Grief To Gift
by Michelle Katz
After my first break up with a serious boyfriend, in my grief and heartache, confusion and scrambling to make sense of it, my dad said to me, “when the groom leaves the bride at the altar, no one knowns who is the lucky one.” I remember it stopping me in my tracks. This statement, that I gave tribute to as some Ukrainian adage I imagine he heard somewhere along the way in his growing up, created true pause in my experience of loss. Like a Zen Koan landing in my lap through the wisdom of a man I would never expect such a turn of a phrase be expressed. Years and years later, I still remember that moment, that saying, and have applied it to the many loses throughout my life: relationship losses, career losses, losses that contributed to major paradigm shifts, the most brutal experience of friendship losses, even the losses and battles with my own ideas.
This simple and profound saying offers me the greatest contemplation about loss: ”What if it was meant to be?” “What if this terrible unbearable feeling of grief, is actually for the best?” Holy wow! As the Dalai Lama wrote “Not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”
We all have had losses in our lives. Many of which have defined us, taught us a lesson about how to be in the world, taught us about great love and surrendering to what is. In hindsight, all those losses can be seen as circumstances that were meant to be. Grief for something that was once so wonderful can later be understood as necessary loss for the becoming who we are meant to be.
Loss happens in nature every day, from predator hunting prey to the extinction of a species due to the climate crisis. There is even the line of thought that the global pandemic and it’s enormous impact on the loss of life can be contributed to nature running its course for the creation of a world that is more sustainable, conscious, community oriented. It is a hard heart wrenching thought to bare, but, what if it’s true? Could we bare it? There is much we grieve these days that is hard to bare. We are meaning-making-machines and it is often more about how we feel about how we feel than the feeling alone. What is the work of seeing the crack as also being the place that the light comes in (as Leonard Cohen wrote)? Are we able to see that a light is in both the broken glass and the diamond (Mark Nepo)?
Byron Katie, a great psychological thinker/author, among many others of her kind, teachers us to look at what is. To ask the questions of what is really true? How we know it’s true? What is our reaction to our thoughts? Who would we be if we didn’t have that thought? And what if we flipped that thought around and discovered ways that new thoughts might be true. What an incredible, interesting, and unbearably challenging practice to take on!
Another great explored or grief, Francis Weller, teaches us the wildness of our sorrow and how the other side of it is gratitude. Greif can be transformed into fertile ground for use to embrace the realness of life.
Vulnerably, I tell a story of the loss of a career I had been dreaming of for as long as I could remember. My identity, who I defined myself to be, was wrapped up in this career. The loss of it left me utterly bewildered. I failed, I wasn’t worthy of anything good, I felt depressed, hopeless, I could not see my life ahead of me. Who was I? How was I going to move forward? Joseph Campbell offers, “We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” The freedom of this terrifyingly challenging action is inexplicable. It feels like sometimes this action of letting go could kill us, it is that threatening to our existence. But I have to tell you, every time I have been able to practice this letting go, it has been liberating. Acceptance of what is the greatest way to lead a peaceful life.
I watch the trees move through the seasons, loosing their leaves in the autumn without resistance. I watch the long days become shorter. The fruit fall from the carefully planned and tended to garden. I watched the winter come and cover the sands and soils that are marked by footprints that hold memories of walks with a lover or friend, the small plants that took root but may not make it to another spring, the tree trunks that once invited us to sit awhile. I watch the once pristine glistening heavenly snow turn brown and dirty, patchy and slushy on its way to melt. I watch the buds of tress become leaves and flowers in the spring, the grass growing back the best it can in the face of drought remembering what it once was in the rainy year; the wind blowing the pollen of a juniper to it’s mate like a soul leaving a living being. I watch beautiful full forests become on fire and then turn into flood grounds and then become the landscapes the elk come to know and love as their greatest buffet. I see the bunny picked up by the raptor, the snake eat the mouse, the coyote on the side of the road and it’s mate howling in the loss. I see the fallen and decaying tree, becoming a home for burrowing animals and then on its way to become soil and new plants. The world is full of loss. The loss is an energy that creates something new, something equally or even more beautiful. If we are able to do the important work we are meant to do with the experience of loss.
My losses created resistance, morphed into grief that spoke to an enormous love, initiated a creative process and revealed some beautiful gifts that would otherwise have been unseen. So, if the groom leaves the bride at the altar, yes, no one knows who is the lucky one, but my bet is on both of them eventually grow lucky enough to live happily ever after.