Extract from: 'Some Cross Cultural Reflections about Grief, Community & Healing' (Feb 2024)

SOME THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS ABOUT GRIEF

THE ORDINARY AND EVERYDAY OF GRIEF

Grief is a natural response to loss. For many, grief may strike in direct proportion to love: often the more we love a person or a thing, the more we experience grief when we lose it, a perspective expressed most elegantly by Mayan Shaman, Martin Prechtel in his Grief and Praise talks. In our world there are so many things that cause us pain and sorrow. Big griefs: our dear ones die; our relationships end; our jobs disappoint us. Everyday griefs: a friend lets us down; our children struggle; we feel the loss of roots and community; we are beset by anxiety and fear about the state of the world. Some days life is just hard.

THE WILLOW AND THE OAK

Why, we must ask, is grief and the prospect of weeping openly and the feelings that come, so feared in our culture? It seems people run away from grief and don’t know how to bend like a willow with it, but stand trying to be impregnable, like a great oak, terrified of being toppled. Not even can the strongest man survive it in full force? And maybe it is a leveller, but that is to run ahead of the conversation.

TEARS HEAPED UP

Everyone ‘deals with’ grief in their own way. The world is full of unshed tears, the thought of opening the gates is too much and so we remain frozen. All these frozen tears, together such a weight to bear that we must each day find a hundred distractions not to feel them, for fear of being swept away. Tears that are ours, or tears heaped up, both our own and tears that have not been cried for generations.

A SLUICE GATE OR A DAM

Grief can be scary. And rightly so perhaps. There is a fear that once started the tears might never stop! If you bottle everything up, then you have a huge wall of water (think bursting dam) ready to crash down on you. A terrifying prospect, how will you manage something so big and so unfamiliar? Familiarity with grief allows you to raise the sluice gates from time to time, ease the flow, which is less and not so overwhelming, and it is familiar as you have done it before, and know you won’t be swept away (or fear you’ll die, which is how it can feel to some people in the bursting dam scenario)  What is more, rather than sweeping all before it, sluice water, healing tears, can go on to water seeds in dry fields (think parts of your life needing more emotion.)

OUR BODIES KNOW HOW

The other thing about grief is, we don’t know how to do it. Or rather we fear our bodies don’t. We get all tense and anxious and have no idea what is coming. What people find, once they start grieving, is that their body knows how to do this. It’s natural. Even when big grief throws you to the floor howling, sobbing and thumping the earth, in time the intensity eases and after a while, energy and grief expended, you are lighter, you look years younger (as not so stressed holding it all in) and can move more easily, and your body is softer and gentler too. Our bodies know.

GRIEVING AS A SKILL

Grieving is a skill, feel it, allow it, and then return to the part of your life that is waiting for you. Grief needs practise. However, we live in a culture that holds out no examples of how to express grief, having largely forgotten how to grieve.

Big grief is best with a friend or a supportive crowd, smaller grief you need to develop your own rhythm with, or find your own place. And sometimes it jumps on you when you least expect it and you have to go with it if life allows. But with practise you know it for what it is, and don’t fear it or feel ashamed of it.

IRRITATION OR SEDATION

Restrained grief can come out as anger or even violence. Grief held back unexpressed causes pain, and if I am hurting, some one is going to pay for it: a bad mood, a raised voice, or worse. Or to avoid the pain we numb out and freeze. Tragically we can get really good at this!.

Years can go by feeling nothing because we are afraid to feel our grief, we can’t feel, or if we get a sense of it, we get scared or find a diversion, worse an addiction. Stuck grief (or the anger that turns up in its place) is like a solid layer that seals over all feelings. What can we do, to try to feel instead?

CULTURAL BIAS AND GRIEF

Any nation familiar with battle and conquest, sure you can think of a few, will have an ambivalent relationship to grief. As a serviceman (and it is still mainly men,) you cannot take time to grieve when your buddy gets blasted to bits at your side, you grab his ammunition, his rifle, or whatever is going to help the fight and keep going. Grief has no place on the battlefield. And after? If the enemy killed your friend, to grieve is to accord the enemy a victory. To grieve is to be weak, and less able to fight. And this is a betrayal of your friend and others who died fighting, so grief is not permitted or forbidden.

Grief and war would seem to be naturally wedded, the loss and pain of death and hurt provoke grief in a family, amongst friends, in a nation. Except when that nation needs to keep fighting. Then grief is bottled up and the emotional energy is used to ignite anger and revenge.

‘People who do not know the power of shedding their tears together are like a time bomb, dangerous to themselves and to the world.’ Malidoma Some .cage é

To be open to grief is a betrayal of your country, of the people who had died for it. Grief has no place in a nation built of war. ‘Stiff upper lip’, ‘head held high’, ‘up and at em’, these phrases come so easily in our culture, they predispose us against grief. Only oak trees allowed. These are the words and attitudes of a warrior nation (Britain is not the only one).

MEN AND GRIEF

‘Big boys don’t cry’, it still echoes. For many men they get the message that, manhood is about enduring suffering, being tough, not reacting to loss or expressing grief or crying. The message goes out, especially to men, that to grieve is to be weak. To express fear or pain even, is weak (what toughing it out in sports is a part of.) A school system once designed to run the empire ensured these values were uniformly broadcast and even applauded. The old shadow cast by this system is long, and hangs heavy. To be weak is to lay oneself open to bullying and being called out and mocked. Better keep the grief in. And as a consequence, the non-griever becomes the emotional-freezer, locked in their own straight-jacket of conformity to a message that might serve a cause (the warrior nation), but betrays the fundamental humanity that, by an act of grieving, wants to acknowledge loss and express the love and admiration for the one who has gone.

WHAT IS LOST WHEN TEARS ARE LOST?

And in this, what is lost. To the community, to the individual, to families? It is enough that a man or woman cannot feel or express their feelings because they carry so much stored up grief. Their family lives perpetually with a part of them shut down and ‘missing’. Frozen tears have consequences, increasingly understood with our growing mental health awareness, in depression, violence, self-harm and worse.

And what of the cost to the dead? These costs find expression in different cultural traditions.  Some say that it is the tears of the people grieving for their dead that act as wind in the sails of the boat taking the deceased to the other world. How many becalmed ghosts walk among us? Those dead who looked back, see rows and rows of stiff upper lips, barely a tear amongst them. The dead might rightly ask, do you miss me, was I ever really loved when as a human I walked amongst you? I am gone from you, but my passing seems to make no difference to you. Where are your tears?

Mayan Shaman, Martin Prechtel, speaks most elgantly of grief and praise being the different sides of the same coin (see, The Smell of Rain on Dust). The more you love someone, the greater the sense of loss you feel. Tears and love are inseparably bound; until cultural rules rip them unnaturally apart for its own causes. A part of our challenge now is to stitch tears and love back together again, both personally and culturally. ENDS

BACKGROUND: This is part of a longer article that explores the roll of ritual, as brought to the UK by Dagara teachers Malidoma and Sobonfu Some (both now passed), around grief, and what we might to create the momentum for such events to be less overwhelming to potential participants, and more widely available in general.

For more information about Grief Rituals, or for access to the full article please contact the author: john@recastpath.life