The Intelligence of Grief

6 minute read

I first learned about grief in the card aisle at the grocery store when I was around the age of seven. The words “with sympathy” were spelled out in pastels on the front of greeting cards at my eye level. Is grief like a sort of sad holiday that happens when someone died? Sympathy cards and flowers are given, then we all go back to school and act like nothing has changed.

I don’t think the word grief was ever said in my childhood. Looking back now, my grief lessons were all over my adolescence, even though I didn’t know that’s what the lessons were, or that “grief” was the name of the elephant in the room. We were all lugging this elephant behind us without knowing it was there.

Grief remains present, even when we don’t acknowledge it.

My mother’s father died when she was in her twenties, well before I was born. This was back in the “Time heals all wounds” days, in the “Buck up” generation. I’m assuming that her grief was expected to “heal”. I feel like my mom often had a knot in her throat that she was trying to speak around when we were kids. Though her bright countenance and sense of humor are very obvious, my hypersensitive heart could hear that knot throughout my childhood. I wonder if this is one of the reasons why she was always singing, to give the knot some room. And oh, can my mom sing.

Knowing what I know now about grief, I wish I had known then that it was the nameless elephant she was carrying around while also raising us kids practically on her own. Maybe her grief is what gives her such tenacious optimism.

Grief gives room for singing.

My father, a drafted Vietnam War veteran, was so sick with unacknowledged grief that he was diagnosed as mentally ill, hospitalized for mental illness and heavily medicated for it. Nobody anywhere thought that perhaps a front combat Vietnam War veteran, who also suffered a childhood that was a sort of warzone, could possibly be afflicted with grief.

Grief wasn’t on the radar.

His depression and sporadic nervous behaviors colored my childhood with dark tones. While most kids were memorizing state capitals, I was learning to distrust the American government. I was coming up in the fallout of what ‘drafted to the Vietnam War’ meant. But, still, nobody anywhere considered his afflictions to be grief. He died never knowing that it was grief that haunted him. The dark tones of my childhood grew my capacity for holding heavy things with others.

Grief can be passed down from one generation to the next after all.

In my teens and twenties, my own grief began to choke the life out of me. After years of numbing myself with drugs, I began numbing myself with meditation. Thousands of dollars in therapy and decades spent under spiritual teachers and yet nobody anywhere knew what was wrong with me. When I stepped onto the path of death midwifery and learned exactly what grief is, I began to understand myself. When I learned that it was grief that was the elephant in the room, I began to learn how to let it carry me. A grief practice can be a strong foundation after all.

Grief isn’t something that only comes after the loss of a loved one.

Francis Weller, a well-known author, psychotherapist and soul activist teaches us that grief goes well beyond bereavement. He teaches that grief comes for places within us that did not know love. It comes for the sorrows of the world. It comes for ancestral grief. Through my studies of Weller’s theories, I learned that what I was trying to numb or mend within myself was not an illness but was grief. When I began to practice my grief, learning its movements and desires and the weight of it, my mind and body and spirit began to synergistically bring wholeness, inspiration and health to my self. My depressive episodes became focused and purposeful once I learned they were my grief songs trying to be heard.

It is through my grief practice, my body opened and softened, my eyes watered regularly, that I am able to see clearly. Because of my grief practice, I can stay centered in this devastatingly dark and yet also beautiful world.

Grief sharpens our vision.

My grief will never go away, just like my love won’t. Being awake and aware now to the planet and its creatures and people is an invitation to grieve and praise. Every single day we are given something to grieve and something to enjoy. We have our own personal losses, and we have losses that come from being one part of the whole.

Our planet is gasping for air and yet it still is serenaded by birdsong. It seems that school shootings in America are now an unforgivable norm and yet children are still crafting whimsy with their imaginations. A suicide epidemic isn’t being largely discussed yet some deathworkers are now changing the narrative around this topic and saving lives while they do. Multiple genocides are happening to our kin and the terror is breaking our numbness apart. We don’t know where we’re heading, and yet, through our growing grief awareness we are given invitations to unite our hearts. Will we accept the invitations?

Grief knows the way.

Unacknowledged grief is the rootball of our collective pain. It can choke the life out of those of us that don’t know it’s knotted up around our hearts. Unacknowledged grief is deadly. If we want to see change in our world, we must get to the root of the problems. Unacknowledged grief leaves a sinkhole under Americans that many fill with overconsumption, causing more harm. This harm causes more grief. The sinkhole goes deeper.

We need love to fill these spaces in. Love cannot be its fullest expression until grief is in its fullest expression. We don’t pull the rootball up to destroy it. We pull the rootball up, expose it, study it, and replant it in a place where it will serve us.

Grief is a field that we tend.

Living in grief awareness is a way of life. Grief folds into our day-to-day living. Grief wants to move just like love does. We allow grief to move through our joints when we stretch and dance or swing a tennis racket. We allow grief to move when we gather with others and create space and ritual for it together. We allow grief to move when we make art with it, when we put it into our elbow grease in the garden, when we pray and sing it, and when we weep and breathe it consciously.

Grief has a place in our lives.

The gift of grief expression is interconnectedness with all that is. Grief unacknowledged isolates us and shuts life-giving parts of our selves away from others. Grief unmoved becomes stagnancy in our blood. It closes the shoulders down around the heart and stifles our breath. Grief keeps our gaze downward. The very word grief comes from the Latin word gravare which means to make heavy.

The posture of grief is slumped over and closed off. But when grief is expressed, opened up, and carried out in the open collectively, it is made (into) light. You shouldn’t take my word for it, though. We should know our grief through our personal relationships with its movement within us and what it does when we share it.

Grief is enlightening.

Having a grief practice is essential. Most mornings I start my day with a cup of coffee and my grief practice. Through my movement practice, I open my body and heart energy to express what has made them heavy. If I go straight to my mind to express my grief, my grief gets tangled up with worries, judgment, and ideas. My body must express my grief first. Some days this opening brings tears to my face, some days it brings inspiration, and most days it brings a keen awareness of what is possible.

Grief is a guide.

Recently, I got to have a tender conversation with grief coach Naila Francis for my Nine Keys Podcast. Naila is a death midwife, interfaith healer, and poet who centers their work around grief awareness.

In this conversation, Naila said something that really stuck with me. She shared that some days her grief will express itself through tears and that she won’t assign a reason for that particular grief expression. There isn’t a vagueness to this way of grief, but there is an allowance for the intelligence of grief. To me, this is a mature place on the path. Through practice, we learn our grief and how it moves. Some days it may write poetry, and other days it may weep in dance.

Grief is inspirational.

Naila and I have a grief thing in common. We have found that our grief practices have opened us up to experience a deep connection with nature and others. Our grief practices keep our hearts flexible and strong enough to hold the sorrows of the world. Our grief practices inspire new thought, new ways to care, and wholeness.

We may not be able to solve our world’s problems with our grief practices, but we can hold our collective’s predicaments with them in a way that allows for more love, patience, tenderness, and understanding to be the joining points between us. We’ve got to unite in grief, don’t we? Maybe our acknowledged grief has the power to move us together in such a way that makes empires fall and truly caring communities arise.

Grief is the way forward.

Keep going!

Narinder Bazen

*New to the idea of having a grief practice?

I invite you to lean into the many grief care communities that are forming within the deathworker movement and to work with one-on-one grief coaches like Naila Frances or myself.

*Are you a deathworker / death doula / death midwife / death companion, etc.?

If you would like to develop your grief coaching and receive soft-business development support, please consider working with me through my Reimagine offering. Deathworkers are just scratching the surface of the work that needs to be done for the collective’s great awakening to grief. If you are a deathworker who offers grief coaching to your community, please know the world is grateful for your work.