I walked up to the hospital elevators, waiting for a lift to my mother’s floor. A large man with a warm smile was there.

“How’s your holiday going?” he asked.

An innocent question. Socially acceptable small talk.

But, for me, so emotionally loaded. I took a breath.

“It’s been a tough one,” I answered.

“I hear you,“  he replied, then talked about his mother’s hospital stay, how it affected his family’s Christmas, etc.

His small talk was a relief, distracting me from my own breaking heart for a moment.

But I also knew, by the end of that very day, I’d be asked that same loaded question a half-dozen times. I reached out to my Facebook friends.

“What do you say?” I asked. “ ’My mother’s dying, thanks for asking.’ ?”

“Why not?“  someone responded. “Are you trying to protect them from your emotions? Because, you know, you get a pass right now on worrying about other people’s feelings.”

“Maybe,” I replied. “But the truth is, I think I was trying to protect myself. Coping with grief is like trying not to throw up. It hurts to hold back, but I’m afraid it will hurt more to express it.”

Grief Hurts. Physically hurts.

So do other tough emotions. Fear knots up your stomach. Your jaw clenches in anger. Your shoulders hunch around anxiety.

The pain actually comes from resisting emotions, not the emotions themselves.

It’s like when I broke my ankle last fall. All of my muscles tensed and adapted to protect my injured leg. It was those muscles, not the ankle, that needed Tylenol at the end of the day.

One of the best techniques for relieving physical pain is to deliberately relax resistant muscles. 

Turns out, one of the best ways to relieve emotional pain is to deliberately stop resisting our grief. 

Empathic Skills

To relax into our emotions,  we need to understand what they are and what purpose they serve.  

For most of my adult life, I saw difficult emotions as nemeses.  Barriers to a fulfilled life. They made relationships tricky, romance stressful, and risk-taking, so aversive.

Some self-help books contributed to my negative view. They offered exercises that personified challenging emotions as crazy relatives, rigid drill sergeants, and frightened children. They were rogue elements of our psyches that needed to be pacified or patronized.

But NEVER, these authors admonished, allow your [fear, anger, shame, etc.] call the shots in life.

Resistance at all costs. At least that’s how I interpreted their recommendations.

No one I’d heard or read ever suggested our emotions serve a purpose.

Until I discovered  the book The Language of Emotions by author and researcher Karla McLaren. It is a how-to manual about understanding our emotions and allowing them to heal us and help us navigate our world.

Her perspective was life changing for me. She describes emotions as nonverbal messaging from our brilliant “empathic intelligence.“  It evolved long before our more revered intellectual skills that govern language, reasoning, and problem-solving.

Our empathic intelligence uses emotions to send messages about things in our environment that require our attention.

Feeling fearful? Something has changed in the environment or in a relationship that might signal danger. What protective action do you need to take (if any)?

Are you angry? Someone is infringing on your territory without permission or taking something that belongs to you. What personal boundaries do you need to reinforce?

Suffering pangs of guilt? You’ve done or said something that may not be in alignment with your own principles or values. Where do you have to make amends?

The wise counsel of our empathic intelligence is essential to our survival. Emotional messages allow us to protect ourselves. They help us maintain healthy relationships and to live in community, something essential to us social human beings.

Instead of imagining a weird aunt or dysfunctional child, I now think of my empathic intelligence as a trusted advisor, like a senior staff member who supports the work of a president or prime minister. Emotions are the empathic intelligence’s memoranda about situations that require my consideration.

As president of my own life, I eventually choose when and how to respond to the messages. But I don’t ignore my empathic advisor’s communication. Or ridicule it. Or reassign it to an office under a far-flung stairwell.

Once we learn to trust our emotions, we become more skilled at noticing and attending to our resistance. We relax a bit and find our balance more quickly.  Pain and tension subsides. Our calmer mind  translates the emotional message  and figures out how best to respond to the situation at hand.  

Which brings us to this question: What is grief advising us to do?

Grief is a big emotion. It can hurt so much, it feels life threatening.

And you can’t think your way through it.

Your spiritual beliefs about heaven or multiple planes of reality will not make you feel better. Neither will rationalizing your loved one’s death as necessary or natural. They may be in a better place. It may be a relief that their suffering has ended.

None of this matters when it comes to your grief.

Grief is telling you that you’ve lost someone or something precious and irreplaceable.

The losses may be innumerable.

Your person no longer exists, at least in the form you’ve always counted on. They can’t talk to you. Hug you. Help you out in a pinch.

You lose pieces of your identity. You’re no longer their child. Or partner.

You lose a key relationship. The routines and habits that included them must change. Your future plans have dissolved.

Emotional messages include advice on how to take action. Yet, grief’s message seems contradictory.

Because the action it advises you to take?

It’s telling you to stop.

Stop everything you're doing and take time to honor and release your loss.

How To Stop and Grieve

Such a simple message. But most of us don’t know how to respond.

How do we stop? How do we turn from the busyness and activity that keeps our emotions at bay?

If you don’t grieve your losses, the people who died either get erased from your consciousness (as if they were unimportant) or they hang around your psyche (as if you’re being haunted). Karla McLaren, The Language of Emotion.

We do it through ritual.

Rituals slow us down so we can integrate our new, unwelcome reality. They provide focus and activities that draw the mind’s attention away from its efforts toward locking down grief. Once our mental grip is relaxed, grief is freer to flow and do its healing work.

Earlier generations committed to community death rituals. Loved ones were laid out at home for a week or longer. Family and friends came and went. They spent time with the body, paying respects and saying good-bye. They visited with the survivors, sharing memories, and providing support. People took time for grief.

These days, at least in Western culture, we prefer to keep death out of sight. Grief is an unwelcome reminder that it exists. For everyone’s peace of mind, we push hard to reach “acceptance” quickly. We worry about those who lag behind us, stuck in earlier stages of grief.

Funerals and celebrations of life are kept short and polite. They often feel a bit pointless, such that some families, like mine, don’t even bother to hold them.

Even if we are blessed with a strong circle of friends who can help us say good-bye, it still probably won’t be enough. At some point, the funeral ends. Friends go home. And we’re left alone with our grief.

That’s when your own personal ritual can help.

The River of All Souls

McLaren offers a beautiful image for building a personal ritual: The River of All Souls. Your grief work entails finding your “bend in the river” and going there to honor and release your loss into the water. Your tears and memories raise the level and strengthen the current, helping to transport your loved one to the next world.

If your grief is fresh, you might try the ritual she describes in The Language of Emotions. Her chapter on grief, available here at her website, provides details and tells you what to expect when you enact it. 

Along with helping you formally grieve your loved one, this ritual fixes your personal spot by the river permanently in your imagination. You’ll be able to visit it whenever you need to.

My River Bank

Even when bereavement subsides and life finds a new normal, our melancholy will return from time to time.

I miss my mother at Christmas. I miss her birthday cards. I miss her in the middle of the night, after she visits in a dream.

My heart tightens and aches. My breath catches.

But now, I understand emotional pain and how to handle it. I know it's time to visit my riverbank.

I breathe and plant my feet, stabilizing myself against the emotions flowing through me.

I search for the source of the familiar pain. Was it a song? A visit to a favorite spot? Maybe it was simply the way the setting sun slanted across the room. What memory must I place in the river?

I wade in and release my memories and sorrow into the water. I watch them float like flower petals and move downstream. To the world on the other side.

Go in grace, I say. I’ll catch up later.

***Photo by Matt Forfar on Unsplash***

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