By Sherrie Ann Cassel
Any day in life is filled with all sorts of experiences, for example, tense exchanges with shitty bosses, good camaraderie with great colleagues, laughter, tears, ad infinitum. When you’ve lost a loved one, someone with whom you shared a time in a relationship of some significance and intensity, a day in the life is infinitely many configurations of infinitely many mutable parts – like trying to catch a feather in a dust devil. Love is an abstraction, perhaps even an adaptation toward survival, with a single individual or with a collective, in my opinion.
Whether or not love is an adaptation, one thing is certain, however; love appears to be a need as deep as the ocean and as wide as the expanding and contracting universe, breathing in love, breathing out isolation and loneliness. Grief is like love; it is a necessary exercise in our personal development. When it hits you, you are always ill-prepared.
Grief is one of those life experiences that is inescapable. We each have moments of grief, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be because of the physical loss of a person. When I had cancer in the early 90s, I had a hysterectomy, and it wasn’t so much the actual organ I missed, but it was what a uterus represented, in fact, what it has represented historically to the human race: the ability to procreate.
I am still in grief over the loss of my son, and I disagree with those who say suffering is optional. In the early days of grief, suffering is absolutely necessary. The loss of a loved one hurts at the level of the viscera, deep into the nerve center of your blown mind. There’s a fair amount of messiness one must claw her way through.
Certainly, one will not sob convulsively for a lifetime, at least, that’s the goal. We must return to our lives, transformed, more insightful about ourselves and more compassionate toward others. Liberation is waiting on the other side of suffering.
I’ve learned a great deal about life through suffering. I learned that as with my son’s short life, and as with the lives of all who are born into this magnificent world, all things have an end date. I have found the Buddhist precept of non-attachment to be a bit easier since the loss of my son and only child. I held on so tightly to him during his life that when I lost him it was as if my heart was torn right out of my chest, and there was a gaping wound, blood gushing over the different layers of muscle and skin, and through the ragged arteries, ragged because of their violent separation from the heart.
Whether you believe in the existence of the soul, the pain from losing a loved one, is not just physical; it is also metaphysical. There’s a heaviness on your chest that can be truly frightening the first time you feel it. I thought I was having a heart attack, and twice I went to the emergency room to be told I has having a panic attack.
Your brain has to make sense of the loss, and the absence of one’s presence is felt profoundly, and since it is a new experience in your relationship with your loved one, you are temporarily aphasic as you work to make sense of someone’s non-existence. Where did he go? Why did he go? What do I do now?
I knew how to be in relationship with my son, with many blunders along the way, but he was here to offer me feedback in our mostly symbiotic relationship. I don’t know how to be in a relationship with a ghost, an apparition, a memory.
Forging a new relationship with a loved one who has passed is also necessary in my experience. Meaning comes after an unimaginable amount of work. I felt painfully misunderstood when someone said to me, “There is a reason for everything.” There was no reason for my son’s death. Certainly, there was causation, but a reason, some purpose, some lesson I needed to learn, no. Nearly three years would pass before I began to see that making meaning was my responsibility. My responsibility was to take my experience and make it meaningful, not just for me, but for others too.
I believe we grow in relationship through one another. I am who I am because you mirror for me the characteristics you find most complement your own, poor self-images notwithstanding, and we merge our perceptions, one into another.
I started a Facebook page eight months after my son died. The site is experience- and relationship-specific. I tried three different counselors early in my process, but none was adept at working with a grieving person desperate for comfort. Seeing someone in abject pain is extremely difficult, even for professionals, some who have only minimal training in grief.
I was desperately seeking understanding – and I was not getting it from conventional human resources. I remembered, however, a study done about the success of peer-to-peer support groups. I needed someone to talk with who knew exactly about my type of grief, and there are many types. Grief is not just grief. Some deaths have stigma attached and in some of the catch-all grief groups, some grievers fear recriminations in response to their loved one’s type of death.
There are many online grief groups for several types of experiences and losses. One may pick and choose from a wide variety of groups. After the Storm is specifically for parents/parent figures who have lost a child or children to addiction. The type of drug was not a consideration, but in the face of the opioid crisis, heroin, fentanyl, oxycontin, and oxycodone, a tragically growing population of parents who grieve do so because their child or children succumbed to accidental deaths from using opioids. Many who struggle with addiction have dual diagnoses, e.g. addiction and bipolar disorder. Grief is complicated; it may be a common experience, but there are many components to grief, regardless of how your loved one died.
Finding the right group for your loss is essential. I had attended grief groups and therapy sessions that were a complete waste of time. I left as bereft as when I first arrived. I found my way to a few online groups, but some of them were pits of despair, and I so needed some hope that I would start to feel better, that I would find some comfort, that peace was possible. I wanted desperately to return to the world, one I knew wouldn’t be the same without my son in it, but one where joy was possible again, and I wanted to offer my vision of emotional wellness and resiliency to others as much as I needed to be surrounded by people/parents who truly understood, not just the loss, but also understood the chaos that precedes the death of someone who has struggled with the disease of addiction for some time and all the emotional rigor that comes along with it.
Again, finding a group that fits your particular loss is very important. If you can’t find one, start one. Starting the Facebook page was the best and most proactive thing I’ve done since my son died. He did not die so I could find purpose in his death. He died, and it is my life’s work to find purpose in my experience from losing him.
Choking on my own tears, not being able to catch my breath from crying so violently, benching myself from life, and volitional isolation were necessary steps on my ascension from despair to hope to healing. There was always a roiling of deep emotional sludge working its way up to where impurities could be skimmed off. With things like guilt, regret, and anger sloughed away, I have been left with a joie de vivre. I admit, achieving tiny manageable meltdowns has taken a significant amount of work on my part, but I am grateful that the intensity has lessened to fewer days of chronicity. Sharing my pain with safe others and listening to them share their pain, has been the most healing thing I’ve done for myself – and by extension – it has illustrated to others, internationally, their own ability to grow through their pain, and to express their utter heartbreak unabashedly and unashamedly .
Suffering is optional? Suffering is a natural experience in the human condition. I was arrogant to think I would escape a loss so great and thus escape suffering. There are days when I suffer, not by choice; there are days when everything is a trigger and my loss comes hurtling into my chest and it knocks me on my ass, and all of me is in agony; those times don’t last quite as long anymore. The first year and a half of my grief process, agony was my homeostasis. I went through the motions of living, but I felt empty and dead inside.
In the third year after Rikki died, I started living again. I reinvigorated long-time dreams and brought them to fruition. I am allowing myself to be of service to others. I am not alone in my grief or in this world. I seek community, not just a grieving one either. I seek community in several circles. I ask myself, Where will I be of most value to a person or a group.
My purpose in life is two-fold: one, I must be responsible for my personal growth into a person of substance, and two, I must be responsible for having a compassionate approach to all living things. I didn’t learn these things to give meaning to my son’s death. I learned these things by working my grief process. One day I woke up and asked myself, what contribution am I making to my world?
Grief will not be the end of me.
My heart has been transformed through the process and it has been placed back into my chest, and it is beating strongly again, and my meltdowns are tiny even though the loss remains monumental. I have found my footing again. I have not completed the grief journey, however; only death will end that journey. Until then, I walk proudly and resolutely in my life, hand in hand with my now tolerable pain and occasional suffering. My life’s task is to take my suffering and re-purpose it into something useful, something beneficial to others.
At no time in my life am I exempt from suffering. When it comes, I must navigate its complexities — I must welcome its accompaniment for the duration of my physical life and I must dance to the dirge as well as to the music of celebration.
I’ll put a pebble in my shoe
And watch me walk (watch me walk)
I can walk
“By my Side” — Godspell
Grief to Gratitude 