These words of Queen Elizabeth II drew tears when they were read to the mourning audience at St Thomas Cathedral in Manhattan, just nine days after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.  As yet unaccounted for were 250 British citizens missing since the attack.  English Prime Minister Tony Blair, in recalling a Thornton Wilder poem about dying sought to reassure those present, saying, “there is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love.”  Such are the ways that grief and sorrow overwhelm us during such profound loss.  When we have lost someone we love, there is little comfort for a while.  There is only the pain.  And even though we eventually return to our activities and go on, that pain will touch us and be a part of us for the rest of our lives.

I am often asked to help those who are struggling with grief and sorrow.  To help them gain an understanding of a profound loss and it’s meaning in their lives, to make sense of senseless events that leave our lives forever changed.  Some of the most difficult moments come when grief rises long after the death of a loved one, sometimes years beyond the original loss.  The painful experience returns anew, slowing us down, disorienting us and drawing us back.  Strong feelings appear unbidden and unwanted, sometimes crashing into orderly and productive lives with confusing mixtures of tears and depression, often years later.  We are sometimes encouraged by well-meaning friends to “just get over it”.

I was a nine year old third grader when my maternal grandparents were both killed in a late November night auto accident in a remote corner of the Florida panhandle.  We got the call around midnight.  My mother, wailing, fell into my father’s arms in a lurch.  This was my first real experience of death, and my life was shattered.  I remember crying ceaselessly, standing inconsolably before twin silver caskets, clinging for solace to my aunts and uncles.  The pain seemed endless.  The fog and gloom return to me now as I recall that dark time.  It was winter and cold outside.  But inside me, it was even colder.  My father withdrew into his own grief by diving into work and staying far from our home.  My mother, barely 30 years old, fell into a severe depression from which she never recovered.  I was left alone in the care of my older sister, thrust into managing for myself, especially emotionally, far sooner than I was ready.  My role became caring for a now disabled mom.  It would be many years before I understood the way this pain and grief was changing and shaping my life.  I tried mightily to “put it behind me”,  and “move on”.  I put on a mask.  Entering my early teens, I turned macho and tough and spent some years drinking to excess and getting high.

Years later, after an awful divorce, during a period in which my life was one hot mess after another, I began therapy with a woman who would change my life profoundly by helping me learn about grief.  And anger.  And joy.  It took some time for me to drop the “macho” façade and get real with her.  She was patient and most importantly, compassionate and loving.  Gradually I was able to tell more of my story to her more gently and I discovered that I’d been holding back for years a lot of the grieving that came from that awful accident.  For the first time in my life, I fully grasped the magnitude of my attachment to my grandparents and my helplessness after losing my mother as well.  I’d cried before, but never like that.  I finally let the full experience touch me.  I learned that my anger was a “masking” reaction, a tactic that helped me to feel “strong” during periods when I was feeling the most vulnerable.  She helped me let go.  She helped me get through what Scott Peck, in The Road Less Travelled calls a “spiritual desert”, and she helped me remain conscious along the way.  She gave me permission to revisit a place of unfinished business, and take yet another look at a scar across my heart, helping me to make sense of something I’d only had intuition about.  Gradually, and surprisingly, I began to feel happy.  I recovered my joy.  I won’t soon forget the moment in a dark theater, watching a movie, that a deep and satisfying “belly laugh” escaped from me, mysterious and familiar all at once.  “The depth of your joy will be equal to your greatest experience of sorrow”, my therapist had been saying.  Now I understood.

Namaste,
John