Notes
From a
Modern Day Fairy Godmother
A column from Terre Thomas
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Grief
and empty prayers
A miscarriage, a lost newborn,
failing vision, a dying friendship, a child leaving the nest, a love affair ending, a lost job, a dear friend’s unexpected
death… I am awash with losses, both my own and of those around me – family, friends, Fairy Godmother
folk.
And as this seems to be a
particularly intense spell, I realize that I am getting better at the “practice of grief”. It visits me more often
now, at this stage of my life, and I, as a true Aquarian, have been learning more about it in my spiritual study over the past few years.
Most profoundly, John
Welshon’s book, Awakening from Grief has guided me to a huge shift in my beliefs about the role and importance of loss and grief in
one’s life. He pointedly exposes our cultural preference to avoid, dismiss, or deny sadness.
Messages to avoid grief and sadness “come from our parents, our siblings, our teachers, our friends, and for the most part, they
have been given with the best intentions. They have been given with the hope that our lives will be happier if we distract ourselves from
sadness….We live in a culture that has sought to protect us from sadness. But we live in a world where sadness is
inevitable.”
And in our hearts we know that
this is true, so we have to learn what to do with sadness so that it doesn’t make us sick. Here is a long but powerful
excerpt from the book:
The
losses in our lives are the hardest things we have to face: A loved one dies. A relationship ends. We lose a
job, a friend, a treasured dream. A child is ill. We lose our physical health, or ability and…our world
turns upside down.
We lose
our bearings. We lose our joy. We lose our security. We no longer know who we are. We no longer know what our
lives are about. We no longer trust. We long for
something to take away the pain, to change the circumstances, to bring back the ones we love – to return us, and our lives, to
wholeness.
For
many of us, the question is, How do I begin again? How do I find happiness again? For others, the only real question is, When will
this pain end?
l
If we
can look at the losses in our lives a little differently, if we can change our perspective just slightly, we may see that within this experience lie
the seeds of a new beginning, of a new life, of a deeper experience of love and fulfillment than we ever imagined possible.
We may
see that when our heart are broken, they are also wide open.. Loss is an inevitable part of being human. And our choice is either
to remain in pain and bitterness or to learn how to use this experience to grow into a richer, more fulfilling life..… It is about finding joy
again.
My neighbor lost a friend in a
freak road accident recently. When I saw her a few days after the funeral, she was weary beyond words. When I
told her I would include her in my daily prayers, she said, “Good, because I just can’t even pray right now.”
And who hasn’t had those
spells when prayer feels empty and futile. Even the new revelations of Mother Teresa’s dark night of the soul confirm that
this experience is a genuine condition of our humanness. (As a side note, I want to point out that Mother Teresa’s torment
began when she was 49 years old - I did the math - and I wonder if she had been confiding to other women about her doubts and despair,
instead of male priests, that someone might have considered hormonal change-of-life influences and helped her with that. But
that’s probably a Tingle newsletter column in itself.)
But back to empty prayers. Anne
Lamott offers a most powerful solution to those times when the spirit is dry and the prayers feel meaningless. In Traveling
Mercies, she said that, at the heart of it all, there are really just two basic prayers: “Help, help, help” and
“Thank you, thank you, thank you”.
Once I read that, I realized
that when I was experiencing that emptiness and lack of connection to anyone or anything, spiritual or otherwise, I would have those prayers to
pray because deep down I do believe in my connection, everyone’s connection, to something bigger, greater, and infinitely full of
love. And at moments of despair, those prayers give me at least the tiny lifeline to it.
The other part to honoring
grief is to “chop wood and carry water”. There is preciousness in the ordinariness of what we do in our daily
lives. One of my favorite passages from The Invitation by Oriah is “I want to know if you can get up, after a night
of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children." On a therapeutic level, some of those
daily tasks will pierce the fog and sadness and hopefully give you a glimmering reminder of happiness and pleasure that are so infrequent in
grief.
Many years ago I began
describing the grieving process as one in which at first, you are submersed in your grief constantly, but then a window of respite opens just a
crack. During the brief respite, the pain is gone and you come back to the familiar, ungrieving you. As time
passes and more healing occurs, the window of respite opens a bit more and then it starts to open more often.
Your grief is real and true, and the moments of respite and old normalcy are too.
In Aphrodite, a Memoir of
the Senses, Isabelle Allende described her three years following the death of her daughter, “Those years were three
centuries filled with the sensation that the world had lost its color and that a universal grayness had spread inexorable over every surface. I
cannot pinpin the moment when I saw the first blush stokes of color, but when my dreams about food began, I knew that I was reaching the end of a
long tunnel of mourning and finally coming out the other end, into the light..." This, so eloquently, captures the way time passes
with grief while subtly, but assuredly, measures it in real time too.
If you are reading this and all
is well in your life right now, whisper a prayer of thanks.
If you are reading this and are
experiencing a loss of your own, please know that as lonely as
it may feel, you are not alone in this experience.
In closing I'd like to
share two other beautiful things that has helped me with my grief, the poetry of Hafiz and Mary Oliver. Here are
two of their most comforting poems for me:
Wild Geese
You do not have to be
good.
You do not have to walk on your
knees
for a hundred miles trhough the
desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft
animal of your body
love
what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours,
and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes
on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear
pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep
trees,
the mountains and the
rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high
in the clean blue air,
are heading home
again.
Whoever you are, no matter how
lonely,
the world offers itself to your
imagination,
Calls to you like the wild
geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your
place
in the family of
things.
By Mary Oliver
A Cushion for Your Head
Just sit there right now
Don’t do a thing
Just rest.
For your separation from God,
From love,
Is the hardest work
In this
World.
Let me bring you trays of food
And something
That you like to
drink.
You can use my soft words
As a cushion
For your
Head.
By Hafiz
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