Today marks 15 years since Derek Youngs, my beloved husband, mentor, playmate, and co-author of “Walking to Japan” died. I am not sad today. I am grateful, and I am grieving.
I don’t say this because I want pity, or sympathy, or because I am dredging up the past or wallowing, or need help. I want to share this because I think my experience and wisdom is worth sharing.
Grief is not a simple emotion like sadness. Maybe it’s not even an emotion at all. It is the painful absence of someone or something that had an important place in your life and likely gave you joy— something or somebody you loved. And, joy being more nuanced and complex than happiness, so is grief more nuanced and complex than sadness. It has also been said that you’ll only ever have a superficial understanding of one without experience of the other. Grief is never so deep without having experienced the heights of joy. (The highest heights of joy coming from love.) And joy is never so all-encompassing as when contrasted against the depths of grief.
Grief is not something you recover from. Is joy something to recover from? These are two major aspects of human experience, part of the rich tapestry of life. They co-mingle, overlap, give way to each other, and potentiate each other’s full expression.
Grief has been described as a wave, but I think perhaps all emotions are like this. They come and go. Even today, grief is coming and going in tiny waves. But in 2011, the waves were bigger and longer. And sometimes they knocked me down. However, in the weeks and months after Derek died, I felt wrapped in a bubble of love — The Circle, we called it. This holy matrix was something we created together, over the short span of years we knew each other., simply by being together. A very concentrated matrix it was, as we were seldom apart, at least after we became a couple. The energy of deep play, honesty, curiosity, passion and dedication to peace were all ingredients of the Circle. And the Circle kept me safe.
This bubble of love didn’t prevent grief, though. Grief was already part of the bubble. Four years before Derek’s death, we shared the profound experience of caring for Lin, his beloved wife of 15 years, while she went through the journey of dying from cancer. It is hard to explain how formative this experience was for me, but I have written about it. I felt my own grief losing her as a friend, but I also felt Derek’s grief. Certainly not to the depth and breadth he did, of course, but both empathically and through observation I did experience it.
This might sound strange, but I loved how Derek so easily expressed his grief. It could come on quickly, triggered by a memory, or by seeing or hearing something Lin had loved or said or done. He would break easily into sobbing, and often I would begin crying with him. But then, just as easily, after allowing the emotion full expression, he would be present with whatever else was happening, internally or externally. He laughed as easily as he cried. And it seems I share this trait. I like this about myself.
I was the first in my circle of friends to lose my parents. My mother died when I was 23. I was not a child, and of course some children lose parents. (Each of parents respectively, at the age of 16, lost their fathers.) But, I was still quite young in many ways and I knew no one who’d yet lost their folks. I had no context for this, and neither did my friends. They expressed condolences, and then nothing else was said. I was disappointed, I think, to not be swept up by my group of friends and rallied around, with caring words and actions. But I didn’t really have a group. Some older folks were helpful as I began to navigate uncharted territory. I felt their love and support. But my peers, not so much. I wish they’d expressed concern or curiosity, and invited me to express my anything at all. But they probably needed to be cued to to do this, and I didn’t know how to. It’s clunky. We don’t learn these things anymore.
I ended up moving away from my hometown not long after my mother’s death, into a new community. Somehow this protected me all the awkwardness and disappointment I’d felt. My partner at the time nurtured me readily, and his family loved me too, so, in a sense, I didn’t fully experience the absence of my mother until this partnership ended three years later. At that point I felt very alone. I couldn’t explain to others that not only was I grieving the loss of a lover, I was grieving my mother. My grief was catatonic at times, but it shifted, as it does, and became part of the rich fabric of my life.
Since then, I have lost my father, beloved friends, dear relatives, and a husband. I have experienced other kinds of losses too — most recently another partnership and the dream and home attached to that partnership. The grief of this is no longer so sharp. Making sense of the whole experience is still something I grapple with, but I know that, once again, the grief has become part of the fabric of my life. It is not something to fix. Generally, I think I feel no need to explain or expunge grief; I just feel it. But, when I am with others, grief can become difficult. Sometimes, if I bring it up, I get the impression that friends want me to move on already.
We generally, as a culture, seem to need to explain emotions, diagnose them, and fix them if they are “negative”. We pathologize grief; loss is something we’re not supposed to focus on. Anything more than x number of weeks or months or years, then we are “dwelling” on our loss. We haven’t processed properly. I call bullshit. Do we ever lose sight of the miracle and joy of birth, of witnessing someone coming into this world? Why should we get over loss? Why not honour it, continually?
Of course there is a time and place to go delve into deep conversation, but I guess sometimes it’s hard for me to discern the right time. I can easily sense when others are uncomfortable, and this makes me uncomfortable. I see people deflect, try to change the mood, change topics. And so, I pull back. And before you say anything, reader, I do realize that it’s not my job to make people comfortable. I am working on this. But it’s effing hard. Articulating my emotions, my needs, my desires, in words, in the moment, is not something that comes as easily to me as the expression of those emotions. I am still learning.
In the weeks and months after Derek’s death, I quickly discovered I needed time on my own. I will never forget the shock of a (casual) friend asking me when I bumped into her on the street just a couple of months after Derek’s passing, “So what are you up to?” I was dumbstruck, confused, and enraged. What am I up to? What the hell did she think I was up to? I was grieving a momentous loss, and there was nothing more important to me at the time. I can’t remember what I managed to say, but I am sure I did not express my anger.
I will also never forget the sting of another, closer, friend’s reaction when I shared some painful feelings with him. With a laugh and a big smile he quipped, “But Derek’s still with you!” Again, I was dumbstruck. Although I believed it to be true, that Derek was still with me in some form, there is a world of difference between experiencing someone’s love and companionship and humour in physical reality and in the spiritual dimension. My new-agey friend clearly had not yet lost anyone dear to him, I later realized. And/or, he was spiritually bypassing. To him, his clear-cut truth with a capital “T” apparently trumped the very real, deep, physical experience of grief. To me, they were both true.
Once again, although I am sure my friend s had the best of intentions, neither of them knew how to deal with me in my grief because I didn’t, or couldn’t, tell them. I couldn’t yet articulate that I didn’t want anyone distracting me from my feelings, I didn’t need cheering up, didn’t need to not be lonely. What I wanted was to be acknowledged in my grief, and allowed to feel the loss, feel the shakiness, and recalibrate, in my own time, how I would live my life.
My initial anger, shock, resentment, and disappointment turned into a resolution to do grief MY WAY. I knew I would inevitably return to the stream of ordinary life in my own time, but while I could, I wanted to submerge myself in the richness of grief, and the Circle which held me safely in its embrace. Even though I couldn’t necessarily explain any of this at the time, I feel so glad I listened to myself, and so fortunate to have a lot of friends who trusted and respected me in my process, even if perhaps they didn’t understand me.
Grief is not a problem. It is important. It’s important to allow it to be, in our own lives, and collectively, as a society, especially now, when it seems that our pursuit of happiness comes at hefty price, which includes suppressing, deflecting, and sweeping painful and ugly things under rugs. There are generations of blame and shame, anger, tragedy and trauma under those rugs. It’s time to lift up the rugs. It’s time to live in honesty, and in gratitude of the full human experience.
Grief is a changing state. This state shapes you and permeates you. At times it seems too ugly to look at, too immense to let in, but when allowed, it is an experience that shifts your perspective, your approach, your beliefs, your sense of self in the world. And none of this is bad. It keeps things real. Grief has become so familiar to me that it is a comfort. And although it always feels immediate in the moment it hits, this particular grief, of losing Derek, has mellowed, and has become a comfort. It is an inseparable part of me, and when it surfaces, without warning, it reminds me—. It reminds me how beautiful and essential it is to remain vulnerable. It reminds me what a miracle it is to be alive at all. It reminds me: you have loved deeply. And when I remember all these things, the consequence is gratitude. This is great alchemy.
Grief becomes gratitude, becomes joy, becomes grief, becomes….
