When I was nineteen I forced myself to sleep alone in the woods, far from civilization, once a month for a few years (weather permitting). Then, one early morning, as I lay there wrestling with my fear it dawned on me... "I'm afraid of being alone." It was that simple. I got up, packed my bag and never slept alone in the woods again. Twenty two years later, after several relationships and heart break, as I lay in bed wrestling with the dark I realized, "I'm afraid of being alone". I can't just pack up my sleeping bag this time. But the same compassion finally overtook me and I turned with loving kindness to the woman and said simply, "I know".
Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the
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