Emerging from sorrow - from Wendy Lustbader

It's been over two years since I first discovered Wendy Lustbader.  She still moves me to new insights, fresh awareness.  Little did I know what comfort she'd give in a time that feels beyond hope of comfort. 

My usually cozy little hometown has been bowed down with unimaginable pain & loss.  Ripped by heartbreak & unspeakable tragedy, young - very young - and old have been brought low by loss sorrow grief.  

This afternoon, I was blessed with some sense of solace, reading the already well-thumbed pages of Life Gets Better.  It felt like Wendy offered a warm hand & hug as she wrote, on Loss:

Inside all of us is a great pool of grief that keeps enlarging as each loss is added to the others.  We often find ourselves weeping for old sorrows along with the new.  Over the years, we learn how to dip into grief for a while and then step back into the oxygen of love & life.  It is not that we get good at it, but we know what we must do & we do it.  Grieving does not get easier, but we acquire the skills to bear it and the wisdom to accede to it.

Having done it so many times before, we become confident about our eventual emergence from even the deepest sorrow.  We understand how necessary it is to cherish, rather than fear, the sadness that arises when we are swamped by memories of someone we have lost.  The sadness passes, and the remembering becomes sweet.  Our spirit for life returns with know how to gather in every kind of solace.  Appreciation for the presence of those still with us becomes acute.  We become determined to make the most of the time we have left with one another, to turn mourning into attentiveness.


Having experienced the past weeks, am reminded over & over that grief is a shape-shifter, ebbing & flowing in unexpected ways, expanding & contracting then - when least expected - expanding again.  

When we lose someone dear to our heart, the sorrow never fully leaves us, but that doesn't mean it clings to us, reduces us to chronic sadness.  Ideally, it acts as Wendy describes, leaving us determined to turn mourning into attentiveness. 


All that is wonderful in life comes with the possibility of its loss.  How we carry this awareness divides those who live well from those who do not.  As losses mount with the years, bitterness can exert an inexorable pull.  Some people close up, pushing away anything that would risk their heart.  New life beckons at times, but they keep to themselves.  The door to change stays sealed...  There can be regeneration after great sorrow, but only if we let the grief open us to further life.  The next portion of living is there for the taking, as soon as we are ready to find our way back to flourishing.

 ~ ~ ~ ~ 

To grieve is to experience a relationship - a man said this to me after I had given a presentation about grief.  He announced this happily, as though the very sentence gave him delight.  I knew this was right, that the heartache is proportionate to the loving, but he had captured this truth in one triumphant phrase.


When I drop a matzoh ball into the boiling water, I see my grandmother's hands and a wave of grieve comes over me.  I remind myself what a privilege it was to have had a grandmother beyond my fortieth birthday, one who had the stamina to pass on the traditions when I was ready to receive them.