A few things I’ve seen, known, experienced about significant loss, grief and mourning:
• Grief can go into hiding and emerge months, even years later, as something quite unexpected – like anger, disappointment or cynicism, or kindness, joy, softness, and appreciation.
• Time itself doesn’t heal, not usually. Some grief is never “healed” and some losses never find “closure” but the lack of either does not mean survivors will not, or cannot, live full, productive, beautiful lives.
• Replacing a loss with another person “too quickly” may be unwise, unfair, irresponsible (all things I’ve heard) but it doesn’t feel that way for the one who has suffered and insisting on expressing this is usually alienating and counterproductive and can rip already suffering families apart.
• Mourning has a life of its own, at least initially, and it’s best not tamed by the untrained.
• When a person who had suffered loss declares he or she’d rather not talk about “it” the desire is best respected.
• Our uniqueness as individuals is reflected in how people respond to difficulties associated with significant loss and it’s ridiculous to approach a grieving person with a step-by-step generic packaged formula.
• Non-possessive warmth, listening ears, and hot cups of tea may be the most powerful gifts a person can offer one who has suffered loss.
The challenge is simple: be a presence of grace and healing wherever you are.
Think ‘forgive’ not retaliation. Answer quietly, even if another roars.
Listen, even when it is something you’d rather not hear.
Resist return attacks with your own verbal volley when words are thrown at you, even if those words are untrue, unfair, and unwarranted. Don’t defend yourself, or attack anyone.
Grace is about presence, and service. It is about declaring your willingness to comfort, to assist, to encourage.
Grace is not demonstrated in blind giving, or indiscriminate enabling of the poor manners or the laziness of others, but it is shown when burdens are shared or when friends ‘clear the deck’ and so empower others to find their greatness.
Grace is about perseverance, perseverance in love, truth, friendship, loyalty, and in finding humor even in the darkest of hours.
May you make it, as far as you are able, a week of grace.
Beneath that cover is the great city of New York……!
Three interlocking and overlapping qualities worth striving for in every adult relationship:
Equality.
We are equal.
You may be wealthier than I am, more educated than I am, and had more experiences in a wide range of significant areas of life but, we are equals.
You are not above me. I am not above you.
If I have the lowliest job on the street while you command an army of assistants to do yours, we are equals.
We contribute differently to the community but we are of equal value, divine value.
Mutuality:
Neither of us is more important than the other.
I will pay for things as often as you do. I can choose our shared activities as often as you may. My voice in our relationship is as important as yours. We will each have our say in matters important to both of us.
You are not in charge of us. I am not in charge of us.
We are mutual participants in this friendship, marriage, or partnership.
Respect:
We respect each other.
We speak well of each other to outsiders and talk warmly and kindly to each other. We honor each other with appropriate confidentiality and promote each other’s talents, dreams, and skills.
We give much consideration to how our individual actions impact each other and our friendship, marriage, or partnership.
A boundary is a line (usually invisible) that separates a person from all other people.
Each person is responsible for the wellness of his or her own boundaries.
Indications of poor or troubled boundaries:
Sharing too much too soon.
Falling in love quickly and with anyone who reaches out.
Being preoccupied with someone.
Going against your values to please someone.
Hoping someone you meet will have poor boundaries.
Accepting food, gifts, touch, or sex you do not want.
Taking for the sake of getting.
Giving for the sake of giving.
Letting someone be in charge of your life.
Allowing someone else to say what you feel and see.
Believing someone can and should anticipate your needs.
Being moody and withdrawn to get attention.
Expecting people to read your mind and know what you want or need.
Habitually stealing the agenda, taking center stage, occupying the spotlight.
Falling apart to get care.
Eating for destructive reasons or with destructive results.
The above list is from observing self and others and collated from a variety of sources over many years. I’d love to acknowledge all the sources and would if I had them.
Whatever your faith persuasion, or the decision to have none, you may or may not agree that it is time to pray for the residents, legal or illegal, of the cities across this land and around the world. Please pray, even if it is to a God in Whom you do not believe!
Oh God, our differences in faith and differences in our approach to you, divide those whom they ought to unite and incite those whom they ought to calm. May this not be true for me.
Help us to love, embrace, and understand authentic humility. Help us to honor mercy and to seek justice even if it is personally inconvenient and costly. Help us to live lives of love and truth and to seek the greater good of the community. Help us to place aside the desire for revenge and to seek the growth and beauty that comes with hospitality, acceptance, and forgiveness of others.
Help me to understand that peace begins with me, that hospitality and kindness and generosity begin with me.
May violence end. May leaders, official and unofficial, learn to embrace love and justice rather than be or become intoxicated by their limited powers.
No one can hear you if you sing into your chests. Heads up. Up. UP. UP. There you go.
That’s the kind of teacher she was.
Her do-re-mi-so-fa-la-te-do scales made us hoarse.
Up and down, louder and louder, softer and softer, whispers and whispers, then louder and louder.
Every lesson, at least three times a week, she’d get all into it as if we were some famous choir about to sing for the Queen of England or maybe the Pope.
“Posture. Posture. POSTURE,” she’d yell when we marched in single file into her music room even if she was looking the other way. We’d pull our shoulders and break single file the line momentarily to disperse and ascend her squeaky choir platforms which half-mooned her piano. We knew our assigned places and made a “frightful noise” in the few seconds it took for us to reach our places. Jackson never had to tell us to be quiet, stand still, or to stop our fidgeting. Her conductor’s baton and behave-yourself eyes with a clear-her-throat little cough simultaneously deployed could have successfully commanded us to invade Normandy.
Mrs. Jackson had us take deep breaths and fill our lungs with fresh, frreshh, freshhhh air and hold it in tightly, tightleey, ttttightleeeey, until she counted to all the way slowly to 10 and, wait, wait, waaaaaaittttt, then let it all, aaaalllll, aaaallllllll out, out, out, as ssssssilently, ssssssilnetly, ssssssinetly SSSSSILLENTLY as possible.
Then, scales.
One morning while we were do-re-mi-ing to her heart’s content I reached for my bus fare in my pants packet and dropped it.
Horrors.
My coin rolled across her floor.
It rolled and rolled and rolled and did a little twirl and curtsy and a bow until it finally fell flat near a piano leg. Mrs. Jackson grabbed my coin and slipped it into her embroidered flowers-arranged-like-music-notes pocket on her denim jacket.
I knew I’d not be able to tell her how much I needed that coin.
These were perfect-storm-stutter-conditions.
Everyone knew what happened.
Everyone was quiet. She knew it was my coin.
Everyone – all 26 of us – saw her whip it up. The whole class knew she wasn’t pleased that my dropped coin interrupted her lesson.
This was old hat to us: If someone fell off a platform or tripped on a stair or started another verse to a song when there wasn’t one or if a boy forgot and started singing the girl’s section, we’d see the short, quick movements of her eyes. She would have stuffed all the you-disturbed-MY-lesson people into her little embroidered flowers-arranged-like-music-notes pocket along with my coin if she could.
I needed that coin.
My bus fare.
It’s that or walk home.
I knew no words would come out of me in the ways I needed words to come out if I tried asking her for my bus money and so I held back and left the classroom last, staring back at her, so she’d see me and say something but, by then, she was attending some other earth-shaking catastrophe. I lurked near her door at lunch but I knew I wouldn’t get my coin because she’d ask me why I was waiting and I would have to remind her that she had my money and I knew I wouldn’t be able to say what I needed to say and that the words I needed would lock inside my head.
When the bell rang at the end of the day and I came down the top stairs from where I could see over the fence to where the teacher’s cars were parked I could see hers was gone.
Now I had to walk from Durban North all the way to Red Hill.
The only way I was certain I wouldn’t get lost was to follow the bus route and so I walked up Margaret Maytom Avenue to the bus timing point. This was where the bus driver got out of his seat and reached up and opened the little door above the stairs and turned the 700 to 710. Then he’d move back to his seat and reach up and open the little door above his head and change the DURBAN NORTH to RED HILL. By the time I reached the timing point on the day Mrs. Jackson had my coin, my bus had long gone and the waiting bus was already full of high school boys.
I had my favorite bus drivers.
There was one bus driver who, if he’d seen me walking, would have stopped and called me onto the bus. He would not have watched to see me drop my coin into his little cash thing because he would have known the reason I was walking. I’d often see him let boys who had lost their money onto the bus. One morning he saw me running from our house to the bus stop.
I had already missed his bus but he broke the rules and stopped to let me on.
None of my favorite drivers was driving when Mrs. Jackson took my bus fare and I had to walk home.
At the end of Margaret Maytom I turned onto Umhlanga Rocks Drive and walked until I passed the big gates leading to Dr. Clarke’s house. “Umhlanga” is a Zulu word. In Zulu hl is like sh English so to say it correctly you say Um-SH-longer and I know all this because my favorite maid Pauline taught me all the Zulu I know. Dr. Clarke was our doctor. Every time we drove past those gates Dad said we paid for those gates and Mother would say, “After all he’s done for us, Ernest, he deserves those gates.”
Just like the bus I turned by Brian Gow’s house (he was in my class) which was on Kingston Road. That next corner was where Blackburn Road began and I finally passed the Montfleury Hotel. I crossed the street so I didn’t have to walk by the exact spot where a boy from my school was killed on his bicycle. Even though he was killed long before I was born I avoided that spot especially if I was riding my bicycle. “We paid for those gates,” and, “killed right there on his bicycle” were verbal markers of our whereabouts and why I always had to take backroads.
I passed Mrs. Berry’s house where Blackburn Road went down the hill and changed from Durban North to Red Hill and then I was home.
Took me hours.
It was a long enough walk for a boy to really need to urinate.
I didn’t know what to do so I just held it in and kept walking and I arrived home with a really big damp patch in the front of my school pants.
Every time I filed into Mrs. Jackson’s music room I knew what I remembered and It wasn’t do-ri-me.
Years later – decades later – I saw Mrs. Jackson at church.
I took a deep breath and held it in and counted slowly to 10 and filled my lungs with freeeesssh air right in front of her. Then, I told her every detail I remembered about the day she kept my bus fare.
I couldn’t help it and not a single word refused cooperation.
The words flowed and flowed.
We laughed.
Mrs. Jackson was amused that I remembered her blue denim jacket and the little yellow daffodil music notes on her pocket. I told her if she still had that denim jacket she could dig in that little pocket and release all the little kids who disturbed her music lesson and my bus fare.
There is a certain value in shedding, getting rid of stuff, emptying drawers, taking old books that will never be read and giving them to someone who will read them. We may do it in sync with the seasons and call it “spring cleaning” or “readying for the winter.”
When I do this a lightness enters me, and the clean out not only clears my mind it cleans the room, the garage, the entire house.
There’s a certain value in taking stock, preserving, keeping, assessing what things we really value and keeping them close. These things can be very simple with no monetary value at all.
I confess, there’s something to do with Buzz Lightyear and Woody from Toy Story in every room in our house.
It’s subtle, but it’s there.
Toy Story was so integral to the early years of my boys’ experiences that I cannot let the reminders go.
And so, I don’t.
I hold onto the themes, lines and music. Doing so helps me make sense of time.
The photograph of mom and dad minding the tearoom in Blackburn Road does the same, as does the picture of my dad and me near the Little Top.
A little shedding and preserving is good for the soul.
I am thoroughly convinced that there are always reasons to hope. No matter how dire or conflicted the circumstance, no matter how bleak the prognosis, while there is life, and even beyond it, there remain reasons to be hopeful.
Like you, I’ve seen hope in action.
I’ve seen painful family scenarios, the most estranged of siblings, the most obstinate of personalities, turn, and find previously unimagined degrees of humility, and move in healthier directions.
But of course evil abounds, and it tries to rob us of hope.
Of course men and women are capable of inflicting much hurt and destruction.
But I believe that the good in this world by far outweighs the evil. There is goodness and kindness and benevolence latent in every man, woman, and child, and I believe it far exceeds an inner desire for hate and destruction.
While I am well aware that this idea will be considered absurd in some circles, and heresy in others, I’d suggest that when a lonely woman reaches again for alcohol, or the deprived man engages in illicit behavior, or an adult or teenager self-destructs, these behaviors are desperate acts of prayer, desperate attempts at sanity, desperate attempts to relieve pain and even restore hope.
Observations for students who are studying the art and science of talk therapy….
You are working too hard if you – the therapist – are talking too much. It is the client’s hour, not yours. The therapy hour is for the client to learn about the client’s life and family, not yours. Listen to the client’s stories, avoid telling your own.
You are working too hard and probably have an exaggerated concept of your role if you take clients “home” with you in your head. This does not mean you ought not think about your daily work at home, but it is an unhealthy sign if your clients are keeping you awake at night. Also, it is (usually) a red flag if one client gets more of your thinking time than another.
“Too much too soon” is usually, if not always, a red flag. If your client improves overnight, if your approach to therapy is regarded as “miraculous” or if your connections with your clients seem to be immediate. Try to be healthy enough to assess who is (unintentionally) misleading who. All authentic human encounters take time and patience and quick therapeutic rewards are probably fool’s gold. Pleasing the therapist or pleasing the client is not the goal of the therapeutic hour (or month, or year).
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