Grieving II

New perspectives on the process of grieving continue to surface even as I continue my personal journey through grief. Recently I came across this image of a statue created by Albert György.

The artwork is called Melancholy by Albert György and is on display in Geneva, Switzerland) Read more about the piece and artist here: https://totallybuffalo.com/a-sculpture-that-creates-intense-emotion/

This sculpture profoundly depicts the feeling of emptiness when someone huge in our life dies. The apparent loss is so big, it leaves a sense of emptiness that defies description. I have known that feeling. But I have also learned how to fill that empty whole in my being. It is that knowledge that I hope to convey and share with you my readers. It is my sincere hope, that with my experience, you can find some measure of comfort and some path for filling the emptiness in your heart from your loss.

The first step I have found is to develop a firm belief in the afterlife. This is essential to form a bedrock of hope that the painful separation is not eternal. On this corner stone, a structure can be built with the capacity to provide an authentic comfort in grieving. In fact, it can lead to a depth of appreciation for grief itself.

Once you can extricate yourself from the sadness associated with the painful feeling for the soul deceased, you can begin to work on your feelings of loss and the emptiness that follows.

The next step is to reshape your perspective. I discovered this when a grieving father gave his eulogy for his teenage daughter who had died. He eloquently shared all the things his daughter “passed on” to him that he treasured. He explained that seeing death as “passing on” instead of “passing away” provides a different perspective. I found this to be profound.

Exploring this new perspective, I realized that the “passing away” view produced an implication of the person leaving you, and progressively moving further away each day. Such a view deepens one’s sense of loss. On the contrary, the “passing on” view opens the way to focus on all the wonderfully valuable assets the deceased gave you in life, thereby keeping them close and “alive” in your life.

This is where “prism viewing” comes into the process. Simply stated, prism viewing means looking at life through a specific prism, as with physical prism that reveals the beautiful colors that compose white, invisible light. When I choose to view my loss through the prism of “passing away”, I will see all the reasons why I am losing that person and it intensifies my emptiness. But if I choose the prism of “passing on”, I see and remember all the precious treasured gifts that life with that person gave to me. The emptiness begins to be filled with those treasures. Emptiness is relieved and joy can fill the void.

Every person in your life that precedes you in death, has left you with treasured experiences and memories. Prism viewing helps you remember them. These have been termed “collateral beauty”. A movie of the same name provided a fascinating perspective on this aspect of loss.

I found however, that the most potent positive vision of grieving is what I gleaned from a television show. The show is a drama that takes place in a fictitious hospital emergency room. Code Black is the term for a situation when an emergency room is overwhelmed with critical patients. The resources of equipment and personnel have become insufficient to handle the circumstances.

In one episode, the ER’s lead doctor is speaking to a patient who is not severely injured. He is a psychologist. The doctor is grieving continually for years since a car accident took the lives of her two children.  The patient, with his extensive training and experiences sees her grieving heart. He offers to help her, but she adamantly refuses his offer to help her overcome her grief. She tells him why.

“My grieving is for me the profound evidence that I have deeply loved, and I have been deeply loved. No one will ever take that precious gift away from me. Never.”

That statement opened a very interesting viewpoint for me. It prompted many hours of meditation and deliberation. I concluded, that there was much truth in the following statement.

This love that you shared with the person who passed on does not have the capacity to die. It lives on and there is a place for it to go. It is shared with that person every moment you recall the treasures you shared in life. It revives that feeling of friendship and love that made your life together so special, so important, so blessed.

The love of grief has the power to fill the emptiness and help looking forward to newly resurrected memories from a life well lived and a love deeply shared.

To my readers, I hope these thoughts can help you fill that empty space you feel. I pray that God will open your memories and reveal the many forgotten treasures your loved on passed on to you.

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