Emotional Terrain: Grief-3
[Exploring Life] It has been just over one year since my parents passed away. The feeling of their absence remains poignant, yet there is a greater sense of acceptance of the loss. It is clear to me that we do not “get over” the loss of someone important in our lives. Grief is an amazingly agile and powerful emotional creature. Earlier I wrote about how grief changes our orientation to time and place. At that time, I had no idea just how stealth grief can be. That is to say, grief can patiently wait within our inner landscape and suddenly reveal itself as a torrential emotional storm that catches us unaware. The experience is perhaps more acute if, like me, the initial feelings of grief were repressed in order to “take care of things.”
Death creates absence in life. After the loss of a loved one, it is perfectly normal to experience a disruption of body, mind, and spirit. We may even withdraw from social settings for a while so that we can heal. When someone dies we are overwhelmed by the immensity of the mystery we live inside of. As a result, our thinking may become unsettled, we may feel deep levels of sadness and emptiness, and confusion over how to proceed in life. As we move through our grief, we learn to accept its message and we begin to experience a new perspective in life. Even though we may feel as though we have reached a place of acceptance, grief may inform us otherwise. Grief can be mercurial; a sudden (and completely unexpected) upsurge of grief may overwhelm us so completely that we lose our ability to function in the present moment. These experiences are known as STUGs (a rather unpleasant sounding acronym for sudden temporary upsurge of grief) and present themselves after we have presumed a return to a normal state of functioning. To use play on words from a saying about the past, we may be done with our grief, but our grief may not be done with us.
A Sudden Upsurge: The word sudden implies that we are not forewarned about the approach of grief. If grief makes a sudden appearance, then we are caught completely off guard; the sudden appearance of grief creates an immediate system-wide shock to body, mind and spirit. Because it is so sudden we may feel fear itself, that is, we don’t even know it is grief that is about to kidnap our experience, and catapult us into an unfamiliar and disturbing netherworld of raw pressurized emotion. On one occasion I could feel myself just being “off” so to speak without really knowing why I was feeling the way I was feeling. As the internal emotional pressure continued to intensify, it eventually only took a very simple catalyst to open the floodgates and unleash a torrent of pure unfiltered raw emotion. On another occasion I was having a discussion with my wife and felt quite fine, until I was suddenly taken over by a profound sense of grief intimate with the passing of my mother that had physicality about it I have never encountered before. The experience was so disturbing and impassioned that I was unable to sleep that night and required much of the next day to return to normal. Grief had suddenly hijacked my body, mind and spirit simultaneously, and with great ease.
An upsurge refers to a rapid rise or swelling. The word surge captures images of waves and the flow of water increasing in capacity and voracity. An emotional upsurge is the rapid rise of an emotion from deep within up to the immediate surface of our experience. Grief has both the capacity and voracity to surge over our entire consciousness in a torrent of psychic waves of emotions. A master conductor, grief will masterfully coordinate a vast wash of emotions including, sadness, loss, regret, guilt, anger, anxiety, and fear that strand us on an island of despair. We do not merely cry; we literally move into the essence of the grief with an incredible and relentless intensity. The longer we have attempted to suppress our grief, the greater the potential for becoming physically, mentally, and spiritually marooned in our own emotional backwater. Grief, and the rhythm of emotions it coordinates, does not intend to inflict harm, it is simply looking for authentic expression.
Re-grieving the Past: Memory is immensely creative. It is impossible for us to remember any aspect of our past exactly as we experienced it. We can only remember our past as we interpret it in the present moment. Our “past” then is not really “the” past, but perpetually emerging variations of the past that remain fluid over time. When we remember something, we recreate it in the present moment, and therefore with our present consciousness. A STUG commands us to retrieve a deeply painful past experience in the midst of a sudden emotional torrent that is effortlessly surges across body, mind, and spirit. It inspires a state of mind that may give rise to unusual visions and erratic forays of the imagination. In the midst of a sudden upsurge of grief, we may even begin to question our own sanity, and this temporary retreat of sanity is both natural and necessary to facilitate learning.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross described a five-part model of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Of course, these are not linear, sequential steps conveniently proceeding one after the other. There are no stages to help us understand and navigate a sudden temporary upsurge of grief. Another approach in learning to understand and navigate through grief is the task model in which specific kinds of tasks can be actively worked on and completed in order to facilitate the healing process. The tasks in some way assist us in accepting the reality of loss, to do one’s duty to the deceased, to regain control of our emotions, to find a renewed sense of direction in life, and to embracing the world through a new perspective. There are no exemplary tasks that help us to navigate a sudden temporary upsurge of grief.
A sudden temporary upsurge of grief is an intense phenomenon that invigorates the imagination. That is to say, in the midst of a STUG we are thrust into an alternate reality in which our imagination surges wildly and is completely intoxicated by the violent emotional release. In one experience, my imagination brought me into close proximity with my mother immediately before had passed away. I had already experienced her passing first hand, but now my grief-struck imagination seemed to demand that I feel her death more closely. In this dream-like state I imagined lying with her as she took her final few breaths, yet we were not two separate bodies – we had physically blended together. My mother and I had reunited.
Grief Commands Creative Expression: Emotions are powerful energetic forces that have the power to completely permeate our body, mind, and spirit. They can change the way we interpret the world around, and can take us on vivid and wildly creative journeys of the imagination. Grief is a powerful collection of emotions that conspire to help us learn from the excruciating pain of loss and absence if we allow ourselves to move fully into them. Perhaps we are not naturally oriented toward the exploration of our emotional content as it is often uncomfortable and can sometimes be quite agonizing. It is well known, however, that turning away from or repressing our natural emotional reactions damages our physical, mental, and spiritual well being.
We know with great certainty that avoiding uncomfortable emotions is dangerous to our health on many levels. The energy required to avoid or repress emotions is very significant and only serves to intensify our feelings of stress and anxiety. The repression of emotions gives rise to the creation of abhorrent energy systems that constrict our heart, mind, and spirit. Failing to move into the lessons hidden deep within a grievous emotional landscape is a failure of creative expression. Powerful emotions cannot be contained indefinitely; the repression of grief always ends in an explosive yet liberating upsurge of charged emotion.
Though I am not suggesting that a sudden temporary upsurge of grief is always the result of emotional repression, it is safe to say that the repression of grief can be one possible cause. My mother had no living will (advanced care directive)in place, and she had reached a very advanced point of physical and mental deterioration. Her body was a mere echo of what it is, and her mind had started to fail. Unfortunately, we did not know what her wishes were regarding continued medical care, and it was now too late to ask. While it was clear to me and my family that there was no quality of life left for my mom, the decision to switch her medical treatment from cure to care was made. That is to say, we would now only make her as comfortable as possible and no longer attempt to cure her ongoing medical problems. She died a couple days later.
Just as no parent would want to experience the death of one of their children, no child should have to bear the burden of deciding when to shift the medical treatment for a parent from cure to care. This change in treatment literally means making a person comfortable while they die. Even though it was obvious that the possibility of quality of life had long since passed for my mom, making the right decision can also be excruciating. It is now clear to me that medical technology has given us the ability to keep people alive longer than they may wish to be. Even knowing the decision was the best one possible does not prevent the onset of extreme guilt and regret. Being a Power of Attorney in the absence of a “living will” or advanced care directive places the POA at significant emotional risk.
It is also clear to me that my grieving process started well before my parents passed away. They both experienced a very slow decline over a period of a few years. These final years were marked by numerous hospital visits, intensified medical care, and placement into a nursing home. It was indeed a very sad and heart-wrenching experiencing to participate in. However, my role as POA also meant I had to maintain balance and make level-headed decisions. So I repressed my feelings until well after they had both passed away. And, of course, grief eventually hit me with a vengeance on many occasions.
The Alchemy of Grief: It is a shame that our education systems do little, if anything at all, to help us work with our emotions intelligently. This is, in fact, a striking deficiency. Emotions are a universal experience. We can learn from our emotions and we can improve the ways in which we respond to them. In doing so we improve the quality of our life. Yet we tend to ignore them since, after all, they are often very messy and difficult to perceive. Underneath this thin veneer, however, we all experience the immense and humbling power of emotional turbulence.
Grief can only be transformed by moving directly into it. In the midst of my most recent STUG, I allowed my defenses to fall and encouraged myself to move into the midst of the pain that was emerging. Many times I attempted to turn away from it, but the physicality of it was relentless. I felt physically weak, while my imagination frolicked wildly into ideas and imagery that seemed incredibly vivid. In the midst of grief, the imagination is empowered and invigorated to express itself. Imagination is an immensely powerful force. That night I slept very little and spent the next day utterly exhausted. A day later, however, I had completely recovered.
I suspect that one of the purposes of a sudden temporary upsurge of grief is to compel us to learn something that we might be refusing to face. After this experience I do, in a way I don’t fully understand, feel a sense of resolution regarding my mom’s passing. This is not to say that my grief is resolved and I no longer feel sadness and loss. I am oriented differently to my grief now; I can allow myself to touch and even embrace my grief with being hijacked by it. Of course, this is not to say that I won’t one day be hijacked by it again, but I do sense that grief has led me into a different space of being. All the mercurial and uncomfortable feelings still exist, but I can walk with them a little more easily now.