Grief Pilgrimage
On the first podcast of season two, I shared with you all about the loss of my father in August. I’ll be honest, it was hard to be so vulnerable; so raw. His death, combined with everything going on in my city, the country, and the world is so so heavy. I feel it in the very core of me.
We are grieving a lot of things these days and as Tony mentioned on the podcast, we in the western world not only do not know how to deal with grief, we purposefully run from it, and numb it, and distract ourselves into thinking that we can avoid it until enough time has passed that it will grow tired of haunting us and go away on its own. COVID has taken away many of these distractions and left us isolated and sitting right in the middle of emotions we barely know how to express.
One of the first things I learned about grief when I went through my divorce many years ago is that it is not linear. More than that, it is sneaky and I’m sorry to say, has no specific timeline. When you are grieving, there is no one moment when, after slogging along for months or even years, you arrive at the end of your grief pilgrimage and can celebrate your big finish. Although I did literally walk a ‘grief pilgrimage’ on the Camino as I mourned my divorce, I continued to grieve for many years, and still to this day, even in a new relationship, experience grief over what happened in my marriage and the emotional scars I wear as a result.
The good news is, time is truly the great healer and the burden does become lighter, but as I stated, the scars never really go away. Perhaps a better metaphor is that grief is an injury that at first is unbearably painful but after a few years only hurts when you push your body too far or try to engage in something that exacerbates the movement that caused the pain in the first place.
One of the things that I found incredibly helpful in my grieving process during that time was creating small ceremonies along the way to grieve the things I had lost. On specific days that had been special to us, I made sure to mark them for myself. (I did a lot of ceremonial picture burning the year after my divorce.) I wanted to acknowledge that these days had meaning, importance in my life. In our culture, it is more common to try to forget and ignore those things and I, for one, think that only makes it worse. It is vital to allow yourself to feel and express what you have lost.
The challenge with the loss of my father is that I haven’t even come to terms with what exactly I am grieving at this moment. The grieving started years, probably even decades ago, when I knew that the relationship I had with my father would never be the one I hoped for. As I navigate this strange time, my heart feels schizophrenic and confused. Just as in my divorce, I feel love and loss one day and anger and relief the next. I, however, don’t have those moments to mark in the relationship with my father as I did in my marriage because we were not close. We didn’t have special days or things we did together. Even if I wanted to, I have no pictures of us to burn. I have only one picture of us in my possession where we are dancing the father-daughter dance at my wedding, and it is precious to me. I don’t display it for obvious reasons, but I love it because my dad had the most wonderful and rare smile on his face. He was proud and happy that day and I will always cherish the memory of that dance.
So, how do I walk this particular trail of grief; this new pilgrimage? Even though I have walked it before, I still don’t have a map and feel even more unsure of myself. I can’t engage in the practices that I found served me in the past.
When I was a child, perhaps 6 or 7, my family was visiting friends and I found a dead butterfly on a dock by the lake. It wasn’t terribly pretty and it was very small, but I thought it was beautiful. I showed my father and he must have seen that I loved it and carefully picked it up to transport home. He created a small frame out of popsicle sticks around the butterfly and then poured in resin so that I could display it in my bedroom. It reminds me of the rare moments when I felt loved by my father. It too, is precious to me.
My family is heading to the beach in early October to spend the weekend together and scatter my dad’s ashes at one of his favorite places on the Oregon coast. I am not sure what each of us will say or do. My family is not particularly good at expressing emotions. Perhaps I will take the butterfly with me. When I hold it in my hand I can feel the smoothness of the resin between my fingertips and it is calming. Maybe I will share what it signifies and what it has meant to me all these years. Maybe I won’t. What I am absolutely sure of is that each of us, whether we admit it or nor, need this ceremony. We need this day to express and mark our grief together.
Together.
This word is the difference between this grief experience and the last. This time I am not alone. I know that if we can walk this pilgrimage together - if we can share our grief, the burden will be lighter for us all.
