dark night and the glow of the city lights. The quiet.

Last month, my godson’s wife gave birth to their first child. Texts and photos and tears were passed between all of us. I felt a pure, palpable joy. I adore this godson. He’s recently become a hospice nurse.

At the baby shower a month prior, I asked him how he liked his new job. He said he liked it better than the hospital rotation. He said he gets to know his patients in hospice. He gets to know their families. It’s not like one moment they are there and the next moment, their bed is empty and they are off to a new surgery, treatment or going home where he is wondering where they are.

I have a fantasy that we talk about death and dying as a natural part of life as easily as we talk about the birth of a child. I fantasize that people won’t get uncomfortable, worried that we’ll start crying again as if somehow we’d all drown in the sadness.

No, we want to say…it’s not the sadness that drowns us. It’s the terrified avoidance that drowns us.

I fantasize that the designated strong and capable people PAUSE long enough to actually receive the love and support when it comes their way. I fantasize a culture where, in the 2nd half of life, they find places inside of themselves to let go and fall apart.

I fantasize that the tender ones find a sturdiness they didn’t know they had.

Thresholds is a space where maybe, we allow a woosh that gives space for all of it: the dread, the fear, the stunned devastation of the initial diagnosis, phone call or text, the regret, the terrifying and natural decay of a human body, the quiet and the okay-ness of not have to do anything…

The aching and palpable love finds its way right in the center of being with dying.

Welcoming Practice

Every Thresholds Substack closes with a practice.

The Welcoming Practice was developed by Mary Mrozowski, a key figure in the Centering Prayer movement. The intent of the practice is both orienting and reorienting in all 3 Centers: head, heart and body. Click here to do it as a gift for yourself and the people who love you.

If you do the practice, I’d love to hear what it was like for you. (One client told me she HATES the “I let go of my desire for Power and Control.” She’s not the first).

To Dave, who kept coming coming back and who has never left when it got dark.

I imagine life as a progression of thresholds. When you’re standing on one, the awareness that it’s threshold, eludes you until you have the perspective of time. Most often, you’re plunked there by an email, a phone call, a deconstruction of an identity, a death or diagnosis that reorients the way you’d seen not only the world, but yourself.

My first, most memorable threshold began with a death that shattered my family and froze a grief inside of me that didn’t begin to thaw until 20 years later.

Frozen grief

In 1980, my sister-in-law Patty died at the young age of 27 of pneumonia. Her prematurely born baby died 2 days later.

The weight of these losses felt unbearable. I was lying in bed when my brother walked in the door of my parent’s home at 4 AM to tell my parents his wife was gone. I felt a full body No, this can’t be. I was 20 years old and home from college for Christmas break.

My brother became a stranger, far away and lost… we all did. What do you do when the entire family system is shattered and each has their own way of absorbing the shock?

At the age of 20, I felt like I was trapped in one of those free fall abysses of darkness and could feel no ground. All the sturdy people felt lost and broken. Our energy was diverted to my brother who was left to raise his toddler son without her.

On the morning of her death, I went into my 20-month-old nephew’s room where he was sleeping and sweaty. His Mom had been showing me photos in her wallet of his newest studio picture weeks before she died. I felt a frozen and helpless.

All I wanted was go to church to find meaning in this nightmare while my religiously suspicious brother wanted nothing to do with a cruel god.

In 1980, grief groups were almost nonexistent, trauma-informed care was 40 years away, there was no internet and few grief trained therapists. The only grief books I could get my hands on was Darkness before Dawn and children’s book, The Dead Bird which my mother had bought for my now motherless nephew.

Along with my family, I threw myself into caring for my brother and his toddler. I wondered why my 20-year old then boyfriend consistently came over nightly as there was a dark pall over my family’s home.

I moved home from college and my brother moved in with us that winter. I did my student teaching, waited tables and was perpetually ill with respiratory viruses. I lived with a nagging fear that illness would take me away prematurely the way pneumonia had taken Patty and Jessica.

A year later, my boyfriend and I talked my depressed brother into getting out of the house and coming to a party at his parent’s home. He met my close friend, Terry who knew something about loss and grief as she had recently lost her mother to MS. She was one of the few people I could trust with my brother’s heart.

They connected that evening and I held my breath that maybe my brother could find love again. In a sort of movie ending, they married two years later and had 2 more children.

I married my boyfriend, and we had 3 kids of our own. With each wedding and birth, the pall over my family home lifted, but we were irrevocably changed.

My father was left with anxiety and panic attacks, my mother with chronic colitis and I with a hidden habit of mentally sorting friends and family through the lens of when they might die or leave.

When a new loss thaws the grief of an old loss

20 years later, my old neighbor and dear family friend, Sandy, was diagnosed with lymphoma. 7 years later, after a bone marrow transplant, a recurrence and impending hospitalization, she pulled me out in the hall at a casual gathering and asked me to do her eulogy. She told me a new bone marrow transplant was unlikely. She knew she was going to die even as her family held hope .

I felt the same panic I’d felt 20 years earlier, but this time, I had 3 kids and a foreign exchange student from France to distract me. I threw myself into a network of friends caring for her as if our constant attention would keep her alive. She died anyway in January of 2000, 20 years after Patty and Jessica.

Unmetabolized, frozen grief has a way of housing itself deep in the body. When Sandy died, it was as if the terror I’d experienced earlier thawed and I could feel the familiar feeling of fog and the deep, dark waters beneath the surface of my grief. The sense of internal meaning and order I’d spent years rebuilding, disintegrated.

Today they call it cumulative grief or trauma born of a sudden, destabilizing loss.

At that time, I saw it as spiritual pain. I was confused about a benevolent God and the innocent belief that my family would be exempt from another death as if we had already paid our dues.

I had 3 children and felt an enormous responsibility to get my act together. Sometimes, their lives were a refreshing relief from my newfound death neuroses. Yet, while they were at school, I felt frenetic. I read about death, meaning and grief incessantly. I stayed out too late with Sandy’s friends.

My concerned husband and sister asked me to get help. By 2000, therapy was less taboo in my Midwestern suburb. I found a therapist and a spiritual director to companion me through this threshold.

The therapist didn’t understand cumulative loss, but helped me with the family dynamics that were surfacing.

The spiritual director was refreshingly comfortable with my obsession about death. I can still see her couch, the candle burning on the side table and the sound of her voice normalizing the inevitability of illness, aging and death.

Cumulative Loss

Each time I felt like I was gaining footing, another loss came. My husband’s mother and father in their 70s. My father in his 80s. A close friend in her 50s. My husband’s brother in his 50s and his other brother in his 60s…one in the midst of a painful family estrangement, a generational pattern that repeats through generations.

My inner map was now dotted with sudden absences: people die, they move, and for some, they estrange. Predictable habits like walks and coffee and phone conversations disappear. Someone vanishes. Dogs and toddlers aimlessly look for missing mothers and caregiver. You read an article, hear a piece of music, you want to share it and they’re gone.

But you’re still here.

This is the thing we don’t know how to talk about as it seems so obvious:

I am here and they are not. I want to be gone with them, but I don’t want to be gone from who’s still here.

Janice

In 2016, my biological and soul sister, Janice was diagnosed with metastatic spinal cancer. She’d had breast cancer 10 years prior and had been a hospice volunteer so when her cancer returned, she was surreally accepting. I’d once believed I couldn’t survive without her or my husband, but I’d always had a strong sense that her death would precede mine.

Her diagnosis came 2 years after the loss of my father and another dear friend, and one year after my husband lost both of his brothers.

She was the person in my family of origin who would most openly talk of loss and death with me with spiritual wisdom, a wicked sense of humor and a grounded practicality. I wanted to talk to her about her death after she died but she wasn’t here. I had dreams of her being in the room, but then she’d fade when I moved close to her.

Her funeral was January 2017. The U.S. was in a free-fall of shock and polarization. She died before the presidency that shook the foundations of my country, before the pandemic and before George Floyd’s brutal death.

She died before my son’s children were born, before my mother’s dementia, physical decline and death, before my family faced yet another familial, generational estrangement that shook our foundations.

In 7 years she’s missed a lifetime.

Poets and artists on death

Too often, psychology isn’t up to dealing with grief or death. Clients have shared how their therapist “doesn’t get it” (often, the therapist is terrified of death and loss too). Many rush in to offer comfort to manage their own anxiety.

Too often, theologians and some pastors offer platitudes that don’t touch the parts that feel irreparable in this lifetime. They fast forward to transcendence and avoid the material world of immanence where sleepless nights, body aches and fraught dreams live.

Often, it’s friends who’ve been there or poets and artists who walk with us in the valley of loss. A week after Janice died, two friends created an ethereal dance to the song Shores of Avalon that matched my otherworldly frame of mind.

My sister knew of these things and talked of them me. We talked like this together. Did she know Death was coming for her?

The Christmas before her diagnosis, she gave my grandson, her bonus grandson, the book, Cry Heart But Never Break.

Maria Popova writes this about the book:

When his mother was dying, as Glenn Ringtved struggled to explain what was happening to his young children, she offered some words of comfort:

“Cry, Heart, but never break.”

It was the grandmother’s way of assuring the children that the profound sadness of loss is to be allowed rather than resisted, then folded into the wholeness of life, which continues to unfold.”

Spiritual Substances

Recently, one of my dearest friends recovered from an accident and traumatic brain injury that nearly took his life. I thought I had lost him. We were talking about some new losses of 2022-23 and how they had fundamentally changed us. He’s been a bulwark for my husband and me in many a dark time.

I asked him, “What’s different for you?”

He said, “The compassion.”

In the shadow of death, in facing self doubt and letting go of our illusion of control, we both tasted the disorienting vulnerability of loss and the vanity of we mortals.

We got knocked from our contracted self- interest, younger self-righteousness…plunged into humility and softened by time.

I know a way to counter the chaos of an entropic universe: Sit in my proverbial monk’s cell when things fall apart.

This may not make sense to simply sit, but stay with me:

Death and loss are primal motivators to shift attention from suffering to sensation which gathers you into Presence.

My greatest frustration is I can’t explain this to you.
It takes practice.

It feels like this:
I feel my breath. There.
I smell the strawberries. There.
I hear the timbre of the voices of my husband, my children, my friends. There.
I am here.
All is not well, all is well.

It is highly sensory. Time shifts. I can’t run away from myself.
Sorrow won’t let me.
I can’t go back to yesterday before I knew this death…this loss…this estrangement.

When I sit in my cell…which is actually a chair in my bedroom, my office, my car, my kitchen…and the Pause from unconscious, shallow breath to awareness of the sensation of breath is a choice to be undead or alive.

When I am undead, I breathe, but I am numb, afraid, panicked.

I am not alive.

When I am alive, I feel my body, this breath…I taste, smell, touch, see and hear…now, in this way, after this loss. My body knows I am alive.

I can’t orchestrate it in my way or my timing. I have tried.

I know when I start to feel alive again.

I gather attention to a sensate focal point.

If I cling to what if’s and why’s and the suffering in my mind, I am undead out of the gate. I don’t get to choose what unfolds. I just get to choose to be alive and wait.

Cynthia Bourgeault, who wrote Love is Stronger than Death, puts it this way:

I have companioned many across thresholds brought on by death and loss.

Like many others, I wouldn’t go back to the me before each loss.

Each loss mirrors our limitations, our capacity for sturdiness, forgiveness and love’s impossible demands.

The me after each loss grows more tender. I am have grown familiar with the rhythms of sorrow and grief. After Patty died, I felt guilt when I felt joy. At 65, joy is almost sacramental.

I am open to joy because of impermanence, because of death, because of age, because spring turns so quickly into autumn.

The village

Here’s what I know most: all of us will suffer loss. You. Me. Our children. I know the desire to close the blinds, shut out the world and imagine we are alone.

Yet when we trust ourselves to trust people, to allow ourselves to be held, to be comforted, to receive the love of people who care about us, others can carry some of the burden…do the things we cannot do.

I still remember my parents on either side of my brother holding an elbow when he could barely walk up the aisle at his wife and baby’s funeral when I was worried he would collapse under the weight of who he had lost.

Some have no idea what to say and this is alright with me. I read memes instructing people what to say to grieving people. This can be helpful, but we are so different, aren’t we? I no longer pass judgment on people who say the wrong thing at the wrong time. I know it’s another diversion from the grief gnawing at my bones. They showed up. That matters more and more to me.

Do you know I still remember almost every person who attended father’s funeral. Why was I so surprised they came?

They knew loss too.

Thresholds Meditation

After each Thresholds writing, there is a meditation. It is meant as an offering for you as you sit in your own cell with whatever is landing in your life in this moment in time.

Here is a 3 centered meditation for you to try as a practice. If you’ve never meditated, be patient with yourself. I could barely sit for 5 minutes when I first tried.

PAUSE. Breathe and feel the felt sense of your inhale and exhale.
Feel the felt sense of your feet making contact with the floor or cushion.
Feel the weight of your body.
Tighten your jaw and then relax it. Do the same with your neck.
Once your body is a little more settled, choose a phrase and let your attention rest in your heart or belly center as you breathe this phrase:

• May I be open to the pain of grief.

• May I find the inner resources to be present for my sorrow.

• May I accept my sadness, knowing I am not my sadness.

• May I accept my anger, fear, anxiety, and sorrow.

• May I accept my grief, knowing that it does not make me bad or wrong.

• May forgive myself for not meeting my loved ones needs.

• May I forgive myself for mistakes made and things left undone.

• May I be open with myself and others about my experiences of suffering and loss.

• May I find peace and strength that I may use my resources to help others.

• May all those who grieve be released from their sorrow.

Source: Being with Dying, Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death Joan Halifax, Shambhala Publishers, Reprinted 2009