Is it necessary to forgive — even posthumously?

By Sherrie Cassel

Mom would be eighty-four today. I miss her so very much. We drove each other crazy — often; this is common in dysfunctional families, but…we loved each other fiercely; it’s called trauma bonding.

Mom always liked to be the first person to call each of her children on his or her respective birthday, even if it meant calling at 4 a.m. – the one day you get to sleep in. I never thought I’d miss her early, very early morning phone calls to tell me some horrific news story she’d read, or that someone in the family had died, or just to chat because she was missing me. I miss that too.

How do we grieve the loss of someone with whom we’ve had a tres complicated, or even a tempestuous relationship?

I love the caution to not speak ill of the dead. I’m sure there must be some superstition attached to the sentiment, or out of respect for a corpse with no feelings, or any number of etymologies that lead back to our tendency toward irrationalism when things begin to hurt. I’m sure as a little girl I must have held my dear sweet, complicated, and broken mother on a pedestal. And as my cognition began to develop, questions began to emerge. Why does someone say he or she loves you and then he or she hurts you – sometimes for decades? Shit happens…and there are times when we are truly victims, but just like some childhood allergies, we outgrow them, or at the very least, we find a treatment plan that assuages or even eradicates the pesky symptoms.

Birthdays, angelversaries, anniversaries, and other significant days are triggers for every emotion from sadness to elation. Mom’s birthday has given me pause for thought. Our grandson, a sage for a sixteen-year-old, and I were discussing forgiveness for certain family members in our historical dramatic histories that merged into one complicated ball of intermittent toxicity, and occasionally, a breath of fresh air. Our grandson has a difficult time with forgiveness, but his heart is loyal to those he loves, and he rightly places the responsibility on the perpetrators who hurt his loved ones. He doesn’t understand, yet, at sixteen, that the anger at such a young age without resolution will not serve him well as he advances into independent living. Anger affects every aspect of relationships.

But …

Is forgiveness a necessary action to be performed before one can move forward into liberation? What do you think? I’m of the mind that one does not need to forgive; one doesn’t even need to find grace for those responsible for our deep wounds. I love hearing stories about when people can walk away from their abusive parents and never look back. Most of those people seem to soar into freedom from unhealthy attachments, while others seethe until their end of day.

We can choose to carry into every second of our fleeting lives the anger, the shame, the victim mentality, whatever it may be that will keep us from growing into our greatest selves – and that keeps us from transcending our pain.

My mom and I hurt each other in a million different ways. As a mother, she was broken beyond belief, but in her own limited way, she loved me, and in my need to be loved by her, I painted a picture of her that was not representative of my reality with her. She was loving – on occasion. She was cruel – on occasion. She was encouraging – on occasion. She was shaming – on occasion. She was imperfect, and rather than forgiveness, I’ve chosen to search for answers to the whys I had my entire childhood. Why doesn’t momma love me? Why does momma hurt me if she loves me? What’s wrong with me?

And yet … the little girl who always needed a loving and emotionally-well mother still yearns for that mother. My dear sweet, tortured mother has been gone for two years now. She would have been 84 on this birthday. She lived a very long life, and she is fortunate to have found joy in her old age. I don’t know, as I told our grandson, if I have forgiveness for her, but I have found grace for her through understanding her own historical trauma. Monsters, even those whose horrid behavior presents only intermittently, are created in dysfunctional homes – since time immemorial.

I love my mother – the parts of her that were lovable. The ways she hurt me, because she was not self-aware enough to get the help she needed, no longer have the intensity in their sting. I get it. I acknowledge that she could be equally as cruel as she could be kind.

Grief is complicated even when the relationships were not.

I wish I could say that all mothers have the maternal instinct to protect their offspring, their babies, their children, but it’s not true. I think sometimes we are drawn to horror stories, i.e., holocaust literature, accounts of abuse, rape, murder, sad songs and stories, and whatever sensationalizes and snaps us right out of our own descents into apathy when we’re triggered because those stories bring with them the absolute reality that someone may actually have had it worse than you and – she survived it.

We love victory stories – uber frau and uber mensch, superhero stories. Who better to emulate than someone who has been dragged through shit and against all odds grew into something beautiful? I will tell you this about my mother. She had developmental delays because of all the abuse she endured from her grandmother, aunts, and my father. There might, at first glance, appear to be no benefits to her nightmare, but one looks for blessings even when the world is darkest. Mom never really aged physically. She never developed an old lady’s voice. Her skin was smooth. She dyed her hair until she transitioned. I’ve inherited her vanity. She presented her best self even when she was tired, or angry, or sad, or frustrated. Mom always dressed to the nines, even in her end of days when she sat at home in her chair watching her shows with few visitors.

Forgiveness is not a one and done deal; it’s a process that, if it’s important to us to mend fences, we wash, rinse, and repeat – sometimes daily. I just know that if I have to bite my tongue ‘til it bleeds, the relationship is not worth it to me and, even if ending a relationship hurts, sometimes for one’s self-preservation, it becomes so stressful that you will need to just walk away.

That’s among the greatest form of self-care one can implement in her life. Have I forgiven my mother – on this her 84th birthday? Maybe I have. I helped to take care of her after my father died; a promise I made to him on his deathbed. I kept that promise. I found grace for her.

Some of us suffer for decades before we can finally exhale.

How do you grieve someone with whom tension and love were the poles you learned to navigate between – her world, not yours? I guess, you learn to take moments like these to dissect the memories as you navigate a history that resembles your own. My mother made snow cones out of snow for us – and then she called me a whore. I got tired of extremes – both of my parents waged war against their histories, each other, themselves, and their children.

Grief is funny – it is as complicated as we are. Perhaps I’m confused about what the right thing to do is/was. I couldn’t walk away during her life, although I tried a couple of times. I still lap up the limited love she was able to mete out to each of her children. All of us feel, save one, that she got shorted. The truth is all of us did. Mom had a very limited emotional reserve. See, I get all of these limitations, peccadilloes, and flat-out crimes against her children – we are made in the image of our creators.

I have no doubt my mother wanted to love me well. She was never loved well, and so, the children suffer for the sins of the fathers (and the mothers or other primary caretakers). I miss her for the times we were able to stand in front of the curtain that hid all of our skeletons and pretend none of it ever happened.

And … especially in dysfunctional relationships…all the world’s a stage…and we are spectacular actors improvising as we adapt daily to the toxic soup of our families of origin.

How will I celebrate my mother’s birthday? I acknowledged the day with my younger brother, and then, I will go about my day. I’m no longer overly sentimental about my mom’s absence. Sure, there are times I need a mother, but I’ve learned to do that for myself, or I reach out to my living mother goddesses for emotional support.

I wish it hadn’t taken me sixty-three years to learn how to do that for myself, but it did. My mother learned self-care later in life; history repeats itself…until it doesn’t.

At any rate, happy birthday, Mom. If there is a heaven, I know you’re there. You already went through hell, and for that: grace.

Emily Dickinson

by Sherrie Cassel

The psychedelic lights undulate on my office ceiling. Springsteen is lightly playing his harmonica, and I am grateful…a sixty-three-year-old hippie wannabe. I wasn’t old enough to be truly aware of the bombs bursting in midair. What does it mean to “lose someone in the war” when you’re only five years old? I’ve lost a few to wars, too, though. There were landmines, for sure, and targeted missiles that left me raw. I tended to my wounds for decades; they’re just about all healed up now.

Right.

I have a great sense of joy and have never lost my sense of wonder for all the knowledge there is to be consumed — hungrily. Answers heal. Answers lead to understanding, and understanding heals.

Mom loved her Jesus and our butterflies, representations of hope, sparks of light in a very dark reality, and I am grateful, in this roulette when Death visits us willy nilly – when it chronologically makes sense, but still has the ability to shock us into reevaluation and we shift from apathy toward renewal – and so, life perpetuates itself, eat, drink, and be merry, said the wise king…and so we do – until the next tragedy or comedy or blessѐd equilibrium resumes itself.

I’m hyper-focused on death this week. I will have attended two funerals at the end of day on Saturday. Having lost a child, grief is like a layer of skin, the one right underneath the epidermis, so close to the surface, but protected by time, life experiences that shape us, personal development, and, for me, a Sacred Something that has healed me over the ten years since my son died.

Our lives are constantly in motion, even when we’re bored and apathetic. Apathy has its own vibration, or “vibe” as my heroes would say back when I so wanted to wear daisies in my hair. Born to a southern belle, a Southern Baptist southern belle, daisies were indicative of the hippie movement, and no way, no how was any daughter of hers going to look like a hippie. But I digress.

We have a few challenges that present themselves to us during our workaday lives. Most of us do not have the Bezos’ budget, and so, we work long hours, some of us have actual backbreaking work; we stress ourselves out over money, marriages, and mortgages until we send ourselves to an early grave. Or at the very least, we don’t have yachts that will take us on luxurious cruises to exotic places where we might decompress. I’m happy with a deep-tissue massage and a beer. Only slightly kidding.

I used to worry about the future of humanity, back in my thirties when neuroscience was all a buzz, and evolutionary psychology hit the educational circuit. I thought, “Damn, we’re doomed to extinction.” Modern humans have survived 300,000 years; that’s a pretty good record. We still continue to kill each other and ourselves; we wage war against one another, die of natural causes, and we die of totally preventable ailments.

In 300,000 years, we’ve made some amazing advances, and as time moves forward, no one really sits still. Do they? If one is a couch potato, books are readily available on laptops, Kindles, and through Amazon (fueling Bezos’ yachts), Barnes and Noble and other book delivery companies. If we can afford a pizza delivery, we can afford a book. And once you’ve read the book, allow it to activate your limbic system, the parts of it where our creativity lies, and then – create from your deepest wound or your greatest joy.

The funeral I attended on Saturday was truly a celebration of a great man’s life. There were music and laughter – and of course, tears. Khyrsso was a spiritual big brother to me; it was right that we should celebrate his life. The celebration I will attend this weekend is for a woman I knew only peripherally. I will attend to be there for the women who lived with her, loved her, and shared her life experiences. I will be there to support them.

Both of these people had lived full lives; both died suddenly. The ages are during those crapshoot years…or sometimes during the roulette we play with our own lives. One of the advances our species has managed is extension in the longevity of our lives. I had a friend tell me the other day that if he had known he’d live this long, he’d have taken better care of himself. He’s a writer, right up there with Gabriel Marquez.

Our species knew how to be young and die young, and with the advent of modern medicine, while not common, it is more frequent than it used to be to have centenarians with good genes and good health live into their eighties and nineties now with full faculties and making contributions to our world. Garcia-Marquez wrote until he developed dementia in his eighties. My mother lived to be eighty-one and she taught me so much, in fact, she taught me how to get old.

We are getting older and older as a species — with the technology we have available to some of us, those with the financial resources, and even with Medicaid and Medicare, and shitty health insurances, we are living longer because of our medical technological advancements. If my father had taken better care of himself, i.e., alcoholism, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and ultimately cirrhosis, he could have lived at least as long as my mom. Some by causation and some by chance – such is the blessing and curse of mortality.

So, I’m a bit fixated on existential matters right now. We lose two people to sudden, mostly unexpected deaths, and life has a way of refocusing, reframing, and recalibrating our MOs. Since graduation, I’ve had absolutely no schedule and no structure. I have allowed five months of self-care, and I believe it’s time to get back out there and be of service to others, and not just myself. I was so fortunate to be asked (and paid) to do a grief group last week. I had forgotten how much I love watching people shine and see the reflection of their healing hearts on their beaming faces, even in the face of grief.

When someone we love dies, we are faced with our mortality. What does her death mean to me? What did this person mean to me? How do I go on? Why?

These are all normal thoughts, even with those deaths that also offer relief from suffering; death makes us think about life. I’m sad for the losses, mine and my friends, but I’ve had a week now to reassess the decisions I’ve been making lately, not necessarily bad, but just in the wrong direction. Well, I’ve not been on the wrong direction, so much as I’ve been on a path with no direction, too many forks in too many roads that my spastic brain sees unfolding before me. So many opportunities, and yet, every day is a crapshoot…but still, I and you soldier on.

We race through our lives to chase our dreams, of substance or of excess, until someone we love or even knew peripherally dies, and then we’re faced with our own mortality – and we scrutinize the lives of those we’ve lost. What did they leave behind for us? I have so many memories of times with my son, days of laughter, anger, and tears – they will take me to my end of days. As the celebrations of life rustle me out of my own Winklerian sleep, I reawaken to my dreams, even at sixty-three. Hey, we old folks are allowed to have them too. (Wink)

Death makes us rethink our entire lives, no matter how old the loved one is when she passes. I hope I get to live as long as my mother did. One never knows though, does she? In the interim, I gladly accept this life sentence, and I will dance in the fields of the GOMU today and every day == sometimes a waltz and sometimes a dirge – both with their own appropriate music, their own vibe…for this hippie chick wannabe.

These are the thoughts I have after a beautiful celebration of life for my dear friend, Khrysso, and as I prepare myself for somberness and celebration this weekend; I think about how lucky I’ve been in my life – in between heartbreak and horror.

Salud.

Coming Clean

By Sherrie Cassel

I’m a liar. I am. I lie to myself and so, I lie to others too.

Or … do I? Do I really?

Ahhh, the curse of the double minded, right and left-brained, ENTJ, bipolar, Geminian mooned, Scorpio rising, Christian, Mystic, theist, non-theist, dualistic, divided, synthesized, religious, spiritual, whew, I’m tired from trying to conform to my culture’s overwhelming number of expectations. Certainly, there are social restraints that serve to give humans an uptick in the gene pool and so, toward our survival as a species; I get those restraints.

I’ve been reading about theology for the past four years. I’ve missed out on so many new developments in some of my other favorite disciplines. The biopsychosocial (spiritual) perspective and attachment theory have literally blown my mind. Of course, my worldview has a vein of religion, from Western Christianity, symbols that resonate with me, and that show up as metaphors in my language.

For example, I see the Good Samaritan in the faces of everyone I meet, even those whose kindness is buried under decades of abuse and self-torture. I see wounds in the eyes of everyone. We will each have dark nights of the soul in our lifetime; it’s unavoidable, unless one is a sociopath. One must be capable of empathy and compassion with oneself and with others, which comes from empathetic and compassionate modeling and/or a shit ton of psychological help, decades sometimes.

I think my lie is a little of both commission and omission. Because our parents/primary caretakers are our first representation of the God of our understanding/or extraordinary experiences, if the relationship with our parents is fractured through abuse, neglect, parents who were indifferent, or parents who were punitive, so will be our gods. One of my lies is that I’m securely attached to the God of my understanding; I’m not. I wrestle like Jacob with the angel (the Hebrew God), and I still have no resolution. I also do not limp – anymore. I don’t know if I’ll ever have a secure relationship with the God of my understanding; I do have extraordinary experiences that I attribute to Creation perpetually recreating itself, conception, birth, developmental years, adulting, and death. Sometimes I need to remind myself that the space between the first letter of the (life) sentence and the period is a relatively short period. My son died at only 32. Tiny infants die before they’ve scarcely had the opportunity to catch their first breath and all ages in between.

Now that I’m sixty-three and have been working with grievers, and have, myself worked through the grief process, the reality of death is pretty close to the surface, much closer than it was when I was, say, twenty-one. Another lie, I have certainty about the afterlife; I don’t. Somedays I so desperately want to believe in heaven, and other days, I surrender to another harsh reality. Somedays I comfort myself with the fact that everything is a vibration of the infinite Whole and my son and I still commingle in some way, shape, or form. I have no certainty about any of this even though thinking in terms of energy comforts me – even though I’d give anything to see my son in the flesh again – I have him in spurts of spiritual connection, which is to say, I can pull his memories from my prefrontal cortex which elicits physical responses, a heart pang, misting of my eyes, a swell of love, etc.

I caution grievers to not relapse into old, self-destructive coping mechanisms, i.e., drinking, drugs, or other ways we might find to hurt ourselves; we’re already in enough pain when we lose someone. I would be lying, but I’ll come clean here, too, I engaged in self-harm during the deepest and darkest time of grief. Another way to hurt ourselves is to ruminate about things that are hurtful; it takes work to let go of old shit from all the places we’ve been, at the hands of people who said they loved us and then fucked us over, a shitty childhood, a really bad breakup, domestic violence, ad nauseam. As Thich Nhat Hanh wrote so eloquently, perhaps Buddha said it first, “No mud, no lotus.”

In competitive sports, the adage, “No pain, no gain” is meant to inspire athletes to work harder, to push themselves beyond their limits, to perform optimally. I leaned on the journeys of others who had significant losses before me. I’ve had a few extraordinary experiences whose instigator is oddly God-shaped. What does God mean to me? The jury is still out.

Here’s another lie, that I have it all together all the time; I don’t. I have meltdowns; they’re just less volatile these days. I’m not going to lie about this, I’m grateful for meds, my stylist, and makeup.

I’d be lying if I said meds didn’t save my relationships, some just in the nick of time.

People are always talking about having good genes – i.e., “My father lived to be one-hundred; barring catastrophe or an early death, I could potentially live as long.” Good skin. Good physical appearance, perfect jawlines are all genetic traits. I’m a huge fan of epigenetics; it’s a real thing. I haven’t read extensively on the discipline, but if epigenetics rings true, then the effects of historical trauma on an individual will affect one’s physiology, in fact, trauma, physical, not always domestic violence, i.e., a pregnant woman has a terrible fall but does not lose the baby. She was terrified. Cortisol flooded her system, and the fetus was affected. Cortisol is a stress hormone that we need for our fight response, and that’s logical, but what is tragic is that some people get stuck in the fight response, and their cortisol and adrenaline are always present, beginning with the infant and on through the lifespan which, says the hypothesis, may be responsible for disorders such as obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, some chemical/mental disorders, and others.  What I’ve read about ruptured or unsuccessful attachment theory is that even emotional responses can be transmitted epigenetically. Fascinating.

I’m lying about moving on; I’m not. I’m not really sure what one would call being able to continue to build a purposeful life even after the most significant loss of one’s life. In my field, we call it posttraumatic growth. See, I’d be lying by omission if I didn’t mention that we can grow from our deepest wounds. I’m growing, but I don’t think I’ll ever be fully healed. I would like to be, but my wound, although no longer gaping, is still very tender. I am thriving in my life, because my mother, despite her dark nights of domestic violence, always made time for butterflies and Jesus. She thrived after our father died. I do thrive on more days than I used to, but everything is bittersweet, and there are days when everything hurts, but I soldier on. I have miles to go before I sleep, miles to go before I sleep (Frost).

My parents had vestiges of both religion and superstition; they were both Mexican Americans from Texas, referred to as Tejanos, and we parted ways religiously and philosophically decades ago, to my mother’s heartbreak that all of her children be saved before she died. My understanding of one’s need to be saved is much different, but I agree that we need rescuing on occasion, and how we do that can be or doesn’t need to be attributed to a God of one’s understanding.

I have only recently begun to express my anger at the evangelical churches’ harmful and abusive rhetoric. I have lied for many years by defending these churches. I’ve been harmed by clergy. Many have likewise been wounded by clergy. I want to work with them. I’ve been so fortunate, sadly, to have so many people reach out to me even with their own grief which has only helped me to further my healing process. I hope I’m reciprocating.

As I think about my grief trajectory: abject pain, numbing with and without chemicals, self-awareness, healing, and the energy and desire to help others, I’m grateful, bittersweetly, for the direction in which I’m headed. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t making great leaps and bounds in my life…but as a seeker of truth, I thought I’d offer a few lies and a few truths in an exercise in self-disclosure and vulnerability. I hope my example will model possibilities for you, the possibility that your truth matters, mostly to you, then to those closest to you, then to strangers in whose faces you see the Divine. Dare to be vulnerable – what a contribution to society.

Patterns of Imperfection

By Sherrie Cassel

Triggers that awaken fears, mourning, rage, despair can be anything, really. Tonight, I was looking through a kaleidoscope, watching the patterns transform into fragments of uniquely and perfectly placed shapes and colors. I could never draw a perfect circle (for me). Even with the protractor, the spot where the pencil marks meet their ends, well, in my need for perfection in my work, my circles are imperfect. The pencil always leaves an infinitesimal dot, which I find to be maddening. To each her own neurosis.

But seriously, I bought a kaleidoscope for our grandchildren because I want them to be excited about life and find the wonder in every single thing that crosses their path – and a kaleidoscope is a great place to start.

My son had a sense of wonder, deep and wide; he loved to read, and he loved all that there is to know and all that will remain mysterious to the human mind. I peered into the kaleidoscope on my desk in my office and I turned it and watched the geometry solve itself over and over again. I held it up to the sun and like Icarus, I was singed, and sunspots flashed before my eyes and blurred my vision for half a second.

Once my vision returned to normal, I peered through the kaleidoscope in the artificial light from my office lamps, and this time, one of the shards of colored plastic plunged into my heart as I had a flashback of when I was trying to model for my son a sense of wonder, and we knew we were experiencing infinity together, experiencing what I now hope to be true, even if we are only energy, free from pain and suffering, soaring through the universe, I’ll gladly accept that. My son suffered in life, especially in the four years right before his death. I understand why he used drugs. Understanding the psychological dynamics of the building blocks towards addiction helps and hurts me. I carry my own share of blame. We, family, all do. Our actions have consequences. And I’ll say it again, actions have consequences, and when we fuck up, we make amends if we can, and we take the next indicated step. Beating ourselves up does not launch us toward healing. I talk to my son all the time, in traffic, when I pray to the GOMU, it’s like a three-way call. Maybe that’s weird to some, but we each find our unique way to heal from our unique losses. Sometimes I keep a candle burning all day with some object that was important to him. I don’t think I’m summoning his spirit or his spiritual presence; I’m just remembering him, and I need to express the grief from time to time.

Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos is around the corner; my mother shares her birthday with the celebration. Seems appropriate. The day is a trigger because my son was very proud of his Mexican American and Native-American heritages, and he loved celebrating the cultural expressions of his people. A sense of wonder. I know I gave that to him, just as my imperfect parents gave it to me, a ray of sunshine in a very dark childhood. Halloween will be here soon, and I’m reminded of how my giant son went trick or treating with his friends, half his size, with their pillowcases, hitting different neighborhoods and coming home with their loot and trading and tossing with each other after their final stop of the night. Ah, yes, I remember it well.

Thanksgiving will be here before we know it – another one without my son. Thanksgiving was his holiday. I taught him how to make the holiday turkey when he was twelve years old and until 2016, he experimented with different recipes until he perfected his turkey. Yeah, I saw turkeys in the grocery store already and my heart had a moment of pride and then a second later, a pang of longing for what I can no longer have: my son’s physical presence.

I’m sure I’ve shared this story here before, and I apologize if I’m repeating myself, but one day I was in the grocery store and I walked by the condiment section, and there, right on the shelf to my left was the pickle area. I left my shopping cart in the store, and ran to my car, and wept for about thirty minutes, before I could see to drive. My son loved pickles, ever since he was a small child. Triggers. Pickles?

So, what do we do when we have triggers? How long will we have them? Will I ever stop hurting? Well, what we do when we have them is ride them out, if you can, without drugs and alcohol. The duration of the frequency of overwhelming experience lasts as long as we allow them. I have always been able to stuff my feelings; I had to as a child, and I chose to as an adult, until seminary, which was only a short time ago. I went seeking answers, spiritual answers, holy answers, and what I found was the greatest healing experience.

But first, I lost my mind.

Find what will cause a fire to burn in your soul, no matter how hard you must drag yourself up that mountain of grief. I kicked and screamed and howled in agony the first three years. I was mad with grief. I wish I had seen reason sooner, but the period of mourning was, for me, absolutely necessary. I had more than grief from the loss of my son to work through, and again, find a grief specialist, find a trauma-informed clergy person, try Tai Ji, climb Mt. Everest, just find a goal that will put you back in the present moment where you can grow toward your best self, even through the greatest loss of your life.

Each of us has a different trajectory on this uphill journey, and for me, it has been a journey, the most painful, most wonderful experience of my life. I navigate the triggers like a professional athlete now. I used to double over in angst when I had a trigger. I still feel them; I still clutch at my chest where the metaphor of my heart holds all my emotions. I still feel the pang, deep, wide, and systemic. I just have had ten years of practice with the struggle to maintain a life of normalcy within my culture.

Back to pickles…shortly after I lost my son, I was sitting in the kitchen trying to open a jar of them, when I burst into tears over a struggle that would have had me just banging the jar on the counter in frustration like years past, but this time, I genuinely lost it and I was crying until I couldn’t breathe. What the hell, right? Well, my son was always in the 90 percentile. He was a big, tall and handsome kid, into adulthood too. He used to open all my jars when the lids were too tight. It was right that I should cry. There’s no harm or shame in losing it. I haven’t in a very long time. I did pour myself into the things that consumed me with fire and a drive to know what the hell is going on in our world. I want to be of service to those who are deep in the throes of mourning, a loved one, an ideology, a limb, or for me, the most painful, the loss of a child. Does a dream take away the sting? No, it does not. We have to find something though that will reignite the fires with which we once lived when our loved one was here to be part of our lives and fan the flames of our dreams. I’m being triggered by a lot over the last few weeks. I miss my son. I miss him every second of the day – AND I know because my son was so young when he died at 32. I got to have him for 32 years, and I know, because he traveled with me on my long-term academic trajectory. He was there from a baby to when he died. I celebrated and mourned during the awarding of my master’s degree. I will do likewise, for the rest of my life, as significant moments become triggers and reminders there is no possibility for me to give my son a celebratory hug – ever – again. Bittersweetness is my lot in life. I will allow myself moments of joy – quickly followed by the void in my reality, and so, a moment of pain – the duality was all I had for three and a half years, before I removed the shroud.

Ten year angelversary on January 22nd, 2026 is rapidly approaching. I admit, I’m a little afraid of the day this year. I’m always a little unsure of how I’ll handle the day. I try to book myself, but everything in my path is a trigger on significant days. I feel like a voodoo doll aching under a million needles, and yet, I persist. What helps me? Helping someone else navigate her own grief process. We’re all grieving something. Some of us have yet to emerge from chronic mourning and so life has been at a standstill for maybe some time. Maybe every trigger beats you into submission to the place of mourning, a place in which we are not meant to stay.

I know triggers are shaped in many configurations and colors, like the kaleidoscope, a sense of wonder, and an occasional shard that pierces you in the part of your heart that needs addressing. I do have trigger every day because my son’s essence, spirit, soul, memory lingers until I’m soaring and commingling with him. Healed. Whole. No more pain. Pure joy. That’s all I want for him. What gets you through the triggers? I guess I just ride them out in the best way I can at the moment of the pistol aim. Sometimes I dodge, and other times, I draw my own weapon because grief can be an enemy breaking into your consciousness and stealing your joy.  Keep your sense of wonder. I encourage you each to find something that returns you to a moment of joy with your loved one. Submerge yourself into the moment and then let the memories configure themselves into other perfect pieces of your kaleidoscopic vision that transport your spirit to a place where you and your loved one can still convene.

I’m not sure if that is hogwash woo woo thinking, but as long as I’m breathing, I’ll take my son with me, bittersweetly, into every future moment and I’ll allow the beautiful patterns of our periodic equilibrium, laughter, tears, hope, fear, normalcy, dysfunction, and yet somehow, the patterns in our kaleidoscope, are so beautiful, our history that I continue to learn from. Perhaps that’s how I carry my son with me, and perhaps that is all I get – for now.

Oh yes, triggers, today is a trigger, but I’ll be fine. I have the things I need to get through the day:

Something to do.

Something to love.

Something to look forward to.

An imperfect circle occurs because of fluctuations in hand movement because we are imperfect. Perhaps the configurations of a kaleidoscope aren’t always perfect because when I weep my hands begin to shake and the pattern becomes an aberration, not perfect, and I marvel at the sense of wonder I feel that one can feel so many emotions in rapid succession. I didn’t know until I lost my son. But I normalize the grief and I allow it to transform me into a better version of myself.

I hope you will take some time to look through the kaleidoscope of your memories, even when the pictures don’t line up. Enjoy them, let yourself laugh aloud, let your eyes moisten, share with someone you can weep with, or if you’re like me, make some time to just sit with your emotions.

I have some place to be today. I have people who I love and who love me to spend time with. I have a life in my hands, my own, to co-create with the Great Spirit of our universe, expansive, a perfect circle of love.

I wish you continued healing. I wish you what you need when triggers present themselves, tears or laughter in — perfect configurations.

A time to mourn and a time to dance …

By Sherrie Cassel

I’ve wanted to know what’s on the bottom of the ocean floor for most of my life, you know, to plumb the depths of the unknown, like Jacques Costeau. Every single day I rise from our bed, wipe the sleep from my eyes, stretch, and greet the day, is another opportunity to plumb the depths of a twenty-four hour stretch of time whose mysteries unfold with each tick of the clock. Today is, in fact, a good day. I miss my son every single second of every single day. He is in every single thought and action I have. Aaaannd…life has continued to dole out the minutes without ceasing, so I can’t store up the months and years that pass by as I navigate the tragedies and comedies in my life. The hits just keep on comin’.

In my sixty-three years, I’ve seen some serious shit, and I’ve experienced some serious joy, in fits and starts, of course. Even Job finally got a reprieve from the pain and suffering he endured in one fell swoop, so the story goes. I know life offers us opportunities to grow, transform, and transcend, and it offers us opportunities to not do any of those things. I suffered an unimaginable (until it happens to you) loss when Rikki died, and again, in fits and starts, I alternated between grabbing hold of whatever life was left in me, and — collapse. I’m a very composed person. I don’t freak out publicly. I don’t sob uncontrollably, as a rule. I don’t allow myself to ever be out of control. I had a Marine, a mean one, as a father. Even the girls got called pussies. I learned to not lose it, and this was my M.O. for 55 years, until Rikki died. After he died, all bets were off.

I lost control at the notes one can sense, but not hear yet. I would sob inconsolably. There were times I’d hyperventilate from the pain of the loss. I’d scream into my pillow. I’d wander around the house aimlessly; my heart trapped inside a tight skin that would not release it until it wrestled against its toughness and wound up the victor as it struggled to burst free of its punishing confines. One’s healing process is successful if one begins from a solid emotional base. What I mean is, the less shit one has to plumb, the more accessible grief is. Death is overwhelming when we understand that it is just the way toward eternity, whatever that means to us.

I’ve sat with mothers who’ve lost their children. Once I was with a mom who kept saying to her dead child, “Mijo, please wake up.” Another mother, both of these women are dear friends of our family, she hugged me so tight that I couldn’t breathe. And now, I’m a member of that community of grievers from child loss. I took a bit longer to work through the grief process. Now, that it’s been nearly ten years, I no longer cry until I hyperventilate. I no longer sleep all day. I no longer curl up in the fetal position when the pain is overwhelming and physical. But I did have a lot of emotional strata to work through on my way to healing and wholeness.

I cannot emphasize enough the need for professional help from licensed professionals and/or trauma-informed pastoral care. I went to seminary looking for answers and all of my supervisors were licensed psychologists who called me out on my shit, and I grew because I didn’t shut down. I don’t know if it’s a superpower, but having lost my only child, in more ways than the worst one, I am somewhat fearless. I’m not saying I can’t ever be hurt again, but certainly I will never be hurt to the magnitude of losing a child. (Knock on wood). Never say never, I guess. I never thought I’d lose my son — .

Once you get past the regret, the guilt, the anger, the shame, the regret, the guilt, the anger, the shame, and over and over again, until the ruminations morph into memories that make you smile, forever bittersweetly, you begin to heal. See, I’m not saying, don’t ruminate; I’m not saying that at all. In fact, for me, the ruminations brought up emotions I didn’t even know I had having been stifled by my tough father.  How have you managed to balance the mourning phase, which is when grief is most acute? Grief is forever, but the profound and constant ache is mourning, a period of time when we are at the mercy of our emotions. Thankfully, that time passes, again, how rapidly depends on one’s emotional resources before her loss.

Some of us had a lot of crap we’ve been carrying without expression for decades. When someone we love dies, that pain becomes an opportunity to finally feel the full range of emotions; finitude bursts us wide open, open to empathy, compassion, love, communal concern, and the great mysteries in this universe. My trajectory after my son died veers off from the common path that we all share, the push/pull/resistance to healing. The question that comes after all the whys, for me, is, Does the fact that joy comes in the morning mean I’ve moved beyond my son’s memory? How does one find joy again after the loss of a loved one? The bottom line is that we must at some point face the pain without alcohol, high risk behavior, or anything that takes the place of and stifles our ability to truly feel the present moment of pain – and allowing that pain to open our consciousness to perfect clarity – a clarity in which there are no more whys.

People die from complications of addiction, car accidents, cancer, suicide, and each of those trajectories is tragic. You and I know this is true, and the whys no longer matter once our hearts begin to heal, and to keep going back to them is self-torture. David Kessler wrote a fabulous book in which he posits a sixth step in the grief process, and that step is “finding meaning” after the loss. I have answers to all my whys, and some of those answers only hurt me, but there is also quite a bit of liberation in having answers to my five-million questions, questions that pelted me into the fetal position. There came a time when I no longer felt like I belonged in chronic pain.

I remember after Rikki died, there were a few friends who simply did not know how to be there for me. I was deeply wounded for years, until one of them apologized, and then another. No one knew what to do. Rikki had been very ill for about three years, but none of us really thought he was going to die; I was just catastrophizing, right? Well, retrospectively, there was not any combination of words in infinity that could have comforted my broken heart. I know you know you all get it.

I hope the spark of hope hasn’t been beaten out of you through the tragedies you’ve incurred. We need that spark to bring us back to life after dark nights of the soul. I found mine after soul searching for four years in an interfaith seminary. I found mine through the camaraderie of fellow grievers, fellow parents who grieve the losses of their children. I found mine through tears, through depression, through emotional paralysis, in deep breaths as I gasped through screams of anguish, and through allowing myself to be completely out of control. Me, a control freak, out of control. Losing it is absolutely necessary, and despite our public presentation of our mourning, mourning is among the loneliest places one can ever find herself.

One day, as some of you know, the back breaking task of gardening with a short hoe, brought me to my own epiphany: I don’t want to feel this way forever… broken. I walked into the house and reactivated my academic dreams. There is no one and there are no words that anyone could have said to lift me out of the mourning phase; it was a necessary phase. See, we must do the tears before our grand entrance into the world of the living, the one where joy is accessible.

Three and a half years of hardcore mourning would pass before I had my mind blowing event that launched me into healing, and healing with purpose. The best thing I’ve done since my son died was reclaim my life, and find ways to be joyful again – even in the midst of a loss — of finality. He’s gone. I’m still here. You’re still here. You have the words that will launch you into your own revelation, one that will begin to heal you from the inside out.

Grief can’t be swept under the rug; it will resurface again and again, until we’re ready to face it, full on, with the ugly cry, the darkness, the profound pain, the screams of anguish, and the occasional numbness, a protective coping skill we implement until we can breathe, literally, again.

What words did I say out loud to begin my healing process?

  • I want to heal.
  • I don’t want to be in pain anymore.
  • How do I go on without him?
  • Death is final.
  • There is nothing that can be done for my son anymore.
  • How do I go on without him?
  • I’m ready to launch and remember my dreams, dreams I shared with my son.
  • Damn it! I don’t want to feel this way anymore.
  • I’m the only one who can do this.
  • I let everyone off the hook and I take responsibility for my own healing.
  • I begin each day with the responsibility to myself and my loved ones to be whole.
  • I will accept the bittersweetness because it’s from the deepest love a parent can have.
  • I carry his memory in my heart, no longer broken, but healing.

I have fewer steps towards navigating a meltdown now. I can breathe through the pangs and I can cry without hyperventilating – even on angelversaries, holidays, and birthdays, and other milestone days. For me, the ability to be in control (of course) of grief rather than allow it to control me is progress; but it was time for me to move out of the mourning phase.

I seriously could not function in the world for the first three and a half years after Rikki died. My readers know the drill. I just sat and ate my feelings away, staring into space and stopping only to sob – all alone in my grief. My family lost my son too. I was so lost in my own grief that I had no emotional reserve to help them navigate their grief; and I’m a helper among helpers. I mean it when I say I allowed myself to dive into the black hole of grief, and while we may not yet know what’s on the other side of an actual black hole, I know what’s on the other side of grief. Wholeness.

Please talk yourself through your grief, asking the whys in the beginning, until you have the answers that will satisfy your soul. Weep as long and as hard as you must. Learn an instrument. Go back to school. Dance under the moonlight and allow the moon’s light to radiate through your entire essence, your heart, your soul, your physicality.

We know that grief hurts, especially in the mourning phase. I listened to Gregorian chants and Bread songs to bring up feelings from Rikki’s death, and from places I hadn’t thought about in decades. We are not just our grief. When we were in mourning, even then, we were not our grief. We have grief throughout the rest of our lives, but we will not always be in active mourning. When we have those exhalations, those moments of relief, we should take them and allow them to wash over us and take us out of our acute pain, to a place where we can think and do self-talk toward longer stretches of wholeness and longer exhalations, exhaling the anguish, and inhaling the healing.

Maybe that sounds hokey, and trust me, if I hadn’t been through the grief process, I would have thought so too. Breathing? Exhaling anguish? Inhaling healing? I learned to take deep breaths during what felt exactly like a labor pain; it was systemic. Prayer, in its many forms, helps. Learning a new skill helps. Whatever you can find that is emotionally sound to ground yourself in the now will catapult you into your healing will only help you. Trust me, I know this from experience.

Renee Fleming sings, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and the first time I heard it, I was famished for someone, something to stop the pain, but there was no one. You see, acute grief, before the clouds begin to clear, is a solo act, but in that space where we are most alone is the greatest healing journey, not without painful memories, or an occasional and irrational why, and not without bittersweetness in our memories that make us smile and subsequently make us cry.

Grief is manageable after the mourning phase. I still remember the woman I was during that time. I was a mess, an absolute wreck. I talked myself through the worst experience of my life, and I began to heal; it’s in our hands; it’s in the realm of possibilities.

Lazarus and Reality

By Sherrie Cassel

I’m in MX for a week and some change visiting my younger brother and his senior dog. He won’t let me lift a finger, so it truly is a vacation of being pampered. It’s nice. I don’t interview for the doctoral program until next month, so I’m reading everything I can get my hands on about grief, religious trauma, and depth psychology; they matter. The book, Stories from the Edge: A Theology of Grief, is among the best books I’ve read on dying, suffering, and death and how all of them can lead to a wholly present life that, unto our very end, holds so much beauty. If we’re very fortunate (blessed) we have had a supportive network of loved ones who have traveled as closely as they could our grief march. I’ve been alone a lot on this vacation. My brother works seven days a week, and I’m here on my own, to read, to write, to pray in the way I do, to meditate, to think about my son. My brother, my son’s uncle loved me through my loss, also his as best he could. – I don’t see family a lot, mostly because of the toxicity and the brokenness that has become a choice for some of my family members. I choose Life. There were times I seriously didn’t think I was going to make it after Rikki died. There were days I didn’t want to make it.

Garrett was a chaplain in many hospitals where he dealt with the dying, the desperate, and those who were grappling with impending loss. I think he may know some shit about what we navigate every single day since the loss of our loved one; it helps to have experts who work with grievers every day and night – into those dark nights of the Soul. Being a chaplain, whether a theist or a non-theist can be a heart wrenching calling. I believe healing is a calling, and Garrett – along with all his own shit, extends grace, mercy, compassion, and love to those who are transitioning, and to those who love them.

I’m American by birth, and I know only my American culture’s grief rituals – ferociously linear and unsatisfying. You start from the pit of grief – and you ascend to wholeness – without interruption. Right. Garrett discussed how Americans, especially American Christians denounce suffering as a lack of faith; it’s not. Each of us will grieve loss after loss – no one escapes heartache. But broken hearts are not the end of the story. We talk about the circle of life, or revolutions that circle back time and time again, or round and round in the circle game (Joni Mitchell)…sometimes old wives’ tales comfort us because they’ve been through generational interpretations depending on the era.

“Into each life a little rain must fall…” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

And in the words of the brilliant and beautiful Michael Stipe, “Everybody hurts sometime.”

Why do we think we should never suffer in my religion of origin (now defunct)? In the words of the great Lynn Anderson, “I beg your pardon; I never promised you a rose garden.” And the hits just keep on coming. Damn it! We are not, not one of us, exempt from tragedy or suffering. I lost my son. I can’t imagine a pain greater, and others suffer great losses too. How do we manage after a catastrophic loss? How do we move forward – out of the pain – and into purposeful living? How do  we answer the always beckoning call to live in the Present Moment – despite our grief – for those who are living in healthy bodies, to those whose bodies are breaking down, all the way to communal grief.

I had a lot of help along the way toward wholeness and healing. I prayed for healing for my son. I begged the God of my very limited understanding to heal my son, and then I asked God to raise my son from the dead. I had a rough childhood, an understatement, for sure, but since I did I thought I had done all the suffering that would be required of me in this lifetime. Boy, was I wrong. You see, we have no control over death; when it hits it hits. If we’re very fortunate, we’ve been given the emotional resources to love others well, and if that is true, death, while still grievous, will carry with it few if any regrets. If we don’t have the emotional resources to love well – grief, IMO, is much more of a steep climb up that mountain of shit we are left to sort through after the death of our loved one.

I guess my son’s death has taught me, among the millions of things it has, that life is not going to wait for me to “get over” the loss of my son. I never will. I have been able to listen for the call to be an interfaith pastoral care counselor, a spiritual healer, if you will. Whether by grace or by accident, my life has changed to one of service to those who are hurting, those who know they’re hurting, and those who know only they are unhappy. Did I lose my son despite the fact that in my desperation I lay prostrate on the floor begging the God of my limited understanding at the time to heal my son completely, to bring him back to me whole and well? No. Prayer is not passive; it requires our participation whether we find God through hugging a tree or holding space for someone else who is hurting.

The healing force we find for ourselves does not have to be in the shape of a deity; in fact, in Marya Hornbacher’s book A Non-Believer’s Higher Power, she shares her own non-theistic journey through her healing path from addiction. She wrote so beautifully about a time on the shore of the beach when she was just sort of gazing at it’s beauty, and she had what used to be called a religious experience. We now refer to them as extraordinary experiences – and we can each have them whenever we can rev them up for ourselves.

I thought my life had ended when Rikki died, and again, there were so many days in the early part of my grief march when I wanted my life to end; the emotional pain and profound grief I felt was sometimes more than I could handle. Did I reach out for God after my son died? No, I did not. I was angry. I was bereft. I felt abandoned by the god of my youth. Thinking back to that anchorless woman who was wandering around with blind rage at G_d – I wish I’d had been able to just sit and heal – instead of being so wounded I couldn’t even rev up joy for all the gifts I’ve been given.

I didn’t lose my son because I sinned, or because I didn’t believe, or pray hard enough; I lost my son because we all die, and there is never a good time for it, even when we know it’s coming. I encourage you to listen to the wind and see what it brings you – perhaps a calling to turn your pain into purpose, to help those who are anchorless. Be God’s hands and feet with your wisdom born of pain. I’m not sure where Americans get the ideas about quick, but ultimately unsatisfactory answers as a successful grief journey, but I find it to be hurtful and not conducive to genuine healing.

Garrett gave me a different perspective about a famous story of suffering in the Christian New Testament when he shares about Mary, Martha, Lazarus, and the teacher Jesus’ reaction to this tragedy of the loss of his friend, and Mary and Martha’s supreme grief, and even some anger toward their messiah because he didn’t get there in time, and Jesus wept. Whether Jesus is a teacher you can learn from, or you prefer Buddha or Allah, ad infinitum, the parable is a good one as we contemplate the grief we each must endure as people we love die before us; it just hurts; it just fucking does.

Garrett said that Lazarus’ death, and the condition of his body, were a foreshadowing of his own death by the cruel method of execution at the time. “Because I could not stop for Death; he kindly stopped for me. The carriage held but just ourselves, and immortality.” (Emily Dickinson) Whether we believe there is a place beyond this one, a place with no suffering and constant joy, or we believe this is all we get, suffering is part of grief – it is part of the process.

I’m a firm believer in, “Physician, heal thyself.” My beliefs are not important here, my religion/faith are not important to this discussion, and I incorporate Garrett’s very expansive theology into this post because it so spoke to me; it doesn’t have to speak to you. In fact, you may have something that works for you so well, you’ve been able to launch into your life of service to those who need the wisdom only you can share with them because of your grief experience. I hope so. The world needs more healers, and fewer “mean” people. When my son died, I was out in Joshua Tree National Park near where we live, and I was watching the hawks gliding on the wind. There was no sound. There were no people except my husband and me. The sun was kind that day out in the desert, and I was trying to take a picture of the ancient boulders out there. There was a giant ring around the sun that was blinding me from the direction I was trying to take the picture. The kind and blinding son, the hawks playing on the wind, my husband off on his own so I could have that moment, that extraordinary moment when life presented itself to me again, but different that time. I’d had three and a half years to march to the dirge for my son. I woke up in that moment – because it was here and because it was now. I hadn’t been there for three and a half years.

I’ve spent the last ten years healing and helping. I have a mission in life. I didn’t ask for it. I’d give it all back if the Jesus of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus would raise my son up from the dead, but I didn’t spend four years in seminary studying theology to fall prey to fairy tales. The people I’ve been so fortunate to work with have inspired me to keep marching – even when the terrain is muddy, rocky, torturous.

I wish I could tell you that it’s true, if we pray hard enough and have enough faith, all will be well. Well, my son died despite all my begging, pleading, weeping and wailing I did before the god of my limited understanding at the time. I no longer barter with the God of my understanding. My relationship with a theos is very broad; it incorporates the world now.

It incorporates you.

Whatever Gets You through the Night

By Sherrie Cassel

Joshua Tree, California

I’m making corrections for the revision of my book. It’s a mess, reflective of where my head and heart were at the first writing – lots of typos, blank pages, alignment issues, over-exposure. I just wanted it out there in the world. Initially and in retrospect, I needed to purge my pain publicly. I wanted the whole world to know how much pain I was in. I was compelled to write my grief as I sorted through the rubble in my world after Rikki died.

As I read through some of the earliest entries, I wept for the woman who was aching and healing at the same time. Do I still ache? Yeah, from time to time I still ache. There’s a hollowness that I used to think was a perpetual ache, but as I continue on the road to wholeness, I accept that it’s the void from the physical absence of my son. Does that make sense? He was a part of my life every single day for thirty-two years; that’s a long time to love someone, to see someone, to hear someone’s voice, laugh, to hug someone. You know what I mean?

The rest of my life I’ll constantly be adjusting and shifting, and maybe, even relinquishing the deep pain that comes from significant losses. After nine years, nearly ten, the guttural wails and convulsive sobs no longer happen. There will be an ache for which there can be no comfort from anything external. I don’t want to be like King Nebuchadnezzar and shout from the rooftops, “Look at all I’ve done, single-handedly,” never mind the slaves who built the damn temple. I had help along the way. I have friends, family of choice, my grief brothers and sisters, and I had professionals who worked with me as I navigated the early years of grief.

I’m fortunate to have a health plan that pays for behavioral healthcare, and I am not the slightest bit embarrassed to admit I use it. Can you imagine how people might operate more prosocially if they knew why they and those who may have hurt them behave the way they do. Every single thing in our individual universe shapes our personalities. In an undergraduate psych class I took, our professor said by the time we are seven years old our personalities are pretty much embedded in our psyches. I’m not sure if I agree with that supposition completely, and maybe it’s even been proven, but I do agree that there are parts of our brain which continue transforming to greater emotional, physical, and spiritual maturity the more self-aware we become. But I also believe with all my heart and head, and based on the current literature, that we’re learning so much more about nature than we knew back when I was an undergraduate, only a handful of years ago. The consensus opinion used to be that once our brain cells are gone, they’re gone, and we don’t produce new ones. Well, now we know that’s not true; synapses can be formed throughout our lives. Keep busy. Keep your mind challenged. Dance or do some other form of exercise and have people in your life with whom you may have riveting conversations.

As I’ve navigated my own rocky and mountainous grief terrain, I’ve learned a few things along the way, many which I’ve shared here. I want to share what has worked for me, what has occurred in my emotional landscape, about the personal development, transformation, and transcendence I’ve found along the way. I’m in a terrific space today. My husband is blasting Fats Domino at the volume of a metal head when the folks are gone. I’ve reached some milestones. I’ve watched many of my parents at my grief sites blossom through the most devastating loss of their lives. We support each other and as new parents and grandparents come in, those who have been grieving for some time give sage advice to them. See, you must find a single thread that keeps you attached to the living, one that keeps you grounded in this world and all of its present moments. Ten years later I can say I’ve achieved that, or rather, I can achieve it, in fits and starts. One can’t be high on life 24/7 – jubilation is tremendous, because it is not common in our workaday lives, but we still have to function in the world that plays it straight and helps the world run, like ants in a structured maze: birth, development, launching, learning, building one’s worldview, career, family, and death. Our tunnels are our cultures, I believe, and as cultural diversity goes, my mourning rituals are an amalgamation of many.

My dear friend and I are going to share a ritual at the beach in the very near future. I know I’ve mentioned it here. I didn’t attend my mother’s funeral because I’m unwilling to support the family mythology and participate in its toxicity, so I’d like to remember my mother in my ritual. I’d also like to publicly apologize to my son – on the beach … on the part of the beach where we spent a lot of time. I was fortunate to make amends to my son before he died, and he loved me all the way to mutual understanding. He apologized to me for causing my hands to shake. I strongly encourage those of you who may not have had the opportunity to say everything that needed to be said, you still can. Rituals don’t have to be religious rituals.

I have a beautiful friend who prays to the God of her understanding beautifully. She opens her prayer addressing this God with, “Oh God of many names”. I was extraordinarily moved the first time I heard her pray. You see, when someone you love dies, so too does a part of you. I’m not a holy roller, but I so love the metaphors in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, and I believe the stories are useful as cautionary and inspirational tales, so, with all that defense for my love of a Christian relic, I call on an Ascended Master, the Seat of my Soul, my Consciousness and the God within me, “Lazarus (you who have been dead for three days, all the way to decomposition – while those who love you weep and wail), come forth” (resurrected and whole – having grown in your own compost).

I always ask what has helped someone get through the early days, months, years of grief, and some say, “God” (of many names); some went all the way to India and found healing unto transcendence and are now sharing their spiritual awakening with others. I strongly encourage you to hit up your local public library and read every single thing you can get your hands on about your specific loss, i.e., mine would be information about addiction and attachment issues. The specifics of your loss may have been caused by SIDS, overdose, disease (including addiction and other mental disorders), or accidental. Finding peers who understand your loss is vital to our healing.

Compassionate Friends has many types of grief groups, including those whose members incurred the loss of their loved one to overdose/addiction, and groups for grief at large. Facebook is an incredible resource to track down a plethora of grief sites – for every type of loss. I know many of us lost absolute control over our ability to keep our shit together immediately after our loved one died. I’m not overly emotional in person, which is to say, I don’t weep in front of others; there are many reasons for this, but to discuss them will not be beneficial to this discussion.

I admit, I was initially disappointed so many of the people with whom I was closest had no comforting words; hugs were an annoyance. I refused to break in front of anyone. I finally did though – with my husband, the most loving and safest person I know. He held me while I wept inconsolably. My younger brother held me the night my son died, and I had never cried so hard in my life. I needed to be with someone who also loved Rikki, just as you will need people who share in your loss – family, friends, strangers at meetings, the God of your understanding, the texts that bring you peace and comfort, and whatever soothes your soul and calms your heart so you can function during the day, optimally. That’s the goal – after the deluge has decreased to a light mist in the air, present and peaceful. I picture my favorite flower, the California poppy, bright hues of orange that border our ugly freeways, but I picture the poppies through the mist, with dewdrops, in holy silence. Beautiful. Extraordinary.

I lost my “faith” after my son died. The tenuous grasp I had on my always wavering faith was severed. Some people are fortunate to have a faith tradition that has helped them through the roughest period of grief. Some people garden. Some people talk to the Gods of their understanding. And there are just so many ways to help yourself to heal, and I maintain that it is we who have the words that will heal us – perhaps inspired by a text you consider to be holy, a piece of art you find beautiful, or a song that resonates with you.

I read the parables from other faith traditions too. I’m trying to become more familiar with my own subculture as a Latina-American, about our struggles and our victories, about our legends and mythologies. I’ve always been driven to learn. I’ve been in school all my adult life, and a latent benefit of being told you’re stupid your entire childhood, is that you work hard to either prove people right or to prove them wrong. I chose the former for decades; I don’t anymore. I’ve been driven since I first learned to read. After my son died, it was largely academic knowledge that I found to be most healing, academic knowledge and the stories of others who had been on their grief trajectory longer than five minutes ago, which is what it felt like every time I thought about my son, which was chronically.

I seriously thought early in my process there would never be a time when I would stop aching unto emotional and social paralyses. And I actively mourned for three and a half years. During those years, I read everything I could about grief. I’d read a book, wail, and then read another one, and I did this for those three and a half years. Once I began to understand the psychodynamics of grief, I still felt rudderless. I had no anchor. I didn’t lose it because I don’t believe I ever had one. I do have a “God”-shaped space in my consciousness and I desperately needed something that would be representative of love, safety, compassion, mercy, and grace – and so, I went to seminary, a four-year program of intense deconstruction of my faith of origin – and building my own theology and forming a relationship with the God I need. I’ve had to dig deep to figure out what I needed for healing after my son died. I needed camaraderie. I needed understanding. I needed the advice of others. I needed to be able to share my story, first, the story of the parent who lost her only child, second, of the parent who struggled to not lose her mind to grief, and last, the heroine emerges transcendent in resplendent beauty – whole.

Deep grief, loud guttural wails, and mea culpas will happen at some point in our lives, either through a finalized divorce or permanent breakup, or you lose someone because he/she died. Tragedy is in the eye in the beholder, and tragedies happen every day, sometimes, like many, like Job, a whole string of bad luck in one fell swoop. In 2016, I lost my son, and then we lost four more family members within months of one another. Ten years later, I’m grateful to have made it through those losses. I take what I’ve learned, and I want to share it with my readers, and people who find this page by accident.

Again, I’m in a very good space, and yes, it took me nearly a decade to get to this place. I’m grateful for my life, and I wouldn’t have been able to say that ten years ago. We grow through our grief. I’ve become far more compassionate in the past ten years. I’ve always been introspective (to a fault), but now I don’t just internalize my introspection; I bring it out to play, to invent, and to help others. I’m extraordinarily well-read about grief, healing, and I’ve read many victory stories by people who went through incredible transformations after losing the loves of their lives.

My son was mine. I can’t share this sunset with my son, except symbolically. I’ll bring a memory of his face to my awareness, and I’ll hold that memory like I used to hold his hand, only … I can’t walk him home yet, because my home is here. I read in a book by Carl Sagan, the first of his books I read, called Dragons of Eden (1977) in which he suggests finding an author who resonates with you and then read every single thing that author ever wrote. Now, of course in our busy lives who has time, right? Well, just read until your thoughts start to congregate into coherent solutions to behavior that is maladaptive, i.e., behavior that hurts us and that hurts others. If we’re not aware of what is happening inside of us biopsychosocially and spiritually (whatever that means to you), growth can still happen, but it takes longer to reach milestones, not THE milestone of healing, because my hope is that you and I will have many peaks among the inevitable valleys of despair and the times when we can achieve tranquility for however long it lasts.

I don’t know what drives you, but I hope something does. I’m driven academically and my drive is fueled by my childhood experiences, grief, and the love for my son who would be so proud of his mother’s accomplishments. Find something you can pour yourself into, something that puts you in the zone, and let it lift you out of your deep pain for longer and longer moments at a time. I’ve learned so much in ten years’ time. Would I give it all back to have my son back? Only in a fantasy and I live in the real world. At the end of the very long days, we carry our grief with us (24/7); it is we, finally, who must take responsibility for the intensity and duration of our grief. I allowed myself all the time I needed for meditating on feelings too deep for words.

I learned there’s no escaping grief in this life. Our grandson lost his father when he was only six years old, so even children must learn to cope through devastating losses. I don’t know what in the world made me so arrogant to think that horror would sidestep me after all the horror I experienced in my childhood home. Yep, the god of my limited understanding at the time, would spare me because that god had been absent for all of my life, and he owed me a life of perpetual joy and cotton candy clouds. Right.

My inner Lazarus has been resurrected through knowledge, nature, sacred texts, talking about my pain, and my Lazarus has come forth with a ferocity. I hope your Lazarus, Buddha, Shiva, Consciousness, all find new life through the toughest thing a person can experience: the permanent loss of a significant relationship.

Namastѐ

Druthers

By Sherrie Cassel

I hear it; it tinkles like ice

in your glass, like broken

glass. The sound of

shattering people is

the earworm that

makes me wish I were

deaf.

********

Ah, but then … who will

hold the sound of our

dissonant collaboration, and

for how long?

********

Some stories

don’t need to be told.

Some stories never need

to be told.

********

Would I take the shaking

hands, and the broken

soul only to hear the tinkling

again?

********

I watched you wither away

like a dried up leaf, increasing our

fire danger to high in our Santa Ana

winds.

********

I’m remembering one Thanksgiving.

Laughter serenaded our festivities.

There were other times it didn’t.

********

Sometimes, yeah, sometimes,

We skated together, gracefully,

and sometimes,

I drove you away.

********

Brain cells and booze,

and … now …

I’m lost without you, but no,

If you are at peace, then as much as

I miss you, I will rest in the knowledge

that you are no longer in pain.

********

Mommas and Poppas find peace

eventually. I have.

********

Whether you are or you are not.

If there is to be any closure,

if there can be…I will do my best to

stay at the party…even if you are not

here.

********

My very life blood.

My reason for living.

********

I will. I will hang in there, and as

the seasons change from the

sizzling heat of a summer in

the desert to the sweet chill of

winter, I will wish you were here.

********

I’ll wait for the spring, holding my

breath because another year will

have passed and soon, yes, very soon,

ten years will have passed. Ten.

********

You ached in your soul, and so,

ten years later, I’m starting to

understand why you wanted to

leave, why you needed to leave.

********

No! It should not have been you.

You are a prince, my Aztec and Native

Warrior.

********

I’m going to picture you on your best day

here, and be grateful that I can still remember

your face, your voice, your laughter,

and fuck the tinkling ice.

You were so much more than that.

Song Choice

By Sherrie Cassel

There is a bird, brightly colored; it always has a lilt in her chirp, which I interpret from my hedonistic brain as a sense of joy. The lacrimose mountain tanager’s name means sorrowful or tearful, despite her happy tune. The theory of how she got her name, it is suggested, may be because of the teardrop shaped yellow spot directly under her eyes. Regardless, I saw an analogy immediately and I wanted to ponder it with my fellow grievers.

I will carry grief with me until others hold space for me in their memories. I get that. I haven’t had a meltdown in a few years. I’ve had moments when my eyes have welled up, but for the most part, despite my sorrow about losing my son and with my face now forever stained by the deluge of tears, I cried for about four years of complicated grief. I know I was in complicated grief because I was watching others rebuild their lives, and I just sat around numbing myself with whatever did the trick; nothing did.

As we reach the next year, it will be here soon, my son will be gone ten years. I remember the day he died like it happened five minutes ago, and yet, if I stay in that space, I’ll stop experiencing all life has to offer me, surely, those things which are joyful, and sometimes, those things which bring a great deal of pain.

Among the exponential number of thoughts my spastic brain spits out is the desire to feel my best. So much like in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I guess we bloom where we are planted. Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, a holocaust survivor who contributed so much to the idea of post-traumatic growth who spoke of the joy that comes after mourning. How does one survive an experience that takes her down? Cancer? The death of a child? A breakup? Imprisonment?

There will be difficult times in our lives, but there will also be days when it is your favorite season, and joy is unavoidable – even in grief. I don’t know how long, or short one’s grief experience should last; I just know how long mine did and while it was and is essential to mourn our losses, prolonged and complicated grief can move into self-destructive behavior very quickly. I strongly encourage professional help – and, read everything you can about grief, about loss, about the specifics of your particular loss, i.e., for me, addiction and the loss of a child.

Art has the potential to heal us. The first time I heard Concerto for oboe, strings and continuo in D minor (mvt. II, Adagio –  Alessandro Marcelo), I was revving up for a night with Jimmy Buffet and fellow parrot heads. I remember it distinctly. I was lying on my bed gazing out my bedroom window on a patchy October afternoon. The clouds looked like giant popcorn, and I wept over the beauty of this magnificent piece.

After Rikki died, no place felt like home, not until we moved to the high desert where the geology is a staggering 1.7 billion years old. My tear stains become a little less visible, the more I process my pain. The ache in my heart remains, as a rest – and then – I sing, or I dance, or I write, and — I heal. My son’s death will never leave my brain, and certainly not the part of me that will always hold space for him, spiritual and intellectual space. My heart has been pieced together with the thread of every person, place, or thing, and each moment I’m alive, either singing or lamenting, is a gift my son and your loved one didn’t get to have.

I remember right after Rikki lost his life to addiction, I wished every day to not awaken so I could go to wherever he was, even though I’m less sure now if I believe in a mythological place where streets are paved in gold (a precious metal I have never liked), or a return to the Garden of Eden, or Aztlan, or self-actualization, or transcendence.  I just remember it hurt to breathe. I’ve traveled nine years with the monkey of grief on my back, and I alternate between dropping it and moving on, or continuing to move forward encumbered by grief that only keeps getting heavier with every single rumination of how things should have been, or through holding on to guilt or regret.

I didn’t die; I went to seminary.

There’s a song by Paul Simon, “Slip, Slidin’ Away,” that reminds me of our paradoxical lacrimose mountain tanager. Behind the ecclesiastical lyrics is a finger snapping tune. My husband and I speak about this song often. All of life is bittersweet; there’s no escape from tragedy happening in our lives at some point. Once I realized I was in self-destructive grief, I so desperately wanted to sing and to dance and to twirl in the moonlight under our desert sky. I had forgotten how to live beyond one strained breath at a time. I needed a jump start to feel alive again.

When I said my brain was hedonistic, I mean, not that I’m overzealous about pleasure, but I think we all want to feel our best on every level. I remember in a science class thirty years ago, I read about how living organisms return to homeostasis (balance) after a stress-producing event. I would put the death of a loved one in that category. It took me four years to return to homeostasis (Cannon) after my world was turned on its head when Rikki died.

In nearly ten years’ time the song, the one that accompanies my life can be heard again. I’ve had several months of being in a good space. The holidays will be upon us soon, and while I just love the holiday season, from Labor Day to New Year’s Eve, there is some sadness that keeps me grounded. I think I hold on to my grief out of respect for my son. I don’t, and of course I could not ever forget him. I wonder if he thinks I’ve forgotten him because I made the conscious choice to sing again. I wonder if he thinks. I wonder if he is.

My husband and I were in a life-altering car accident thirteen months ago, and my neck and back pain have not been the same. He fared worse. We are fortunate to be alive, and as near-death experiences go, I’ll take the lessons and keep moving forward with my life because I get to.

I used to laugh raucously with our grandson; he was the only one who could have me in stitches after his father died. I don’t laugh quite as long or as loudly as I used to. I tend to be calmer than I had ever been in my past. I love more fiercely. I’m able to hold space for someone who is sitting in the dark – because others held space for me when I was in my own dark night of the soul.

I think death is probably final. We live, love, lose, blow it and have victories. After Rikki died, I asked all the existential questions, but to be honest, I am no longer asking them. I know why my son died. I even know how. My question has always been, “Will I see him again?” Who knows, right? I envy those of you who were able to sing right away because you have conviction in an anchor; I didn’t.

My grief process has not been ideal, and I’ve fumbled and fallen flat on my face several times, but I keep going, learning, growing, singing, and grabbing all the joy I can in this one short, remarkable life.

The lacrimose mountain tanager sings with a sweet melody, and with visible tears tattooed upon her cheeks; so do I. I am not a Bible literalist, but I do so love the metaphors and the symbols, which have always infused my work. Saul of Tarsus, who later because Paul, a Jew among Jews, spoke of having a thorn in his side. I’m a freaking pin cushion! One of my thorns is the grief that is embedded in the skin of my soul. I carry that grief all the time. I dance with it. I laugh with it. I love with it; it is always present.

I got tired of feeling morose and dark all the time. I have always loved bright colors; orange is my favorite color. I have always loved spring and summer as my preferred seasons. September and October are amazing in the high desert. The sunrises and sunsets rise and set beautifully in our sky. I miss my son during those incredible natural phenomena, and so I bring him into each present moment. Nothing about my life is the same as it was before my son died, not even my favorite season. I think death shoots us out into the universe with the tools we were given, no map and expects us to find our way back to life through other solar systems until we’re back on solid ground. Death makes you crazy, and then it beckons you to heal.

I grew weary of my own teardrops. I grew weary of being sad all the time. I grew weary of hearing the kids playing tag underneath the streetlamps without me – and I grew weary of thinking my life had ended. Grief really does make perfect sense; it just hurts, and in my hedonistic country, it just lasts too damn long. Return to the positivity asap.  In retrospect, four years was too long. I cried with no singing in my heart. I heard Maria Callas sing The Magic Flute this morning. I’m not usually a fan of opera, but the sheer crystalline clarity of her voice made me want to weep because I got to hear it, and bittersweetly because I cannot share it with my son any longer.

Ah, but therein lies the rub; the truth is that just like Puff the Magic Dragon, if I sing really loudly and dance strenuously, maybe my son’s spirit will accompany me for a spell while I collect myself from a deluge. Who knows? Today is all I have, and so, like our lovely little bird here, I will continue to sing.

How do you mend a broken heart?

By Sherrie Cassel

Sometimes I make bonehead mistakes, not drastically bonehead (anymore, that is), but take for instance last night around 8:30 p.m. I pulled into Starbucks for a brown sugar, oat milk, shaken espresso. I actually knew I’d crash from the sugar then be up all night; it’s 4:30 a.m. I got up at 2:30. So, I’m writing a post.

I can scarcely believe that ten years ago I lost my son and only child. Ten Years. Unfuckingbelievable. I miss him beyond description. Some days I do really well, and others I just go with the new flow of my life, driven by heartache, and fueled by grief. I’ve learned it’s okay to use my grief toward a purpose, first toward my own healing, and then – helping others find their own pathway to healing. I always say it, and I’ll say it again, the fast-track to healing is through helping someone else.

I ached so much in the beginning I begged the God of my understanding to send me an angel, a human angel who would say the magic words that would just make me stop hurting. Well, I’ve learned in ten years time (in January 2026) that there are no magic words. I started this blog and another very specific blog for parents who’ve lost a child(ren) to addiction, specifically, heroin, fentanyl, and alcohol – all with the potential to kill someone. I read and read and continue to read everything I can find on grief, attachment issues with regard to addiction, from psych, medical, and social issue journals, ad infinitum. I just try so hard to fill that void with knowledge, and it’s true, knowledge has brought me right up to an understanding of the God of my understanding.

I wasn’t able to find that God until my heart was split in two; there is a scar now where the two halves of my heart have grown back together. There will always be a scar. To be honest, I want that scar, just like I want the stretch marks that came from the miracle of my son’s birth, just like stretch marks on my Soul. See, our Souls, whether you believe in the presence of a Soul in your own worldview, also stretch and grow as life continues to shape us into healed people – people with a purpose.

I have been in college in one way or another, either as a student or as an employee, for decades. I mean decades. I never had a clear purpose. I was busy being a single mom with a dead-beat ass as a biological father. A real bonehead mistake there. I also never had a clear direction. I thought I wanted to be a CNA, then a nurse, then an administrative assistant, then an English teacher, then an anthropology professor…see, what I mean?

After the death of my son, whose name is Rikki, I mourned for nearly four years before I started to awaken to the very real possibility that the intensity of the pain I was in was relentless; it would never end. Self-awareness is a major factor in healing. Once I became aware that I was the only one who could do the work it would take to lift myself out of this chronic pain, the first book I read was, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by the Rabbi Harold Kushner who lost his fourteen year old son to progeria.

There are times when I shoulder the entire responsibility for my son’s death. There are regrets. There is a constant longing for what can never be. The ache never goes away; the Soul remains tender, but that’s okay; it’s a good thing. I’d been numb for a very long time after my son died. Because of C-PTSD, there were still parts of my Soul that were numb, as a protective coping mechanism. I get it now. I believe in the Soul. I’m not sure if it’s eternal, but I do know there’s a part of us that goes so deep, like a black hole, we don’t know what’s at the end; I think we don’t know what’s there until it’s our time to return to dust.

I’m very careful about politics and religion on my other site, because I love all our members, regardless of how their worldview is structured. We share a common bond. We share the greatest loss a parent can endure. However, on Grief to Gratitude, I’m able to share about my own worldview openly, politics (although the current absurdity is enough to have me bury my head in the sand for the next two years). Religion is something I’ve deconstructed since seminary, which I was driven to complete, no matter how long, how difficult, or how traumatizing the internship was.

See, I found the Soul urging me to continue striving for the dream, whatever that might be, at any age, even in my 60s. I listened to the call and so, I realized in helping others, I was healing right along with them. I took my pain and I reframed it; I repurposed it. I turned it into the drive to complete two very difficult tasks. One was to live my life again – to its fullest; and two, I found my mojo to pour myself into seminary. There were days I was too exhausted to react to a trigger.

Did I find the God of my understanding? Yes, it took seminary to help me understand where my God stood in the many ways there are to understand the extraordinariness of the Sacred, whatever that means to you. I was raised into both Roman Catholicism, and as a Southern Baptist. I dickered back and forth between God or no God to why, God, why did you take my son, to there is no God, to God, I’m aching here. When will the pain stop? Are you listening? Are you real? Can you “hear” me? See, after a while, after seminary and two extracurricular classes on Models of God and Alternate Ultimate Realities, and Science and Religion from a Process Perspective; both classes blew me clear out of the water.

My Ph.D. (I’ve been invited to interview at my first choice of programs) will focus on psychology, religion and consciousness. I’m looking forward to it. See, for four years life held no joy, no hope, no thought of the future. I was living one minute at a time, and my heartbeat was arrhythmic and I could hear it beating with my Soul, trying to resuscitate it. The hunger for knowledge and the hard work it takes to heal can be of great comfort. I had a therapist years ago who gave me his “recipe” for happiness:

  1. Have something to do;
  2. Have something to love; and
  3. Have something to look forward to

We have to be proactive in our healing process. There are no magic words. I bought something called grief spray about three months after my son died. The homeopath was very kind when I poured out my broken heart to him in the health food store. But grief spray. Obviously, it didn’t work. I wished that grief was a demon, and my Catholic roots would have someone who loved me call for an exorcism to rid myself of it. I always say that when in intense grief, unrealities are not out of the question. Grief spray! Not only did it taste like shit, it also was a desperate attempt to stop the pain. I know I’ve read about others saying the pain is a given, but suffering is optional. I call bullshit. Suffering is necessary to grieve; suffering does not feel good, but it’s temporary – if we work hard to process it and if we feel that pain which causes us temporary suffering, if we find something to solder those two halves of our broken heart together again, not without scars, and not with total healing, but with the tender spot of perpetual healing, no longer suffering, but navigating the grief process equipped with knowledge for how to change the trajectory of your path.

I had nothing to look forward to after Rikki died. How do you go on when the only real job you’ve ever had was being a parent? Do you reach out to religion? To non-religious, but spiritual traditions? To nature? Whatever it takes, life goes by quickly. Before you know they’re singing When I’m Sixty-Four and you’re planning your next home – with no stairs as you contemplate, and hopefully, look forward to your old age. Fill that void that can never truly be completely filled, with knowledge about your specific loss. Find a community of fellow comrades who share in your loss with their own. Find a spiritual practice. Write. Paint. Weep onto a canvas. Sing into the void. Physician, heal thyself.

I walked away from my religion(s) when I went to seminary. I found the greatest love and healing through academics, grief, and spiritual work. What does that mean? It means when the world and the grief get too heavy, I can tap into the God of my understanding in nature, through books, through podcasts, through music or through a conversation with a safe other. So can you tap into the Sacred in your own life.

I’m not saying you won’t have triggers that compel you to sob on occasion, but a healing ritual is not a passive activity; it’s very proactive. My Soul sister and I are going to do a healing ritual at the beach next week. I love the ocean. Rikki loved the ocean. We have our special pier we have walked on for thirty-two years. I no longer feel that deep, frantic feeling of an impending overwhelm when I do something Rik and I did together since he was a baby. I get a tug at my heart and then Soul sweeps in to rescue me so I can function fully in my day. I can share about my son without losing it now.

I hope that if you’re new in your grief that this long post reaches you and gives you something to do, something to love, and something to look forward to. I don’t know if it’s THE recipe, but it sure has helped me.

G_d, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I know the difference now for how to live a life where joy is welcome and how to stay in the phase of suffering for longer than is necessary. We ache in our hearts, but allow your Soul, the Sacred, Source, G_d, to guide you to that joyful life; it’s possible.

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