Grief and Transformation

Editorial by Sage Starwalker

Most religions offer humanity one of the things we need most: belief in the survival of the soul, the spirit, the mind, the individual reality. Deepak Chopra's recent book, Life After Death: The Burden of Proof claims to offer scientific proof of life after death. I may add the book to my reading list; it uses Hindu myth to explore death as a doorway to afterlife, and it's bound to give comfort to skeptics and believers alike.

Comfort. About death.

Beyond promises of living forever, of meeting one's maker, of streets of gold and 72 virgins, what is comforting about death from a practical perspective? I'd say nothing, except that living with chronic pain and limited mobility have given me glimpses of the promise that death offers — the end of struggle and suffering. Don't get me wrong; I'm not ready for death. The older I get, in fact, the less ready I am to escape the mortal experience.

For Pagans, Hindus, and Buddhists, death isn't the final state of existence. For us, it's what comes before rebirth. Our religions promise us that we will be born again, literally. We know that we'll survive death over and over and over again.

But whatever our religion, our beliefs about death only address the experiences of the one who is dying: death, salvation, the afterlife. What about the experience of the "survivors" — those left behind?

Left Behind
I was born into a big, loving extended family. By the time I was in my 20s, we'd buried 18 great-aunts and great-uncles and their spouses, three grandparents, and a huge number of mother's "kissing cousins." Most of my peers' families were still more or less intact, while I'd become practiced at being left behind by the familiar loving adults who graced my childhood.

Like most of my peers, I was also left behind by close male friends whose lives were cut short by AIDS.

By the time I was 35 both my parents were dead.

I grieved; I accepted; I moved on. I had become relatively matter-of-fact about death, acclimated to it, accustomed to being left behind. The big extended family was gone; for the next fifteen years my blood-kin consisted of my brother, my sister, and her son Cobi.

Then, two and a half years ago, Cobi died. Last year, my brother followed. It's a small world now for my sister and me. Left behind? Yes. And rocked by a rush of tragic, untimely deaths. No longer accustomed to death, no longer matter of fact, I now have a different experience: deep, abiding grief.

Grief
Cobi's death was totally outside the realm of my experience. First, he was young, an eighteen-year-old, the child of my heart. Second, his was a death by choice, suicide.

Nothing prepares you for the loss of a child; nothing prepares you for a suicide. We know this. Likewise, we are not prepared to live with deep grief. We're supposed to move through Kübler-Ross' five stages of grief — denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance — to adjust and get on with living. Neat. Clinical. Contained. Other than Kübler-Ross' pointers, and the relatively recent concept of grief work that has grown out of it, most of us have had no cultural preparation for grief and grieving.

Two quotes formed my cultural preparation. The first was from these lines of William Wordsworth's Ode #536, "Intimations of Immortality":

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind….

The second was from the movie Shadowlands. Just after my nephew's death I found tremendous comfort in these words (spoken by C.S. Lewis after the death of his wife, Joy Gresham):

The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.

Life and death are the traditional great polarities, but I'd propose this alternate: death and grief. We hear a lot of political rhetoric today about cultures of death and cultures of life, but there's an unnamed culture that needs naming and exploring: the culture of grief.

The Culture of Grief
Two and a half years after my nephew's suicide, I'm still looking for that sixth stage of grief: trying to find "Strength in what remains behind…."

This past summer I read Lewis' brief book, A Grief Observed. I found in the following quote a summation of one of the most difficult parts of my own experience:

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief ... I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions — something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he'd rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It's easy to see why the lonely become untidy; finally, dirty and disgusting. …

Meanwhile, where is God?

For a full year after Cobi's death, my productive life disappeared. My mind didn't work in the accustomed ways. My emotional state ranged from numb to overflowing. Depression, Kübler-Ross' stage four, lasted for over two years and was untouched by this culture's cure-all, the anti-depressant.

Personal grief comes to each of us, and it abides. How can you medicate that deep grief?

And in a culture where personal grief can be multiplied by a thousand, a million, a billion? What then? How do you medicate that?

I don't know anyone who's not in some stage of grief. It may feel or look like denial, anger, bargaining, depression, or acceptance, but it's grief: for species' die-off, global warming, the death of rainforests, the seeming inevitability of war; for democracy, the continuing inequality of women and men; for poverty, racism, classism.

And we're grieving community, tribe, tradition. Max Dashu writes about ancestral pagan traditions that were still living as recently as two hundred years ago, but few if any of us have direct connections with those traditions. We Goddess Women grieve: the loss of the life, culture, and earth-connection that we sense our Goddess-venerating ancestors knew, thousands of years ago. Perhaps we're grieving an Age of Innocence, or a Golden Age. To hear the Goddess-debunkers tell it, we're grieving a fantasy of our own deluded imaginations.

Transforming Grief
I'm not sure we transform grief. Grief, surely, transforms us. If we are co-creators of reality, then what is our part in the work of grief transformation?

In Samhain, we Pagans have a holy day, a holy season that asks us to connect with our dear departed, to remember them, to reflect on mortality, on death.

In the ever-turning Wheel of the Year, we also have inevitable, inexorable transformation. The metaphors and reality of returning light shake us, yearly, from the arms of the season of death and dying. In our various mythologies, we are reminded that death and life are two sisters, or two aspects of a goddess, or the two kings of the year. Death and life are the two gateways, Samhain and Beltane, the two poles around which we alternate over and over again.

To dance at Samhain, to grieve our beloved dead, to feed the ancestors and petition them for signs and blessings: these yearly acts force us to take steps to transform grief, to look around and see how close we are to the land of the dead, and at the same time how far from it we are, while we live.

In Paganism, we have what most other religious folk don't have — a worldview in which earth life is sacred, a worldview that tells us if there's a victory in death, it is most certainly the promise of another turn on the wheel of life, a promise of renewal.

In the middle of grief, it's hard to see through the thicket of depression, death, and destruction that grows in our gardens, whether backyard gardens or Mother Nature's Eden. Naming the culture of grief is an important act. Only by seeing it, and by seeing its hold on us, can we hope to see clearly that other culture which is our birthright, the culture of joy.

The Culture of Joy
How do we respond to the despots, the death-dealers, the people and powers that seem determined to destroy the earth and define the terms of life and death?

If we're to reclaim the earth for life and the living, if we're to put women's values back at the heart of communities and culture, we have to find the energy, even in the midst of grief, to hope, to believe, to act.

How do we recover a dwindling culture of joy? What are the signposts? Where is the compass? The quote on this issue's home page may point the way:

... if we hold to the power of our visions, our heartbeats, our imagination, we can fight on our own turf, which is the landscape of consciousness." (Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing)

Transforming consciousness is hard work, especially when one is in the throes of grief, cultural or personal. Reclaiming the landscape of consciousness is equally hard. Hard, but necessary work.

May we never hunger. May we never thirst. May we find our way back to the Mother and her garden. May we find our way to joy.