Living Phoenix

Tag: faith

  • If Your Roots Reached Down to Hell, Grow Toward the Heavens: A Personal Pain Biopsy

    If Your Roots Reached Down to Hell, Grow Toward the Heavens: A Personal Pain Biopsy

    “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” Carl Jung

    Before we start this journey together regarding surviving our loss and dissecting the evolution of grief, it is necessary to first take the most difficult step: identify exactly what we are grieving. Grief isn’t a vague process that proceeds through natural stages on its own, and if we do not say out loud what we lost and what we mourn then we will become stuck in any particular phase of grief; a breeding ground for what you might call “past trauma” that one day wreaks havoc on the future. And since this step is so important and perhaps the most difficult, and because in writing it I feel like a bit of the pot calling the kettle black…I’ll share my own pain biopsy in hopes that some vulnerability is both therapeutic and beneficial to someone out there somewhere, as well as, myself.

    Do not be surprised to find that taking ownership of your own mistakes and faults, as well as identifying the hurt you caused, may be easier than identifying the non-organic specific losses and hurt. Unless your loss is due to a death, we have blame to accept. And we will. The journey we took to the bottom, however, led us to care so little for own selves making self-judgement and conviction much easier than acknowledging the broken promises or physical losses that we now mourn. But if you are going to grieve and have a hope of healing, admit what you are grieving- a step in the right direction of honesty is being honest with yourself. Carl Jung said, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain”, and “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

    The pathology of our pain and nearly every stumble we have ever faced is rooted in fear. The most amazing humans have made the most horrible mistakes. And those who look amazing without fault have only hid them well and acknowledged them less. It is much easier to assume a persons identity with their worse moments while seeing our own identity as our greatest attributes. In other words, our assumption of a persons identity is often dishonest and our assumption of our self identity is often honest. That is until you find yourself in the ashes and all you are able to see is all of your ugly parts. The entire system flips on its head along with every other thing in your life. Self loathing. Self distrust. Self hatred. And therefore, flows the ease of accepting your mistakes and the difficulty in naming the things you are grieving most.

    Two things come to mind that lead to painful grief. One is the loss of something vital to you. Death of a love one. Separation and divorce of your person. A prodigal child. You have no control of any part of the loss. You cannot bring someone back to life. You cannot make someone love you. You cannot change a persons will to make bad choices. The other is the loss of something that confirms your insecurity. Abandonment. Distrust. Feeling unsafe. All of the insecurities. And a successful pain biopsy must address both types. Both are often tied together. You not only lose your spouse or your child, you lose every hope and dream woven into the fabric of your previous reality. And that is exactly why it hurts so badly, for so long, and why we get stuck in the worse of it.

    For example, the severity of my pain seemed obvious to me at first. I lost the love of my life. Similar to having an argument, causing them emotional pain, and then moments later they die in an accident- you never see them again, you never get to say you are sorry, you never get the chance to rebuild what was broken into something greater and more indestructible. Only in this case (and thank God, of course), it wasn’t an accident. And while those wounds remained open the person who I loved the most in this world was out there moving on and healing without me- her sworn best friend, husband, safe place- replaced with worse friend, ex-husband, unsafe person. When the person you love more than any human in your lifetime disappears you feel like you are perpetually stuck in the initial moments after the fall when the wind has been knocked out of you- gasping for breath, chest tight, panic, fear. I was mourning my greatest loss. A person. And that part will stay with you forever. But that can become more generalized with time and confusing and the pain seems to worsen instead of ease and become manageable. The biopsy only included the largest lesion. And with that lesion were the metastasis that turned up at every dark corner of my heart. I not only mourned a person. I grieved deeply for our time. Early mornings, dinner after work, random texts, sending flowers, planning our weekends, cuddling on the couch, reading in bed and hearing her breath and feeling her cold feet. The small things began to add up to seemingly infinite losses. Sitting in the bathroom while she showered and vented about her day, dinners with her family, walking the dogs, jump scares and pranks, teamwork, dancing in the kitchen, sharing a song. But it didn’t end with the direct losses that shunted off of the experiences with the person. It included our future. The dream and planning to bring a child into the world. I mourn the loss of child that will never be born. Finding our “forever home”. Dreaming of pets and farm animals. Dreams of travels and adventures. And I mourned my final day, just before my final breath, when she would hold my hand and say “we did good”. I mourned promises lost and broken of lifetime and for better or worse and sickness and in health. And after weeks of identifying those individual things we grieve, only then can we begin to say goodbye and hope for healing.

    There is no recipe to feel better. And our greatest misconception is that time heals all wounds. It doesn’t. In fact it makes them worse. Every trauma you carry with you was time not healing a wound. Stuck in the cycle of grief. Intention, steps forward, feeling the pain, hard work, praying, and the mercy of God are the only hope we have of healing any wound. A pain biopsy is painful. But the only way through loss and grief is the eye of the storm. You must travel directly through the storm, walk through hell, to get to safer ground. There was a point in the movie, The Odyssey, that resonated deeply with me in regards to this very point when Calypso is seeing Odysseus off on his makeshift raft heading home over uncharted waters. What she says describes what we must eventually face on our journey if we want to get home. And it is a lesson that an attempt to control every outcome in the pit of despair will only prolong your suffering.

    “You are a man that likes to control your fate. But this time you can’t. You must give yourself to the storm. Give yourself to Poseidon. Take your punishment.”

    A pain biopsy is painful but necessary. You don’t just grieve, you grieve loss of many things. And failing to identify them and not allowing yourself to feel the pain will lead to getting stuck. And those demons will show themselves again in many forms.

  • If Grief Is the Price We Pay for Love, Who Covers the Cost: Good Mourning

    If Grief Is the Price We Pay for Love, Who Covers the Cost: Good Mourning

    “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the same yawning. I keep on swallowing.” C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

    A shocking truth about grief and mourning is that it is a chronic disease. That mourning resembles the time of day only as a heterograph, but better approximates eternity as a synonym, is undesired irony. The clinical picture is constant aching pain with fluctuating intensity described as waives of aching and stabbing pain, nausea, lightheadedness, and emotional lability. There is the inability to eat or sleep despite the oppressive weight of fatigue and sudden loss of motivation to get off the couch. And yet, we are expected to wake up each morning, go to work, take care of our family, maintain our health, concentrate amidst constant uncontrollable waves of memories that tear at the edges of our gaping wound of loss. This is the misery of grief, that in moments as time progresses we try to convince ourselves that we will be okay and that life will move on. We will string together, at first, a few minutes to hours of emotional reconciliation: only to, unprepared and unaware, be speared into pieces by a sudden fleeting memory. Sometimes it is triggered by something you shared together. Sometimes it arrives like a thief in the night to rob you of your will to live. There is no good mourning. There is no sensible mourning. Grief is the most painful human emotion, but is the least human experience.

    Perhaps it feels the least human because it is the emotion that brings us closest to God. Or, as we often feel in the moment, the absence of God. Either way, whichever side of the spectrum you find yourself from one minute to the next in these volatile circumstances, it is when one cannot help but at least desire a divine presence. Help. Comfort. Peace. Deliverance. Forgiveness. Healing. Resurrection. Death. I am wary to offer the word blessing behind any intention of grief, for blessings are unwelcome in a cloud of darkness so thick. However, perhaps the mechanism behind the pain could be an eventual choice of blessing rather than immediate gratification of death. It is during the early moments of grief and mourning that we tend to underestimate our worth in this world the most. We made enough mistakes, don’t make that one.

    There is one constant in our mourning during grief. A deep void, or absence, left in our entire being. By entire being I mean this sensation of a missing piece is experienced physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally. As the primary result of the massive portion of our being ripped from our chest, we experience indescribable pain. I believe that is why denial, the first phase of grief we will soon explore, is the most logical and desperate starting point in a rush to self preserve. Our whole world construct, the entire reality of the life we created, has just collapsed into the ashes in a single moment. If our reality ceases to exist, so does our acceptance of the circumstances. We deny that reality exists, after all it no longer does as we conceived it, and we rush to fill that void desperate to stop the hurt.

    I was told by someone the fastest way to get over someone is to get under another. What a desperate false hope. Adding a poison to an open wound. Taking the few remaining pieces of your soul and giving them away until the void covers you in entirety and you are unrecognizable as a person. I have felt, myself, the desire to use alcohol or drugs to manage the pain. A liars crutch. Adding more chaos to chaos. Pouring gasoline onto a raging fire. No, there is nothing that is big enough to fill that void, that undesired painful emptiness, except something greater than our human experience. There is nothing big enough to fill that void but God. And perhaps that is evident, at our lowest, when we first feel the unimaginable pain of loss and we rush to pull ourselves from the fire that we so often think, God help me. Perhaps it is the spark of the divine that is written in our very DNA that points us to the only real answer. Perhaps, when everyone you loved has turned away and all is lost, God is the only one left beside you. And perhaps it is because He is reaching for you, pulling you in, because this terror is real but so is He.

    God is not the absence of mourning. “I dress the skies in darkness, covering them with clothes of mourning.” Isaiah 50:3. He is the hopeful presence among it and the pathway beyond it. “You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy.” Psalms 30:11. There is no doubt that this pain will be remembered for a lifetime. But a life is both too short to remain in our darkest moments and too long to be defined by it. God understands this is the most severe and complex human emotion. He understands this pain is more than we can bear. Sometimes, the severity of the pain is unnecessary and if only the other person involved would look to God in the same way it could be healed and joyous. But their will is not yours and their needs are their own. Sometimes, the other person is no longer living and you are left to heal without the hope of their return. Whatever it is, however it came about, our first lifeline is that despite our greatest loss God will continue to write our story. Take comfort in that He is an author who only writes happy endings for those characters that choose His pages.

    There is no good mourning. The pain that comes with grief will dissipate, but even now as I write, memories and fears of the person I lost come and go and feel as real and painful as the day it occurred. They may be dead, or they may have moved on, they may have patched their void with another person, place, or thing. But your hurt is uniquely yours. And it is going to show itself for a longtime to come. So our focus belongs not on the fears but on the only hope we have in the person of Jesus Christ. If we gain anything from the ashes of this fire it is that we are not our few mistakes. We are the children of God who have loved deeply, cared freely, grown immensely, and are of the highest value to the Kingdom of our creator. Why else would he be the only one there in our minds when we look up from our greatest tragedy.

    The cost of love is grief. The cost of anything worth having is great. And when we realize that cost it is only natural to feel bankrupt because we don’t have the resources to manage this type of transaction. But that high cost of pain can be covered on our loving Father’s account. No strings attached. No interest. Paid in full before you were ever born.