Transforming Grief Into Joy

My bottom line for dealing with grief concerns a firm belief of mine that the experience of grief is simply "God" knocking on our door with a really useful lesson for us. A lesson that will transform us.

If we don't answer the door, or we answer it but can't comprehend the lesson, or we comprehend the lesson but don't seem able to heed it, the grief continues.

In that case, the grief continues until such time that it subsides on its own, becoming adapted within our bodies (e.g. "time heals all wounds"). This sort of "adaptation" warps our bodies slightly. I liken the process to developing a flinch.

But, on the other hand, if we do answer the door and do heed the lesson, no flinch develops. Instead, we become lighter. This, I believe, is true coping with grief.

Now, the above is just my theory. Could be true. Might not be. In any case, I'll tell you how I stumbled over it.

It is the first week of July 1997. I am 34 years old, and live (alone) in temporary housing in Palo Alto, California. I work for a small Internet startup. Three "interesting" things happened "to me" that week:

• My mom's strange progressing disease was diagnosed as ALS. This was a death sentence.
  
• My divorce from my first wife (my mate of the past 12 years) became final.
• My Internet startup got bought by a larger player, leaving me with a good deal more money than I needed at the time.
  

If you look at the famous Holmes Rahe Stress Scale, you'll see that these three events of early July 2007 rate as #2, #5, and #16 on that scale. The higher the rating, the greater the stress.

Many Americans won't understand how or why my third event above was stressful. How could making a bunch of money be stressful?

I'll give you one way that it was stressful for me. One thing money buys us is time. Free time to sit around and do nothing, if that what we choose. Free time to travel to wherever we want, for as long as we want. Free time to try out new activities.

Sounds like fun. Except when events like my first two above just happened, and I found myself consumed by thoughts of them. So during all this free time that the money bought, all I could think about was those two events.

Sometime toward the end of my "lost years" (1996-2000), I remember sitting in an airport terminal in Seoul, South Korea. I was traveling between India and California, waiting for my connecting flight.

As I sat there, I watched the stream of people passing by heading on to their busy lives. I watched as particles of dust -- illuminated by the morning light -- drifted across the marble terminal floor. This dust moved randomly, buffeted by the movement of the people.

It struck me at that moment that I was no different from this dust. That I was a chance collection of molecules randomly drifting through the world. Disconnected. Meaningless.

As you might imagine, that was a pretty low point for me. A rather negative feeling.

But then the stangest thing happened to me. In the midst of this black mood, a ray of light suddenly shined through and my mood flipped from desperation all the way over to joy. True joy.

I had suddenly realized that disconnection and absence of meaning is the flip side of free, and that I am free, always have been, always will be. I realized that "ownerhip" is but an illusion. We are mere renters of these bodies in which we walk around. Our relationships are mere passings in the night.

And all of this is exactly as it should be, has always been, and ever will be. And I saw that this was beautiful. And I felt a sense of profound gratitude for the privilege of participating in this dance of life and death, of joining and of parting, of beginnings and of endings.

I tell you this story to come back to what I said at the start of this testimony. That moment in the Seoul airport in the late 1990s was God knocking on my door with a lesson for me. I answered that door, and have been heeding that lesson ever since.

These words are metaphors. What they mean is that when I was feeling like shit in that airport, I didn't fight it. I didn't take any pills. I didn't try to drown my sorrows. I didn't wallow in them. I didn't flee them. I didn't feel ashamed of them. Instead, I just accepted these feelings, and quietly pondered them.

This was a meditative state of mind. Aware. Awake. Non-judgmental. Non-attached. Non-averise. It is a state reached only by letting go, not by trying harder.

I believe this mental state is akin to "answering the door when God is knocking". As for understanding and heeding the lesson, I suspect that those just follow from this open, penitent state of mind. 

The last thing I'll say on this score is that if the above is sounding too "high and mighty" for you, realize that the grand lesson I needed God to teach me was stated very simply by my sister drLove early on. She said: "Peter, they [my mother and ex-wife] weren't yours to lose."

Everything I wrote in the middle of this testimony fits into that pithy statement of my sister. So is my sister a wise woman for giving me that pearl? I'll say yes she is a wise woman. Just read her volumnous contributions to Holonation. 

But as for her pithy words of wisdom to me quoted above, I think they say much more about me than they do about her. What I mean is that the vast majority of us learn that pithy lesson somewhere between the age of 2 or 3. I can see this struggle in my own 2-year-old daughter right now. Everything is "mine!". I am confident that by 3, she will have learned this rudimentary lesson.

But I never did learn it at 3. It wasn't until I was 34 that I understood. Pretty slow learner aren't I?

Well, it turns out that whatever the "grand lesson" is that you need to learn I probably learned back when I was 2. But me just telling you what that lesson is would do you no good.

You will find your lesson within yourself or not at all. And you will find the answer for it inside you, or not at all. Even if the lesson you learn turns out to be as pithy as the one my sister tried to teach me.

This is because "heeding the lesson" is not a mere intellectual dynamic. Rather, it is a full mind, body, and "spirit" acceptance. It is something you feel, you taste, you sleep with. It's not clever words in a book nor the kindness of a "guru".

Finally, sorry for the preachy voice. As you can probably tell, I'm still waiting for the "grand lesson" having something to do with: "none of us is the teacher; all of us are teachers".