The Weight of Grief

Photo by Amin Hasani on Unsplash

Carol, an old friend of my parents, is the marriage commissioner here on the island. She married my oldest daughter and her partner at an intimate ceremony on our property this past Saturday. The ceremony was by the pond where we scattered by parents ashes, and where we had a celebration of life for Tucker, our lovely old dog, in May.

We were a small group, only immediate family; four people on our side of the family and sixteen on the groom’s side. Family members travelled from Malaysia, Colorado, France, and the UK. Some had not seen each other for many years. We celebrated. We had fun. We laughed a lot, cried, hugged, talked, and danced.

I expect you are thinking, what a strange beginning to a post about grief. The thing is, this joyous day helped me come to terms with grief I have been accumulating over the past year. I lost my mother, an old friend, and Tucker.

The groom was the last to give his speech. His words were heartfelt and emotional as he spoke of his new wife, daughter, and family. He also remembered the people who left us this year; the bride’s oma, the groom’s grandfather, and his cousin who he was looking forward to seeing at the wedding, but who died tragically several weeks ago.

Now, I am not good with grief. I am not sure what processing grief actually means. I bury my grief, convince myself it has faded, only to realize it is still there when I tear up or sob at unexpected moments. But listening to my son-in-law, and sharing this experience with our new extended family, I felt my grief soften.

Gabrielle (Gabby) Elise Jimenez, an end-of-life doula and hospice nurse, recently wrote about pancake grief in a blog post. Yes, I thought, as I read her words, that is how I cope with grief, tucking it away and allowing it to grow heavier.

Gabby wrote,

Your very first grief experience adds the first pancake to the plate; you see it, you know it's there, you might even ask questions about it, and then you tuck it away. As you get older there is more grief; the end of a friendship, a break-up, you lose a job, you suffer from a serious illness, you lose a friend or an older family member. The pancakes start stacking. As you become an adult and the losses are more personal, the pancakes keep stacking but they are heavier, because for some reason you don't deal with it, you don't talk about it, or work through it, you were probably never taught how ... so you cover it with syrup, hoping that it looks or feels differently to you. And then you have another loss (in this case it was my sister Laura), which is so big you cannot work through it, you cannot even look at it because it feels as though it has ripped you open, so you tuck it in further. Then you lose someone else (my brother Ben), and the reality of all the loss you have experienced, and the grief you never really worked through, faces you... looks you right in the eye and says, "do you see me now?" And your answer is... "Yes... I see all of you." And you find yourself in such deep pain that you don't know what to do.

Our English language does not have sufficient words to describe many of our deepest emotions - love, grief, and sadness, to name only a few. I was excited to discover poet Mary Ruefle’s Color Spectrum of Sadness in Brain Pickings. I mentioned her rainbow of sadness in Fifty Shades of Grey, a blog post about the dark shades of my own depression. Gabby also shared a quote last week that mentioned a range of colours to explain the many nuances of grief. “Grief is every colour in the Crayon box, it is every season, it is rain, it is sunshine, it is thunder and lightning, it is snow, it is a very windy day and sometimes…it is absolutely still and silent…and those are the days I struggle the most.”

Still and silent, she wrote. Yes, I thought, that is also my grief. Unspoken grief, kept private, grief that makes my heart ache at unexpected moments. The wedding, and my son-in-law’s speech, changed that. In the presence of others, experiencing their joy and grief, I was able to release my grief. “Grief has never been private; it has always been communal,” writes psychotherapist and soul activist, Francis Weller. “Subconsciously, we are awaiting the presence of others, before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow.”

Who knew that this wedding would bless me with so much more than I could have hoped for?