Death is a Part of Life
I have a number of clients who are experiencing the aftermath of the death of a parent. For some the death is recent. For some, the death was many years ago, but their grief feels unprocessed, stuck somehow. There’s a wide range of what that looks like for each of them — for a couple of them it’s excruciatingly painful, there’s a sense of betrayal, an underlying anxiety about whether they can count on anything at all in their lives. For others, there’s actually a sense of release and relief. Those deaths were protracted, and for a couple of them, the relationships with the parent were complicated and painful. Death can bring out the worst of family dynamics.
The end of a day
Death is a potent time. Not that different from birth, it’s a major life transition that all humans will experience. A time when we become intimately aware that there is little that we can control about… really anything. Death can come very much at random. As I’ve written about before, my mother moved here in 2012, we thought for her last years. We had no way of knowing she only had 4 months to live.
When I zoom out a bit and remember that time, I can see that there was some divine timing and rightness of how that process went. I learned so much.
But, in the moment, during those 4 months, there was so much chaos. I was overwhelmed. She was not a kind person in her dementia, and she was often angry at me for not being able to make her dying easier, for not being able to change what was happening with her. There was little rationality in my life, just an enduring sense of relentless futility as I tried to help her feel better, when the truth was, she wasn’t going to feel better.
She was dying. She wasn’t going to feel better. Ever again.
How can we live with the many losses of our lives that have and will happen? Death is only one type of loss. Relationships end in many ways. We will get sick, at some point for the last time. Accidents happen. We get sick. How can we live with that uncertainty?
For many of us, chaos was coupled with trauma as a child, or even epigenetically. Your forebears may have lived through wars, through famine, through enslavement, through abject poverty. You are proof of their life, their survival. You have a lot invested in trying to have some order and predictability in life, even if that seems impossible. Chaos is frightening, it’s meant very bad things in the past!
And, here’s a truth — chaos is an inevitable part of evolution. Things have to fall apart before they can come together again in a higher order. That’s one of the teachings of MatrixWorks, a beautiful way of viewing and working with systems.
This is where having a spiritual practice is invaluable. That practice may look like learning to feel the breath in the body. Slow breathing is well know to help the nervous system calm down. That practice might look like a creative process of making art, dance, music, or crafting. Repeating healing phrases in the mind such as Loving Kindness practice. Whatever can help you slow down and bring your attention into this moment, so your nervous system can weather the storms of chaos when they inevitably happen.
We can’t change the fact that a parent or other loved one died tragically, or that our relationship with them was fraught before they died. We can learn to be with ourselves and feel the feelings that arise from that, metabolize those feelings, so that our grief isn’t overwhelming and running every situation in our lives. We can learn tools to support ourselves. We can find a deeper certainty that supports us when we are faced with the uncertainty of living in a human body in this world.
We may even connect with a sense of purpose in the aftermath of a death or other loss. A desire to support others in that situation, a commitment to making change in the world, a form of activism, so that the conditions that led to the death are less likely to happen to others. My work as a healer deepened and broadened after my mother died. I saw how little support there was for me and for her, and I wanted to do what I could to offer that in my community.
If you don’t walk through the aftermath of loss gently, but with open eyes, you may miss the gifts available in the process. Death is inevitable. Are you showing up for your life?
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