grief | the heart of the matter

Tag Archives: grief

June 22, 2013 · 10:58 pm

the thin line

I am watching my son grieve the loss of his partner, Bill. I am stunned by the grace by which he faces this grief. He meets it daily as he takes on tasks completely new to him: calling people to break the news, helping to give away his partner’s belongings, choosing a few special items to keep himself. And those acute moments where he turns to tell Bill something–only to remember that he is gone. I clearly remember my mother going through that after my father’s fatal heart attack.

I cannot relieve my son’s pain. I can only love him unconditionally, and listen with care when he needs to talk. Or wail. Or have moments of anger that Bill didn’t attend to the clear symptoms that something was amiss.

Here we are in this raw, tender vessel called life–one big living, dying, birthing, exploding wonder. Awareness, seemingly playing out in this field called manifestation, yet never taking form, or changing form, at all.

8 Comments

Filed under Advaita, Daily reminders

Tagged as direct experience, embodying realization, grief

May 21, 2013 · 7:28 pm

Moore, Oklahoma

I couldn’t find words when I posted yesterday afternoon. But last night, in a monthly writing group, this showed up during the free-write period.

Today, in Moore, Oklahoma, lives were literally blown wide open–and the litter of lives spun high, then twirled down, some pieces found ninety miles away in Tulsa.

Buildings exploded–folded, twisted, crushed–and within them, some bodies were impaled, crushed, and even drowned. One man’s whole livelihood lay in his herd of eighty horses. Only one is left. Oh… oh my, where are the rest?

Two elementary schools took the direct hit. A teacher lay on top of her third-graders to protect them from flying projectiles of debris. Those children survived; she may not.

What was once a sheltering, seemingly sturdy elementary school lies as unrecognizable wreckage. As I watched the half-hour news, the death count rose from fifteen to thirty-seven to fifty-one. Then dark fell. Just the beginning. This “event” as newscasters call it–was deemed three times worse than the one nearby last year that killed 167 people. Today we learned the twister tipped the scale at EF5–a mile and a half wide, with winds up to two hundred ten miles an hour. Close to twenty square miles, flattened. One consolation–the death toll was reduced to twenty-four.

One powerful x#%!# tornado.

The mind wants to make a story–what wrath have we called upon us? But that is simply a creation of thought that, grasping on to sensations we name helplessness, demands some kind of answer. The mind wants to rail–we go to war for billions of dollars, but do not build safe rooms in schools for our children to ride out a tornado.

There are no answers. Nothing can give back to these people, what–on a relative level–they have lost.

But love can help. Send love, and if you can, money, to our very own hurt and wounded self.

3 Comments

Filed under Advaita, Daily reminders, Non-duality

Tagged as direct experience, embodying realization, grief