Unfolding, grief, and love

The local paper is chronicling an account of how a local family faced the challenge of living without a daughter and her child after their murder 20 years ago (GazetteNet.com). It is a brave thing to do to share such a deeply painful story publicly but a gift to all of us. In this intimate disclosure are many lessons about healing and caring for each other that usually remain hidden between us; our terrors, depth-less griefs, our loneliness, abandonment, and little hopes. How much we need each other becomes apparent in this story as well as how the losses that thread throughout our lives connect us together in ways we can forget. In her healing, the mother returned again and again to a place she called "the pit" which was cold and dark, lined with cement. "It was colder than a walk-in refrigerator. The floor was flat, with steps on two sides and no railings...in the intense cold, her movements were slowed. As her spasms of grief lessened in time, she found she could slowly climb the steps without falling back, the air warming as she rose." In her journey of grief, we are reminded of how slow and uneven the path is. Her therapist writes, "At some point the line (inside of the pit) would have run long enough for deeper healing to become possible, for a person to recover enough to do more than hold themselves together. But first, they get a little worse. People shouldn't mistake that flat line for recovery or adjustment." She told the woman, "I think you've gone as far as you will with getting better quickly. Now you're going to get better more slowly. You're not going to be at the bottom though it may feel like you are. Changes are going to come more slowly now." We need to help each other, in so many ways, to find patience with these necessary changes which move, at times, so slowly (and backwards) that we can feel so abandoned and lost, the grief implacable, the darkness never ending. Unlike the messages we receive (every microsecond) from the world around us to move faster, better, with more efficiency and progress, our inner lives unfold at a slower more uneven, natural, and organic pace. Cut off from the lessons of the geese, the wildflowers blooming after winter ice, the sun rising ever so slightly a minute earlier each day, we loose touch with our humanity, our true purpose in life, which is to both unfold and touch more deeply our inner soul. And to do this - to reach the warmer air - we need each other's help.