Living Phoenix

Tag: pain

  • Denial Is Not a River in Egypt: It Is a Small Raft Afloat in an Ocean of Despair

    Denial Is Not a River in Egypt: It Is a Small Raft Afloat in an Ocean of Despair

    “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand. … Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back.” C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

    In the opening of the brilliant novel, The Goldfinch, by the literary genius, Donna Tart, the young Theo Decker finds himself in a tragic and sudden transition from the safety and freedom of a loving mother to the literal and figurative aftermath of an explosion in an art museum: left confused, surrounded by the rubble of walls, ceiling tiles, dust, smoke, and body parts he is thrust into a lifelong journey through grief. Walking into the museum that day his mind never ventured to imagine life without his mother. Why would it? As he wandered and worried about the trouble he had caused in school and the disappointment and anger his mother may have, his thoughts never led him to believe at any moment it would be his last opportunity to say good-bye, or I love you, or I’m sorry. He couldn’t imagine the guilt of leading his mother into that museum or the pain of losing her. For days he sat in the apartment certain the phone would ring and it would be her, she would walk through the door with dinner, seeing her, hearing her, smelling her. First a constant sea of denial followed by waves of remitting and recurring denial, anger, sadness, shock…always an underlying fear.

    Denial is not a large body of water. It’s not even fluid. It is the small raft your mind strands you upon in the midst of terror and loss of reality for the sake of survival. The edges of that raft, it’s borders and size, are simply determined by what your mind can handle in the moment. An emotional buffer between the safety of your previous reality and the new reality of loss and pain. In the aftermath of tragedy everything slows down to a survivable pace- the silence of the house, the growing pile of dishes in the sink, the sounds of the settling house and the clock on the wall. Tick, tick, tick, tick… We move slowly, we breath slowly, we wait for that person to call, walk through the door, seeing them, hearing them, smelling them.

    That is denial. A slowing of the pace of reality: the brains desperate attempt to restrict how quickly the painful realizations of your new life are absorbed, like a nozzle on a firehose. But there is no permanent comfort on this small raft. While it may protect us in those early days, to stay here and dine on the lotus flower of Calypso’s island is to damn yourself to a life of pain and sadness that will live forever beneath the surface, giving way to an even greater loss- our souls.

    In the movie, Braveheart, William Wallace is visited by his deceased wife, the love of his life, during a dream. There is something sad, sweet, and very real how he begs for her to remain when he says: “I don’t want to wake. I want to stay here with you.” Her reply is what God is telling us softly with each growing day: “And I want to stay here with you. But you must wake up.” His reality is no longer there with her and his journey must go on, he must fight, fueled by her memory but not remaining there, defenseless, within it’s company.

    I believe C.S. Lewis was right, and that his gutted portrayal of his grief is amongst the greatest in literary history, when he said don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion, what was taken away will never be given back. That is the underlying etiology of the fear beneath our guilt and grief and why we find ourselves in denial. We don’t want to wake up. We don’t want to say goodbye. The only quiet glimpse of consolation during this period of loss is the silent image of the cross, the hope in a Savior, a garden of prayer. And all of those things are still fleeting for some great time. Waves of consolation broken on the rocks of a sudden memory. But if you are to step off that raft and try to fight, to continue your journey, it will be those moments of His consolation that may sustain you the most. You will never rid yourself of the pain. You are hurting even when you deny it exists. You will hurt when you open your eyes and rummage through the pieces, too. That pain, if you were genuine in your love, will remain: you cannot rid yourself of it, you must change your relationship with it.

    “I will never forget this awful time, as I grieve over my loss.” Lamentations 3:20. “Though he brings grief, he also shows compassion because of the greatness of his unfailing love.” Lamentations 3:32

    When you are ready to look around at your new reality, start by sitting on the edge of the raft with your feet in the water. Feel each emotional current pulling and pushing. And ask God to be with you before you are submerged and swimming toward the shore. Ask him to remind you that your feet will stand on solid ground again. Move. Stroke. Fight. And breath.

  • 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 ourselves that it made 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 easing 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, dinners 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 together, 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 the loss of many specific 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 years down the road. So, take a deep breath, do an inventory, hold on tight, and biopsy.