When
A Loved One Is Lost
by Linda Marks
LITTLE DID I KNOW WHEN I STARTED WRITING
THIS ARTICLE IN JULY, THAT THE TOPIC OF LOSS AND THE PROFOUND TRAGEDY OF
SUDDEN LOSS WOULD BE SO POWERFULLY RELEVANT AFTER THE EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER
llTH. LOSS IS ONE OF THE OFTEN SILENT TOPICS OF OUR WORLD AND LIVES,
HIDING IN THE SHADOWS UNTIL WE ARE FORCED TO LOOK AT IT WITH GREATER
DEGREES OF CLARITY OR OBSCURITY. WHEN SOMEONE DIES, HOW HARD IT IS TO KNOW
WHAT TO SAY. TOO MANY FEELINGS. HARD TO FIND WORDS. LOSS IS PAINFUL AND
OVERWHELMING FOR THE PERSON WHO HAS LOST A LOVED ONE, AND AWKWARD AND
OVERWHELMING FOR THOSE CLOSE TO THOSE WHO ARE LEFT BEHIND.
Deep and meaningful relationships are a
gift from the divine. While we may feel varying degrees of closeness or
estrangement with our blood relations, there is a primal connection that
is broken when a family member dies. When relationships end, short of
physical death, a deep psychic loss takes place, sometimes more painful
than death.
Soul connections never die. Heart
connections need conscious care and attention. What we do in the here and
now, in our daily lives, with the connections we have is up to us. We can
take care of our relationships, even if the forms need to change and
evolve over time. We can loll relationships slowly or abruptly through
neglect, sabotage, violence or fear. Sadly, few of us have been given
models or language for the care and feeding of intimate connections over
time. As a result, we suffer deaths of a sort within existing
relationships as intimacy breaks down, and we suffer more complete deaths
when important relationships are lost entirely.
In our culture we have few good models for
working with all the emotions associated with losing an important
relationship, through death or separation. The language and imagery of
separation in the workplace portrays how we handle loss and separation in
many other life arenas. It is riddled with violence and heartlessness. An
employee gets "fired" or "terminated." When they are
given the news that it is time to part ways, the bearer of the bad news
"pulls the trigger."
And while some organizations are humane as
the professional relationship between employer and employee comes to an
end, many endings are abrupt. After being told they are "fired"
the employee is escorted to his/her desk, asked to collect his/her
personal belongings and is escorted out the building, never to return.
Matter of fact. Over and done with. Security is called to be sure there is
no angry outbreak, no violent episode, no theft. Endings are handled
violently. The trigger is pulled, we walk out and away, forever. No room
for a closure process. Emotional loose ends hang raw. While this is normal
behavior in our culture, the heart does not process this way.
Loss Through Violence
Violence of all sorts—emotional,
spiritual and physical, against self and against other—has its roots in
having been violated. I remember seeing a video of a teenage girl who was
in treatment for having broken the arm of a three year old boy. In the
first part of the video, the girl provides a blow by blow, journalistic
report of how she put her hands on the arm and twisted, with emotional
detachment and no signs of remorse. Listening to the cold, heartless
account sent chills through my body. Later we see that this girl was
herself physically and emotionally abused, and her accounts of her own
experience are conveyed with equal detachment to what we have first
witnessed. And then we watch the girl go through a course of therapy over
a number of years, where she starts to make the emotional connection
regarding what has happened to her. As she begins to feel her own pain in
her own heart and body, she bursts into tears, and suddenly realizes for
the first time what she has actually done to the three year old boy. As
she emotionally understands and integrates the violence done to her, she
is capable of also grasping her own violence, its roots, its impact and
feelings of remorse for what she has done.
Because loss is so often violent, abrupt,
and unresolved at the emotional level, few of us have had spaces to feel
our way through the deep and complex emotional territory of separation,
and therefore lack models of how to approach separation in a non-violent
way. Even in the painful anticipation of loss, people can separate or
leave without killing each other or the relationship. And sometimes when
tragedy strikes, as it did for so many people on September 11th, loss can
occur in the spirit of love. The Sunday after the tragedy, the minister at
my Unitarian church used as an anthem, the last words of a man, Stuart
Meltzer, to his wife as he anticipated his forthcoming demise as the first
building of the World Trade Center was being is happening. I don't think
I'm going to make it. I love you. Take good care of the children."
The minister's eyes were filled with tears as he spoke these words again
and again and again. And so were mine. God only knows the pain this
widowed woman and fatherless children feel-today and tomorrow. However, at
least the last contact from her husband; their father, was a message of
connection and love.
Barbara's Story
Facing death is raw and scary both for the
person dying and for the loved ones close to the one who is passing on.
Relating from the heart as separation nears is profoundly intimate and
often terrifying. Some people ask to have no contact with their loved ones
as they die because it is too painful to feel the emotional bond or the
other person's pain and loss. Likewise, the one(s) being left may also
disconnect in order to escape heart or soul wrenching pain.
I experienced the intimacy and terror of
death and separation in an inescapable way over a decade ago when a woman
I was close to died of cancer. As she realized her fight for her life was
being lost, she asked me to please watch over her husband and her two
young daughters as best I could and as they allowed. I was moved to tears
and made a spiritual commitment to her. In her final days, I would visit
her as she lay motionless in her hospital bed. Just sitting with her,
often silently, honoring her spirit as it began to pass on. '
The last time I saw her was a haunting
experience that forced me to look at my own fear of intimacy in a life
changing way. I came into Barbara's room and sat by her bed, as I always
did. Her eyes were closed or drifting, her body was quiet, thin and only
half inhabited. She seemed to have lost consciousness, palpably dose to
her death. I just sat there paying respect to her spirit. All of a sudden,
her eyes sprung open, she looked me right in the eyes and used all of her
life's energy to try to craft words. I was petrified, frozen eye to eye
with the unmasked fragility and tentativeness of life.
As Barbara spoke, I shut down, protecting
my own heart from the rawness of it all, quivering in my stomach, yet
trying with whatever reserves I had to listen to what was very clearly her
last words to me. "Thank you," she whispered in almost
undecipherable syllables that chilled me to the bone. My mouth reacted
before my heart or brain. "What did you say?" I uttered, awkward
yet trying to be present. She could not answer me. She was gone.
Unconscious. Back to that drifty place close to death's door. In a
heartbeat I had deciphered her words, and I had let them in. I was in
tears. But the intimacy of that moment, Barbara's last conscious contact
with me, blew my emotional circuits. I felt split in two—the part of me
that heard her struggled words and could be touched by her acknowledgement
and caring, and the part of me that in the face of such raw reality
freaked out and shut down.
As I left her room I felt remorse and guilt
that I had not been able to fully presence her in her last contact with
me, that I had split and only heard her from half of my soul. I have grown
profoundly from that moment and all the moments from then 'til now. I wish
I could rewrite the script and go back to that final moment with Barbara,
receiving her appreciation eye to eye, moved to tears, fully vulnerable
and touched, able to say, "Thank you" back to her in real time.
However, through Barbara's lesson and gift, I do not split in the face of
separation anymore. In fact, I made a .commitment to Barbara's spirit to
learn how to bring my full heart to the process of separation and to learn
how to live through such raw and trying moments with presence and
love.
Sacred Separation: Leaving In The Spirit
Of Love
Just as the process of creating life takes
place gradually and a new life grows and evolves slowly overt a period of
time, those we love come to us and leave us in similar ways. The emotional
and spiritual work involved in separation unfolds gradually over time, if
we allow ourselves the internal space to be with our experience.
Much pain comes when fear of separation
creates a protective shield within our bodies, hearts and minds that cuts
us off prematurely both from the person who is leaving and from ourselves.
We create the fear in hope of protecting ourselves from pain. Yet,
ironically, as we tighten up our internal fortress, we often are more at
emotional risk in the big picture of things. As Forrest Church notes in
his book LifeLines (Beacon Press, 1996), "self-protection veils ours
hearts. Even more sadly, it may armor them." Sometimes it is more
comfortable to kill a relationship rather than to live through the change
that is unfolding, to live through the loss.
Separation is a transformative passage, as
powerful as the creative force that allows life in any form to begin. As
we are able to get grounded within ourselves, in supportive relationships
with others, and in our spiritual beliefs and practices, we are better
able to flow with the inevitable, with the movement of life in its own
rhythm and time.
At times, like on September 11, a loss is
sudden and a separation happens without any preparation. At other times,
when we are aware a separation is what needs to take place or is
unavoidable we can take steps that allow us to participate consciously.
Separation, like birth, can be a sacred journey, undertaken with full
heart, honoring rituals and a spirit of love.
