Grief is Love in its rawest and purest form…

My dear beloved community, I have not written to you since January. In fact, I have not written much in months. And my writing today comes from a tender and vulnerable place as I choose to share what has been unfolding in my life that has prevented me from sharing my regular newsletter with you. At the end of January, I learnt that my father was ill, and on February 3^rd he was diagnosed with stage five end-stage renal failure. What I did not know then, and now know intimately, is that renal failure can be a silent killer – you can be very sick without necessarily experiencing pain at the start of the illness, and without realizing the severity of the illness. This is what happened for my father, and I was faced with the difficult, and yet clear choice to put a hold on everything in my life and business, and travel home to be with my father in his final weeks of life.

Of course, choosing to uproot my entire life and go home, is not an easy choice to make, and yet, it was a deeply aligned choice for me. Family is one of my core values, and I made the choice that helped me stay in integrity with myself and ensure that I would have as few regrets as possible – given the information available to me at the time. I am incredibly grateful for the life and business I have created that allowed me the opportunity to take this very important trip back home.

I had no idea what I was walking into as I got on that plane and went home. I had no idea what would unfold, and what I would learn during my time there. My coach encouraged me to get really clear on my intention for my time in South Africa, and to also identify my non-negotiables during the time that I would be away.

Looking back on this, I’m so grateful for the invitation to get clear on my intention. During the darkest and most challenging days, my intention is what kept me going. My intention was to show up fully and spend meaningful time with my father. My intention was to be the daughter I wanted to be so I would have no regrets. My intention was to be fully present and loving, and to not get sucked into any drama. My intention was to meet Life exactly as it was, without resisting it. My intention was to stay deeply grounded in reality and in my truth. My intention was to honour my father’s dying wishes, and to support my mother and sister through their grief. Essentially, my intention was to be loving presence; to show up in ways that would have me feel proud of my choices.

Those of you who have lost a parent will know what I mean when I say that it changes you forever. You can never be the person you were before your parent died. Losing a loved one is a grief that cannot be explained until one has walked the path, and for this reason it feels like a right of passage. This one is a right of passage that we will all face at some point in our lives, and how we choose to walk the path determines what gets created from our grief.

The tender space one finds oneself in during a time of intense grief has its own timing. In many ways grief carves its own journey through our lives as we grapple with the loss of something that can never be retrieved or replaced, while at the same time, trying to find some sense of rhythm in the regular mundanity of everyday life again.

And in all of this, none of us are actually ever alone. As personal and individual as grief is, it is also incredibly universal; which is such a gift. As human beings we are capable of immense compassion when we stay present, and that is a gift, because we can understand and feel with others through our own experiences of loss and grief. Grief can connect us to each other, especially when words lose their meaning…

And I recognize that we don’t all know how to be with grief; especially in the Western world. There is this expectation that we should grieve silently, and try our best to move on as soon as possible – whatever that means… I you are currently walking through grief right now, you will understand what I mean when I say that grief does not allow itself to be dictated to. Grief is its own beast and will work through you in its own time. And your level of grief depends on so many things – your own level of awareness, your own willingness to feel and meet your grief, the quality of the relationship with the person who has died, and so much more.

For me, I’m choosing to be a renegade in grief. It has been 44 days since my father died. Although I was deeply held and supported during my father’s illness and during the first two weeks after his death, slowly but surely, people started moving on with their lives again, and I have days where I feel like I’m just stuck in my own bubble of grief, and I’m not able to connect with the rest of the world from this bubble. I’ve witnessed clients walk through this after losing parents, children, and friends. And I have always invited them to let their grief be there. So, I’m also choosing to let my grief be here, and for it to guide me right now. I’m choosing to stay in grief in a world that wants me to move on and get back into my normal life and routine.

 

This is not the first time I have chosen to stay in grief. I also made the choice to stay in grief during my first year as an immigrant in Canada. The homesickness and grief were debilitating at times. I had days where the only thing that got me out of bed, was the fact that I had a daughter to take care of. I spent weeks – no months actually – crying, and longing, and letting the grief carve its journey through me and through my life. I had many well-intentioned people try and convince me to “go out and explore” or that I “should be grateful”, and all I could feel was the immense loss of the life I had known and the people I have loved so dearly that were suddenly so far away. It felt like everyone I loved had suddenly died and were gone, and the bubble of isolation and misunderstanding was like a prison sometimes…

However, if I could go back and choose again, I would choose the grief again. I would choose to honour the grief, because it gave me so much. So much of who I am today was shaped by the experiences of grief I walked through during that first year in Canada. Having to face my loss, taught me about gratitude, presence, and joy in ways I could never have imagined, and I now understand that it’s only through loss that we truly get to understand deep gratitude, wonder, awe, and presence…

“Grief”, in the words of Megan Devine, “… is love in it’s rawest and purest forms…” Grief speaks to the love that was present. Loss reminds us of what mattered most. Grief reminds us that we feel, that we are connected, that we once loved, that the space where love once lived is now empty…

My relationship with my father was complex to say the least, and I will share that the level of complexity did not lessen the amount of grief. In fact, I think that in many ways it has intensified my grief, as I also grapple with regret at opportunities lost, and the realization that there are no more conversations to be had, no more apologies that can be made, except for in the silence of my weeping as I express my sorrow, my longing, my regrets to the empty space around me.

I’m choosing to write to you, not because I need to be consoled, but to let you know that I see you, that there is so much available in our grief that would otherwise go undiscovered. I’m letting you know that I’m here even more fully now than I have ever been. So much has been healed over the past four months since the start of this year. And I continue to deepen in my learning and in my capacity for holding space and loving others.

I feel like there is so much grief in the world right now. For me, it feels like almost every week something occurs that has me question the sanity of people, and wondering if there is any hope to be found. And I’m here to tell you that there is hope – even in the darkest of moments, because where there is grief, there is love.

In his book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle explains that a new earth is not just another typical utopian vision. He declares: “All utopian visions have this in common: the mental projection of a future time when all will be well, we will be saved, there will be peace and harmony and the end of our problems. There have been many such utopian visions. Some ended in disappointment, others in disaster.”

Tolle reasons that at the heart of all utopian visions lies one fundamental misunderstanding – i.e., the belief that salvation lives in the future. However, the future is not real. It’s merely a thought. Life happens NOW in the present moment, and the real opportunity is in meeting Life as it is – imperfect, unpredictable, uncertain, chaotic, sometimes profoundly beautiful and wonderous, and other times deeply painful and challenging…

According to Tolle, awakened consciousness is not a future state to be achieved. A new earth can arise within you in this very moment, if you choose to be present to your own intention in this moment. If you keep telling yourself that “one day” you will be better, or “one day” you will do things differently, you might never get there, and a world where things are different will remain a distant utopian dream. And sometimes, we reach the endpoint, and our time here on earth is up. It’s easy to ignore the fact that we are all dying, until it is not. Until we are faced with our own mortality, our own humaneness, our own vulnerability, and we must choose in THIS moment who we will be.

My father used to say that there were three really important decisions one must make that will determine the course of the rest of your life:

1. What you do for a living.
2. Who you marry or partner with.
3. Where you live.

I used to believe him when I was a little girl, and I attached so much value to making sure I made “the right choices”. And over the course of my life, I have learnt that all three of those things are choices I can unmake. I have changed careers many times and reinvented myself many times. I have been in and ended many relationships, including friendships. And I have moved not just towns or cities, but countries. What I learnt from moving countries, uprooting my entire life, starting over from scratch, is that NOTHING is permanent, and anything can change – sometimes in the blink of an eye.

My perspective now, is that it’s not the big decisions in life that shape our lives, but rather the small, seemingly insignificant choices that matter more – what I say in moments of anger; my intentions during difficult and challenging times; the choice to heal or retaliate in anger; the choice to brood in resentment, anger, and frustration, or the choice to own my life, my choices, my reactions; the choice to let hatred and anger run my life; or the choice to let love and compassion run my life. These choices matter more. These choices are the ones that define who we become over time. They have us either look back on a discarded mess of disjointed choices, or at the symphony of growth and healing that marks any life that is well lived with intention.