This wisdom is from Jill Muehrcke, the author of dozens
of books and articles, including Waking Up Happy and the best-selling Map Use.
She is the founder and editor of the international, award-winning magazine
Nonprofit World (www.NonprofitWorld.org).
Jill lives in Madison where she gives talks and provides support for
people who, like herself (and her daughter, granddaughter, and grandson) are
rebuilding their lives after years of addiction.
Each month, Jill offers KEYS and ACTIONS TO PRACTICE to
help keep yourself and your loved ones on the road to positive change. Many of these stories and lessons are drawn
from Jill's book, WAKING UP HAPPY: A HANDBOOK OF CHANGE WITH MEMOIRS OF
RECOVERY AND HOPE (www.WakingUpHappyBook.com).
I recently learned that an acquaintance of mine – an
exuberant woman with an infectious smile – just lost her 33-year-old son to
drugs. I don’t know the details and it’s clear she doesn’t want to talk about
it. I understand why. It’s the nightmare that wakes all of us in the middle of
the night, isn’t it? As a mother who came perilously close myself to losing my
daughter to drugs, as well as my granddaughter and grandson – more than once –
I can feel the pain viscerally.
I don’t want to intrude on her suffering right now, but I
hope that someday she and I can talk. I think it will help us both if we do.
Although I have not known the searing pain of losing a child to death, I do
know about grief, and it’s something all of us must learn to confront.
Here’s how my granddaughter, Shyloh, describes it in WAKING
UP HAPPY:
THE PROFILE: Learning to Grieve: Wisdom from Shyloh
I was reading when my phone rang shortly after midnight. It
was a friend asking if my boyfriend Tim was OK. It was an odd question, so I
called Tim’s mom, a woman who’d been endlessly kind to me and whom I loved like
a second mom.
As the phone rang, I felt fear creep up. When she answered,
I knew right away that I wasn’t going to like what I heard. The unusual lack of
emotion in her voice sent a shiver through me.
And then she was saying words I couldn’t believe and couldn’t
bear to hear. She’d gone into Tim’s bedroom to wake him and found him lifeless.
He had died from an overdose of heroin, the same way I had almost died a few
weeks earlier. I had been unbelievably lucky that I was found in time for them
to bring me back even after my heart had stopped. How could it be that I had
been saved but Tim had not? If I had been there – if only I had been there –
How could this happen to someone so smart, funny, handsome,
talented and kind? Someone with the
whole world in the palm of his hand? All
I could say was, “No, no, no, no, no.”
During those first days after Tim’s death, I could barely
speak without sobbing. The agony of those early days was like the pain of a
wound when the anesthesia wears off. My heart felt cleaved in two. I’d used
drugs to numb me from all kinds of pain, and now I had given up drugs, and that
cushion was gone.
At first I put aside what everyone said about proceeding
through stages of grief. I was sure it would be different for me. But I was
shocked to discover that I wasn’t as unique as I liked to think. I moved
through the same stages Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and others had identified years
ago – denial (“It can’t be true, he can’t be gone forever”); guilt (“I should
have told him I loved him more often”); anger (“It’s so unfair!”); bargaining (“I’ll
do anything if only I can see him one more time”); depression (“There’s no
point going on; I can’t live without him”); reconstruction (“I have to build a
new life for myself somehow”); and acceptance (“He really is gone forever, and
it’s time to move on.”).
Not that those steps happened in a tidy, linear way. My
stages of grief went more like this: denial that he was gone, guilt for not
being there when he died, fury at the fates, desolation and despair, certainty
that I was going crazy, more guilt for all the drugs we’d done together,
pleading with the universe to let me go back and redo the past, more denial
that this could have happened, unbearable loneliness, extreme self-pity,
wrenching guilt for having survived while he didn’t, more denial and
depression, guilt for all my crying and self-indulgence when others had things
worse than I did, attempts to distract myself from my grief, a bit more guilt,
a crumb of acceptance that things might be OK after all, lots of guilt for even
thinking about letting go of my grief, defense mechanisms like distancing
myself from my pain, a horrible realization of everyone’s mortality, a nugget
of forgiveness toward myself, a flitter of hope, guilt for feeling hopeful –
and then the whole cycle over again but in a different order each time.
While my movement toward acceptance was chaotic rather than
step by step, knowing about the stages of grief helped me anticipate what to
expect and understand that these were natural feelings. Each time I grasped
onto a piece of hope, I was able to hold onto it a little while longer.
I found that it helped to talk about what had happened. In
addition to talking about my emotions, I wrote about them in my journal.
Writing from my heart was a way of grieving, of putting my shattered self back
together.
THREE ACTIONS TO PRACTICE
1. Start a list of some of the losses you’ve had in your
life. Be sure to include losses from your early life and the loss of dreams
and fantasies that have died – not only for yourself but for your loved ones.
Even if your child hasn’t died from an overdose, you may have lost that child
to drugs. Because addicts care only about their addictions, you may have lost
the connection the two of you once shared. You may have lost the hopes you had
for your child’s life. You may have lost trust in your child because of all the
lies and deception that are part of an addict’s life. Add all those things to
your list. Just acknowledging these losses is a kind of medicine for your soul.
2. Tell a friend or family member about the above
exercise (and some of the other grief-related exercises in WAKING UP HAPPY). Then
get together and talk about some of the things on your lists. This may sound
hard, but you will be amazed at how cathartic it will be.
3. Do something to show your compassion for yourself and
the trauma of grief you’ve endured. Don’t minimize that grief or the
importance of caring for yourself. See “Self-care” in the WAKING UP HAPPY index
for exercises to soothe and restore you. Some examples:
- Turn to rituals like listening to a favorite song, lighting candles, and practicing deep-breathing. As you inhale, imagine breathing in serenity and peace. As you exhale, breathe out anxiety and worry. Continue to lengthen your inhale and exhale, filling your lungs as you breathe in and pushing all the air from your lungs as you breathe out.
- Sing or chant, either
alone or with a group. Or repeat a word silently to yourself (words that
end in “m” or “n” will increase the relaxation response).
- Take a long, hot bath. If
you like, use bath oils with calming scents such as lavender. Or light a
scented candle. After your bath, lavish your body with soothing lotions.
- Dance around the house.
Or take a quick walk, swim, or bike ride.
- Build some quiet time
into every day. Practice just sitting still and being in the moment,
taking gentle notice of your environment and your body. If a thought
enters your head, label it “Thought” and return your mind to your breath
and the sensations in your body, such as the feel of your feet against the
floor and your fingers as they touch one another. Remind yourself that you’re
an integral part of the universe, and it is important to treat yourself as
you do the world around you – with respect, admiration, love, and
kindness.
A short course in sorrow:
We all must learn to grieve the losses in our lives. There’s
no way to avoid loss – not only of family and friends but of animal companions
and of the healthy, beautiful (or relatively beautiful!) minds and bodies of
our youth.
You suffer a loss every time change enters your life – even if it seems to be a good change. If your child gets a new job and moves across the country, that’s something to celebrate. But at the same time, you need to mourn the fact that you won’t see your child as often and you’ve lost something stable and comforting that has been an integral part of your life.
If you don’t grieve all the little losses when they occur,
then when a really big loss comes along, it will overwhelm you because you’ll
also be dealing with all the ungrieved losses that have been building up.
It sounds odd, but practicing grief by mourning these little
things will help you immensely later on.
THE KEYS
Unresolved grief keeps us from making progress in our lives.
Consider these keys to working through your grief:- Keep in mind that everyone mourns differently. Do what feels right for you, on your own time table, no one else’s.
- Cry. Tears are your most healing elixir, not only emotionally but physically and spiritually. Jerry Bergman has written, "Tears are just one of many miracles which work so well that we take them for granted every day."
- Talk to counselors, therapists, and grief support groups. You need to express your emotions to people who are willing to listen endlessly and with compassion.
- Laugh. It helps to remember the funny times, and it’s not disrespectful to laugh, even after someone has died. Consider laughter a remedy as healing as tears.
- Use your creative spirit to heal yourself through music, art, and writing. Start a grief journal, and write in it each day.
- Find a spiritual haven through meditation, prayer, church services, yoga, or other practices that take you away from your ego and link you to a vast universe.
- Be willing to be happy. While it’s essential to mourn your losses, it’s also important to let hope and joy back into your life.
Please contact me with your own
stories, strategies, insights, and any questions you may have. Also, please
share one item from your list of losses – either the first one you wrote down
or the one that you find hardest to overcome. Name one thing you plan to do to
mitigate the pain of this loss.
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