“Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”
― Martin Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise
There are innumerable models to explain grief. Mostly they’re about transition, not finality, i.e. to elide grief completely.
None, or none that I’ve been taught or read about, articulate grief as a skill in the same way that you might take up something like golf — i.e. to get better. Using this analogy and applying the various models as aforesaid, it appears you’d take up golf more than likely to give it up.
Much like yesterday’s post, my belief is that the absence of grief literacy is a cultural phenomenon. It’s no different to our aversion to death. And you can see the effect of that writ large across all areas of our life.
If I were to opine on how we might come to grief and learn about it, it’s not going to happen by reading a book or going on a course. Instead, it’s going to come from being in community, sitting with our elders and being around death — upfront and personal. It’s only in that space we can start to inhabit grief and learn about its many spiritual facets not least the fact that, as Martin Prechtel speaks so eloquently about in the above book, we can approach love in a wholly different way. (I could be wrong but I do wonder if one of the reasons we don’t want to get too close to people is because of the fear of loss that we’ll inevitably have to deal with.)
I realise, having embarked on a bereavement course at our local hospice, how sensitive is the subject of grief but so much of what I’ve observed goes to the heart of what I’m speaking to. In short, if there was grief literacy we might have the machinery in hand to approach grief in a very different way.
For now, I need to reflect on my own experience of grief and reconcile the fact that I’m ill-equipped to deal with loss in so many areas of my life. I will, though, continue to write on the subject of grief and I may even try to convene a space where those interested can come together to discuss this mythic, poetic and deeply personal subject in greater detail.
Deep bows.
Love,
Julian