Unnaccustomed to Grief

“And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

~T.S. Eliot

People die every day. With millions of mothers, children, sons of the grandfathers and grandmothers gone, there is much to be grieved. As an adult, working intimately within numerous ecosystems, I have become aware there are stations of grief surrounding the loss of each specific. Everyday entire species are wiped from their planet, forests are demolished by the chain, and wet plains are drained to their death. The systems of life remaining run askew in their process of grief; thriving colonies of bugs begin to lose their number, the shelter of trees now flattened leave plants exposed to a sun they’ve never known to be so hot, a wind they’ve never known to be so harsh. Humans, whether mourning the loss of a particular parent or tree, or overwhelmed in conceiving of all the loss ever known, or simply being “at a loss” of knowing how to be complete, now, amongst the change of scenery, are left within their compromised state, in charge of themselves. ‘Themselves’ having the largest impact on the earth than any other “self” to date. Standing upon the soiled stage of this world, we bare witness to the toil of our ancestors.

The ground below, fashioned by centuries past, provides the foundation on which we erect our bodily temples and roam from space to space, finding our place in the world. Cultured with centuries of slavery, war, greed, love, and generosity, humans are kept afloat a stream of life whose source is irrevocably adrift our immediate memory. Available in myth, retold in family stories, and although experienced in the consequences of such a rift, our beginnings cannot be known, or lived through again, as it were, to see where we slipped. We have fallen and now we must rise to the challenge; to be or not to be is the question that has been brought to face.

It only takes a quick look around at humanities current mode of being and relating to the biosphere to realize that something has gone terribly wrong. We are fueling our days with the fossils of the past- our ancestors bones are burning black the skies. There are lies caught in our lungs, our tongues and our hands are tied. Have been tied since birth, our beginning, have they not? Having had personal run-ins with chronic illness, bouts of depression, bewildering traumatic tendencies, and undergoing existential despair, I am made aware of carrying a concentration of crisis, of grief, unprecedented or explainable by my collective experiences alone. Joanna Klink sums up my thoughts starkly in her poem, And Having Lost Track, “I passed a garden under snow, a half-open book, / a man unaccustomed to grief. / And thought: what must I do differently.”

Our footprints are too noticeable now. There is no more thieving away into earth’s winter night taking whatever one pleases, the oil has been spilt, there are people are watching (and not much left for the taking). Stepping into the second decade of the new millennium, monopolizing the earth resources means death. With approximately seven billion people and eighty percent# of the earth’s forests annihilated under the guise of “survival”- one hundred percent of our oxygen is being supplied by the remaining twenty percent of sparsely scattered forests; our house plants and gardens will only get us so far. Yet we are still here. Our book has been opened- the pages of our days, our joys, hopes, fears and loves pulse through us with each waking breath- so, what must we do differently? How can we become more accustomed to grief?

Approaching this question I turned David Abram’s book, The Spell of the Sensuous, which gives us perspective of an alternate ground to work from, he writes;

As long as we structure our lives according to assumed parameters of a static space and rectilinear time, we will be able to ignore, or overlook, our thorough dependence upon the earth around us. Only when space and time are reconciled into a single, unified field of phenomena does the encompassing earth become evident, once again, in all its power and its depth, as the very ground and horizon of all our knowing. (217)

Abram suggests here that “all our knowing” is made available within the coalescence of the past and future. Allowing that ‘which has been’ to be married with ‘that which will be’ is the very source of present space. This infinite awareness of presence honors the extensiveness of time, which has brought us to where we are, while simultaneously grasping the all-encompassing expansiveness of space which supports our stance, livelihood, and the living hoods in which we dwell. Herman Hesse said it sweetly in Siddhartha, “Have you also learned that secret from the river, that there is no such thing as time?...The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth.” Taking this standpoint, all that we could ever need to know, about healing ourselves and our planet for instance, is held within this presence. On the other hand, however loud and clear our “problems” are, the answers are elusive and require a certain depth of presence not many of us have ventured through. Abram calls on phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty in reference to the not readily seen forces or sources of knowledge around us; “...we could say we are searching for certain invisible aspects of the visible environment, certain unseen regions whose very hiddenness somehow enables or makes possible the open visibility of the land around us” (212). Not to venture too far from the question of grief and personal responsibility let us explore some of these “invisible aspects” of our immediate self which “makes possible” our existence.

Although there is an expansive atmosphere pumping us full of life with every breath, what are the hidden aspects of life held within our most intimate landscapes? What can be discerned from the terrain of our primary relationship to the body, the vessel from which we claim physical space? Kept safely hidden, yet ever so slightly noticed to a present and stilled observer, is the pulse. The sap of our flesh and bones. Where does this blood come from? I know where I got mine. My mother and father gifted it to me. With the magic of something I have yet to remember passing through, the sperm encoded with the essence of my father found my mother’s egg and conjoined within a safe holding watery womb where I, by means of the umbilical cord, was gifted the sources of life; oxygen and blood. Those privy to the physiological sciences could explain more readily the biological processes that occur in this exchange of life-giving saps. They could go into detail about the genetic exchange making us “specifically” offspring of our parents and not some toss of the dice orphan ‘belonging’ (I use this word loosely) to no particular blood line. It suits me enough to simply point to the connection already designed between blood, the genetic information encoded within DNA, and the specific generational tendencies of our bodies in order to correlate such testable findings to the discovery of the more elusive, more hidden aspect of our existence; that concerning the psychological and spiritual ancestral inheritance.

Imagine for a moment that you are standing within a massive cave. This subterranean space is your ancestral cavern; time is marked by the very narrow opening of light streaming in from the opening. Those that have come before you, your parents, grandparents, and the great greats, recede from you to rest within their placement of time. You stand at the end of the line. With the years of your life determining the dimensions of your space, the cave behind you opens wide with the years of your ancestors past. The walls are encoded with your family struggles; the earthly vibrations rock your current position. Depicted on the rocks are animated symbols dancing the hearts story of lost loves, burdened choices, addictions, ruler ships, murders, suicides- all that has come to pass through the emotional and spiritual lives of your ancestors support and decorate the very structure surrounding. The space is filled with trapped dense energy found in the dark and buried behind each death; the stories are left incomplete, the traumas endured have yet to be healed and their only hope is the light at the end of the tunnel. With density seeking relief, all the energy funnels into you; the living, the one closest to freedom. Now imagine your heart as this cave. The pump gifted to keep the blood alive. You are this living creation. The only way out is toward the light.

Illuminating these historical stories playing out within you and reconciling time and space into the presence of your being is the heart from which to ask the question: what must I do differently? It is our choice to step through and be birthed, although with the weight we are carrying, the contractions are intense; the labor long and difficult. As mentioned before, the process of grief, although given credit in most cultures as being a natural, even healthy, emotional occurrence to be experienced after loss, has many more complex and mysterious counter effects than typically recognized. Just as the landscape has its subterranean graves, the horizon its foreign countries, and our bodies’ safe kept heart, grief is full of secrets.

Attending to the elusive aspects of grief we find that the word stems from grever meaning “afflict, burden, oppress,” and gravare “to make heavy.” This understanding implies that grief is caused by a weight, “to make heavy” signaling us to the same emotional burdens experienced after the loss of some specific which we had grown intimately acquainted with. Interestingly, although many feel oppressed by uncontrollable pulses of “grief” in the experience of loss, the opposite effect, at least on the physical level, has occurred. The act of losing someone or something, is actually a release, the taking away from, not the adding “to make heavy” as the word implies. So beyond the condition of weighty feelings that stand in the void once loss has been experience, what has been added within ones psychology to a point of feeling like a brutal burden? I am suggesting this concentration; this weight experienced and implied in the word grief is contributed by a total emotional and spiritual ancestral transference placed upon the successors at the time of a family member’s death.

From the moment of our birth we carry a portion of this weight. With our hands tied from the start, we go about our days interacting with specific psychological tendencies comparable to the inclinations of our genetic makeup which leave us more susceptible to specific physiological difficulties. We, unknowingly (at least not typically at the conscious level), step into a phantom family process that has been coursing through the various veins of kin since time immemorial. At the death of our ascendants the psycho-spiritual burden is no longer shared, but fully transmitted into the living descendants. The shock of this interchange occurs simultaneous with the more readily acknowledged aspects of grief.

How are we to relate to this new surreptitious state of being as it pulls the strings of our heart through unexplored, yet deeply entrenched modes of emotion and response? What can be expected once this ancestral weight, this grief is acknowledged? Although I am not convinced the “Stages of Grief” as outlined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross provide an absolute in the process of grief, it does provide a useful model for investigating some of the possible emotional interplay at hand when we come to face our family fate. Let us take a look:

Denial: A quick wiki search leaves us with some basic ideas. According to Sigmund Freud's understanding of this psychological idea, “Denial is a defense mechanism...in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.” Freud considered three manifestations of denial, each having its own spin on how a person tends to deal with the unwelcome fact presented. For our purposes we’ll keep it simple. There is a direct stress or an unexplainable claustrophobia experienced after, seemingly with no conscious choice, the psycho-spiritual “baggage” of our forefathers makes its way into our closets. We may have many hints of what has occurred, for instance, certain circumstantial crisis suddenly appear in our lives that ring a hauntingly familiar bell, or you notice that your usual unhealthy tendencies become amplified (or a partner realizes for you!). Yet there is a tendency to look the other way, putting blinders up, and refuse that these “issues” are now yours to deal with, or act flippant at the idea of something so utterly “impossible!”

Anger: Personally, I still have waves of this “stage” (makes me wonder just how many of my ancestors had a tendency to repress this emotion). It can be maddening to be placed with limitations seemingly out of one’s control. We have been fed the line “freedom of choice,” so many times it becomes agonizing to digest such a foreign or esoteric idea of karmic destiny. I remember waves of being furious that I, “didn’t do anything to deserve this pain,” and cursed the skies for being so opposed to someone supposedly as simple and sweet natured as I. Sadly, the more I fought and resisted the state of discomfort, with all the questions of purpose and contemplations of ill-fate that it brought up for me, the more debilitating the pain.

Bargaining: Perhaps because I consider myself to still be inundated with this process myself it is difficult to not be biased in reference to the particulars of this concept. I believe that the shadowy aspects of the unconscious battles with the conscious mind pulling out every sly maneuver it knows to manipulate the situation. Oh, by the way, here is another thing to be angry about: recovery from these ancestral trends is an uphill battle, both ways, in thousands and thousands years of snow! As soon as we think we have everything “under control” something will trigger our own conscious or unconscious self-deceit and oppress us with “another one of those days.”

Depression: It’s overwhelming. We are tired; we have too much on our plates already. It seems hopeless. And I am helpless, so don’t try to show me love, because I can’t handle it, I must not deserve it, because look at me, I am a mess, etc. etc. This process applies to both the unconscious process building its proof from the case studies of your health and sense of well-being as well as a conscious process of your family dynamics. Some people become so deflated by what is playing out amongst their family they choose to avoid the reminder any chance they get. Shall we discuss the increase of suicides, accidents, and death rates during the holidays? Let’s pass, we all know the mixed sense of ecstatic hope/joy, squelched with a “more than we bargained for” sense of dread.

Acceptance: Ahhhhhhhh..........

While alive, breathing this earth as a manifest being, the architecture of our individuality is built upon the product of potentialities. Life, our blood-force, offers the opportunity and is the playing field from which to heal and transmute the propensities passed down through the generations.

There are many human beings who throughout their lives and at the moment of their death lag behind their own potentialities and-even more important-behind the knowledge which has been brought to consciousness by other human beings during their own lifetimes. Hence their demand to attain in death that share of awareness which they failed to win in life. ~Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (308-9)

When your mother is still alive she has the potential through the means of awareness to uplift her inner inclinations which create, for her and her environment, an effect opposite wholeness. You, having shined a light into the dark and neglected chamber of your ancestral heart, can also heal the both of you by bringing your own attention to the wound. This act, with the perception of time-space as explored by Abram (and many others), has the potential to heal the particular process at hand for the entire family; past, present, and future. It also has its reverberations upon the very space in which you reside. No longer eclipsing the earth with our hearts shadows we can contribute fresh light, clear water, pure blood and live the change exploding into unexplored territory in the every direction.

Where I sit now typing, beyond this screen of my own exploration, I see white walls. Dissolving myself into this moment I am held within a blank canvas of infinite light. There is a fresh snow on the ground outside, a cars cautious red light, and I am warned to take care during these slippery times. A bus idles at the stop, graduate students board slowly, reminding me that I have already come so far but now must ride with the others in my family toward the higher understanding of “all our knowing.” There are leafless branches and a bush with red berries not even the birds have touched. As I breathe this spent apartment air one of my hearts compartments shows up in the window pane, for when I look out on the dark wintry scene I am able to see the earth only beyond my own reflection.

To be outside the classifiable world,

and having lost track,

and having heard no message.

(...)

And walked in the dark world,

everywhere shaking with light.

That we only exist. That we do not

have the means. And are free to take place."

~ Joanna Klink