Passing The Two-Minute Test

I'll start off with a few words about my whereabouts since late August — I moved! My second move of the summer, actually, and then the dramas of moving into a new home (like no hot water, malfunctioning dishwasher, dozens of deficiencies, etc.). That, plus merging two households into one, plus starting a new school year for my son, and it all adds up to not having a ton of time for blog posting ;-)

It has given me a number of days in which to reflect, however. When I first started my blog, I was already well on my way to completing my bereavement. I did want to share a number of tips and techniques for coping, understanding, and finding the road to peace, and I believe I have done so. To that end, I will no longer be actively posting every other day or so. I have said what I have to say, and past postings are always available for those just setting out on this journey. Other projects now await my time.

I will, however, post periodically in response to specific reader questions or comments. And I'd like to thank Jenny for encouraging me to break my silence and post again :-)

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On the 26th of September, Daria posted the following comment:

Vic,
You often talk about using the skills you've learned in Vipassana, and other methods of meditation, in your healing process. To successfully heal, do you feel that these methods must be used, or can we heal from our grief without in-depth knowledge of these methods?

Thanks, Daria, for the great question. I've been thinking about how to answer it for the last three weeks. First off, I'm not sure I would use the word "heal" anymore. What has changed is my perspective. But I know what you mean.

I really appreciate Eckhart Tolle's work for simplifying a host of psychological and spiritual concepts — cutting through the miasma of thousands of years of nebulous opinions and getting to the heart of things. I find it interesting that I am only discovering his books at the end of my grief journey. His two best-sellers encompass everything I think you need to know to come out of bereavement. Here's what I have learned:

To me, bereavement is a devastation of your mind, your ego. Your mind intensely dislikes the present moment, preferring instead to keep you caught up in thoughts about the past and anxieties about the future. Sound familiar?

In bereavement, your ego, your sense of self has been shattered. To compensate, your mind switches into high gear and roughly shoves you into alternating currents of your past married life and the dark, single, uncertain future. This is a very dangerous thing for the ego to do — most people don't appreciate being shoved around, and they are likely to do something about it. And they might start paying attention to the present moment. If they do this in the right way, they will come to a startling discovery — that the present moment is perfect just as it is, and that there is no need for the ego.

Meditation is simply the act of being focused on the present moment. Right this second. And this second. And this second. Not focused on the past. Not focused on the future. Right now. Only now. Sound simple? Try it. Try just being aware of the present moment for 2 minutes. No thoughts about the past, no thoughts about the future. Just the immediate feedback from your 5 senses. Close your eyes to make it easier ;-)

...

Well? Bet you couldn't go the full two minutes. Your mind sucked you in to the past, or tried getting you to focus on something you need to do in the future. This is the nature of the mind.

I wrote that near the end of my Vipassana course, I discovered the Vic that has no problems. Thanks to Eckhart Tolle, I now understand that that Vic was the one who was totally focused on the present moment. THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS IN THE PRESENT MOMENT. Yes, I'm shouting ;-) Every moment spent in the present moment is a moment spent with no problems.

But the mind / ego hates this — it is a problem-solver. If you spend time in the present where there is no problems, then you have no need for the mind / ego. In The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Eckhart sums this up nicely [pp 87-8]:

But the more you practice monitoring your internal mental-emotional state, the easier it will be to know when you have been trapped in past or future, which is to say unconscious, and to awaken out of the dream of time into the present. But beware: The false, unhappy self, based on mind identification, lives on time. It knows that the present moment is its own death and so feels very threatened by it. It will do all it can to take you out of it. It will try to keep you trapped in time.

Knowing this, try the 2-minute test again. With your eyes closed, focus only on the sensory data you receive from your remaining four senses. No thoughts about the past, no thoughts about the future. Try it again.

...

Still couldn't do it, could you? Now you can see how meditation training can be beneficial.

So, to answer your question, Daria: Peace exists only in the present moment. Nowhere else. But your mind will do everything it can to keep you focused on anything but the present moment. You couldn't even keep your mind focused on the present moment for two minutes, and this even after I warned you that your mind would prevent you. So who's running the show? You, or your mind? They are not the same thing. You are not your mind. Meditation helps you to dis-identify from your mind.

If by healing you mean to live at peace, you will need to find some way to live in the present moment, the only place where you will find peace. Meditation provides many methods for focusing on the present. There are other ways. In my next post, I'll outline several of them.

Never Mind

I have a little index card (folded at the bottom so it stands up) on my office desk with the following written on it:

Everything Is In Flow
I am letting go of all resistance to life

It has sat there in my peripheral vision for over two years. I didn't realize what a profound effect it was having until one of my co-workers recently said to me, "man, you are so Zen." I just smiled, mostly because I don't know a thing about Zen ;-)

But I did understand what he meant. It takes a lot to ruffle my feathers these days. Of course, now that my spouse is dead, my bar for life challenges has been raised substantially, so the little things (what we affectionately called chickenshit in the army ;-) don't really bother me anymore. But I'm finding more and more that the big things don't really bother me anymore either.

Perhaps you're familiar with the story of the farmer who experienced a variety of experiences that most of his neighbors were quick to label "good" or "bad:"

There is an ancient Chinese story of a farmer who owned an old horse that till his fields. One day, the horse escaped into the hills and when the farmer's neighbors sympathized with the old man over his bad luck, the farmer replied, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?”

A week later, the horse returned with a herd of horses from the hills and this time the neighbors congratulated the farmer on his good luck. His reply was, “Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?”

Then, when the farmer's son was attempting to tame one of the wild horses, he fell off its back and broke his leg. Everyone thought this very bad luck. Not the farmer, whose only reaction was, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?”

Some weeks later, the army marched into the village and conscripted every able-bodied youth they found there. When they saw the farmer's son with his broken leg, they let him off. Once again, the farmer's only reaction was, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?”

There are no misfortunes in life. There are only missed fortunes… missed only because we fail to recognise and appreciate them as they truly are… fortunes, experiences, learning opportunities, seeds of wisdom…

From our limited vantage point, it is often fruitless to attempt to figure out why something happened and unhelpful to label it as good or bad. I often find myself saying, "it is what it is." In bereavement, of course, we need to confront this issue head-on. Almost anyone would say that having your spouse die is bad, terrible, a catastrophe. Is that so? Death is what it is. Nobody gets out of this life alive.

I'm not asking you to logically accept this, right now or ever. I am suggesting that you not think about it. If there are some things in life that we are not destined to understand, why waste time thinking about them?

Ah, you say, but what about the pain? The agony of grief hurts beyond imagination and lasts far longer that what we think we can tolerate. Surely that is bad?

Is that so?

The pain we experience in bereavement is what it is. And that is the key — we need to experience it, fully and completely. Not run away from it, avoid it, bargain with it, or anesthetize it. We need to feel it, experience it, welcome it. A great question we can ask ourselves which comes from The Sedona Method:

Can you just allow whatever you are experiencing right now to be here?

There's a scene near the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia where Peter O'Toole lights a match and watches it burn down to his fingertips. When his co-worker tries it, he flings the match away and exclaims, "it bloody hurts!" To which the young Lawrence replies, "The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts." And despite having watched that film over ten times, I've never understood that quote until today ;-)

When we begin to accept that grief hurts, when we welcome the pain, we can fully experience bereavement, and we can begin to heal. And instead of asking ourselves why this terrible thing has happened to us, we can ponder this instead:

See the perfection where the seeming imperfection seems to be
-- Lester Levenson

And yes, that snapped me out the first time I read it too ;-)

Adapting To Being Alone

Soon after our spouse dies and the funeral is over and the family has gone back home, we find ourselves facing the awful reality of being alone. Awful not only because we don't want to be alone, but also because we aren't ready to be alone. We still think like we're married, and we have hundreds of habits that are appropriate to our past life as a husband or wife. Throughout those early days and for months after, reality is constantly scraping against these thoughts and habits, harshly reminding us that we are alone.

A good example: you get out of the house for the day and come home to a dark, empty house. As the silence envelops you, you think again that this is now how it is — you are alone. And that isn't going to be changing anytime soon.

Understandably, this can often cause a great deal of anxiety and fear. As I've posted about previously, we can respond to anxiety actively by facing our fears, or we can respond passively by avoiding them. It is quite common for widow/ers to avoid fears early on by plunging into work, physical activities and exercise, or projects. Anything to avoid confronting this reality of being alone. But if you're still avoiding being alone as you approach the one year mark, it's maybe time to ask yourself why.

Chandra Alexander has posted a great article about this avoidance of being alone, and I think it speaks directly to those of us who have lost our mates:

Avoiding Being Alone

Are you afraid to spend time alone and will you do anything to avoid it? If you are constantly avoiding alone time, here are some things to think about that just might help in setting you free.

1. Is doing “anything” better than being alone?

• If doing anything feels better than being alone, you need to deal with this issue, because doing “anything” is not better than being alone.


• When we run from something (being alone), the focus remains on the running and not what we are doing.

2. Do you feel anxious when faced with the prospect of being alone?

• The feeling of anxiety lets us know that the feelings we are running from are beginning to rise to the surface; that’s what happens when we spend time alone.


• You will always feel anxious when you enter unknown territory. You are used to being distracted. When you are alone, many of those familiar distractions are removed; as a result, you will initially feel anxious.

3. You must face your fears or you will always be running.

• Running becomes very tedious, very tiring. The only way you will ever be able to stop running, is to turn around and invite the demons in.


• When you face your fears and refuse to run, the chase stops!

4. Spending time alone is the ONLY way to really know your SELF.

• It is only in the quiet moments that we are able to KNOW the depths of who we really are.


• Can you not answer your cell, turn the TV off, and sit quietly?


• Can you bear the anxiety that comes from not being distracted? If you can, you will be rewarded with an expanded sense of Self.

5. Enjoying your own company is the reward.

• To be able to have a solid sense of Self - whether you are with people or alone - is what you want to happen.


• There is NOTHING better than enjoying your own company!!!

In my case, after working hard on getting used to being alone, at 20 months I decided to be really alone. I felt I was mostly ready to confront myself fully and completely, so with much trepidation I attended a free 10 day silent meditation course. It turned out to be the major key to my healing. I highly recommend it.

Feeling, Not Thinking

For the last month, I've been pondering the answers to two questions I was recently asked about grieving. The first one came as a result of a woman reading my blog posting about What We Can Learn From Grief and wondering how we can get out of the way mentally and let our body grieve. The second question was asked by a relatively new widow: how does one facilitate the grieving process?

I believe the answers to these two questions are related, so I'm going to attempt to answer them both simultaneously. First, let's start with the premise that grief is primarily a feeling process, not a thinking process. Why is this important? There's a big tendency here in the West, especially for men, to intellectualize grief. We can think about our grief all we want, but we're not likely to heal much that way.

OK, fine. I need to feel in order to heal. But what does that mean in practice?

I was very lucky as an early widower to be aware of a healing process called Focusing. The best book I found on the subject is called The Power of Focusing: A Practical Guide to Emotional Self-Healing. As a man, I found this technique to be very helpful as it taught me how to listen to what my body was trying to tell me. I highly recommend it.

I read recently that the primary purpose of our neo cortex is to produce thoughts, which lead in turn to movement. When I attended a Vipassana meditation course, this was elaborated on a bit as follows:

• First, a thought comes to our mind


• This thought produces a feeling or sensation somewhere in our body


• Due to this feeling, we react in some way

Can you see how intellectualizing grief is counter-productive? I don't know about you, but when I was in the throes of grief, I had more feelings than I knew what to do with! I certainly didn't need to have thoughts generating even more feelings. Instead, I needed a way to work with the feelings I already had. And I needed my brain to be quiet.

What I learned through 100 consecutive hours of silent Vipassana meditation was how to allow a thought to come to mind, feel the sensation, but not react to it in any way. This not reacting included not generating additional, related thoughts and perpetuating the cycle. By the end of the course, a thought could come up and pass away, and I felt no need to follow it or react to it. As a result of not being needed, my mind grew very quiet. I guess it didn't like being ignored ;-) With this quieting of my mind came a deep and healing peace. I finally met the real me, that guy who doesn't have any problems.

It was right after I came back from Vipassana that I learned about a Hawaiian healing method called ho'oponopono. It says that any problem we experience in our life comes as a result of a memory. The solution? Let go of the memory. I have written a fair bit about this method and how it has helped me.

In my next post, I'll explain more about how we can help our body heal from grief.

Lack of Meaning

Value:
Noun. Relative worth, merit, or importance; import or meaning; force; significance; liking or affection; favourable regard.

One of the more fascinating attributes we humans possess is the fickleness with which we assign value to things. When you were married, you probably had a pretty good idea about the value to you of your house, car, job, possessions, friends, spouse, even yourself. And then in an instant, it all changed. Now that your spouse is dead, does anything have the value to you that it once did? What would you give up to have your spouse back, if that were possible? Is there anything you wouldn't part with? Things you may have staked your entire career on, like a big house or car, can now seem almost meaningless. Overnight, your entire value system has likely undergone a major upheaval. And the aftermath can last for months and years.

I'm not real interested in the fast car or the big house. Never have been. Of far more interest to me is the value that we assign to our own lives, and to life itself. Several months after Deb died, I remember staring up at the ceiling one morning for 3 and a half hours with little thought other than "life is pointless." The meaning and value with which I had previously regarded life had all but vanished. But if life held no meaning, what was my place in it? What was the meaning of my life? Oh great, just a simple question like "what is the meaning of life?" My life. Or at least the one I now found myself living.

After Deb's death, this niggling meaning-of-life question would surface every now and then, adding to the sea of uncertainties in which I floundered. Did my life have meaning any more? What was that meaning? Hard, universal questions, and the only answer seemed to be, "the meaning you give it." It took me many hard, hard months of reassigning values to lesser things before I could even begin to conceive of the value I would give to my own life. Was I a father? Single dad? Friend? Co-worker? Naturalist? Idealist? Realist? Essentialist? None of these answers came quickly or easily.

The truth is, I have always been interested in the answers to these questions, and I still am, even though I am now at peace with both the questions and the answers. So it was with some interest that I read "Finding Meaning In the Second Half of Life" by Alexander Green. I'll just quote a few of the pertinent passages, but I encourage you to read the whole article. This will probably be more helpful to those of you who have already passed the one year mark and are beginning to grasp the need to reinvent yourself as a single person. There's lots of food for thought here...

Psychologists believe that roughly a quarter of Americans with symptoms of depression suffer from a chemical imbalance that, like diabetes, is most effectively treated with medication.

Others are experiencing a kind of reactive depression that is triggered by a serious reversal of some kind, an unexpected layoff, for example, or the sudden loss of a loved one. This form of depression can be severe but will ordinarily fade with time.

Yet, according to Dr. James Hollis of the C.J. Jung Educational Center in Houston, millions more suffer from a chronic melancholy that emanates from an entirely different source: a lack of meaning in their lives...

Many of them are haunted by the vague notion that something is missing in their lives. Often they can't put their finger on it. But it gnaws at them, creating fear, anxiety and, in some cases, depression...

But if meaning is missing, where can it be found? Some find the answer in their religious traditions. Others discover it by studying the world's wisdom literature, the great writings by history's wisest souls. Still others are fortunate enough to see it modeled by a parent, friend, or teacher, someone who is not merely living up to someone else's expectations but is instead busy living "an authentic life."

These men and women are too rare. And when they appear, society has a tendency to label them eccentric. As the poet T.S. Eliot once observed, in a world of fugitives, the person who is headed in the right direction will appear to be running away...

"Despite the blandishments of popular culture, the goal of life is not happiness but meaning," writes Dr. Hollis, author of "Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life."

To determine whether you're on the right track, he suggests you ask yourself a simple question: "Does the path I'm on enlarge me or diminish me?" Your answer, he says, should be immediate and instinctive...

Living an authentic life is not an easy choice. The poet e.e. cummings said, "To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

So expect conflicts and hurdles. Setbacks, too. Finding creative solutions to these challenges fuels the mind with positive energy. It gives you the opportunity to show yourself - and those around you - how much you really want it.

And, in the process, it gives your life meaning.

Does the path I'm on enlarge me or diminish me? What a great question to ponder as we make our own road.

Successful Grieving

How does one grieve successfully? Can this really be achieved? What is the best way to facilitate grieving? These are some questions I have been contemplating over the last few days. I think often of new widow/ers and how I can best help them during this nightmare stage of their lives.

First, let's work with the definition of success that I am most comfortable with:

Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal.
— Earl Nightingale

A few points flow directly from this quote:

• One needs a goal in order to be successful


• Success is a gradual process, not a sudden event

So, back to successful grieving. I needed a goal. In my case, I quickly determined that my goal was to be at total peace with Deb's death. Easier said than done! Still, I had my goal out in front of me. Next, I needed to take gradual steps to realize this goal of total peace. But in what direction should I head? This was my first real experience with death, and I found that societal support was pretty much non-existent.

Still, I knew it was possible to grieve successfully -- others had done so before me, and many of them had documented their success. A key component of success is imitating those who are already successful, making use of their hard-won acquired wisdom. So, one of the first directions in which I set out was the public library where I signed out Seven Choices by Elizabeth Harper Neeld. A big insight I acquired from reading this book was that grief work would likely be carried out over a period of years. This was disheartening, but I was glad to be reading about my first success story nonetheless. It also helped me to read such a detailed account of someone else's grief.

The Importance of Asking "How" Questions

I stress this point a number of times on this blog. "How" questions will lead you to your goal. Yes, there tends to be a period of time where our thoughts are dominated by "why" questions. For me, those questions included,

• Why did Deb die at 32 years of age?


• Why did she get cervical cancer and suffer such a horrible death?


• Why did she say goodbye to me emotionally 15 months before she died?


• Why was I left to raise a 2-year old by myself?

You'll notice, of course, that none of those questions were getting me any closer to my goal. And no matter how many times I struggled with those questions, I never did come up with any real answers. However, I've since read that this is a normal phase of grief, so it is good to know that I am normal ;-)

I think part of the reason I didn't spend too much time dwelling on "why" questions is because I read Lester Leavenson's highly irritating quote in Happiness Is Free: And It's Easier Than You Think!:

Try to see the perfection where the seeming imperfection seems to be.

"Seeming imperfection" - give me a break! But you know, a little seed was planted the day I read that tidbit, and I began to entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, there was a good reason for all this crap to have happened. Maybe things were unfolding perfectly, however demented it seemed to contemplate such a thing at the time.

Back to "how" questions. The main question I kept asking myself was, "How can I be at peace with Deb's death?" As I began asking this question, I started getting answers.

How Questions

I was poking around The Grief Blog a few days ago and stumbled upon this great article. It lists a number of common questions for newly bereaved people, and I remember asking several of these myself. I've highlighted a number of them, and I'll explain why I did that at the end:

Common Questions

Will the pain ever go away?

Will I feel better?

Why haven't I been able to cry yet?

Why am I afraid to leave my house when I used to be active?

Why am I running all the time, filling every waking moment with frantic activity?

Why do I find it impossible to accomplish even simple tasks, or even get out of bed?

Why do I find myself breaking down in embarrassing places? Why can't I have any control over my emotions?

Why don't I have an appetite? Or, why can't I stop eating?

Nothing makes sense. Am I going crazy?

Why am I so forgetful?

When I have the energy, how do I set new goals?

How do I even begin to know what I want?

What am I going to do with the rest of my life? Does this feeling of numbness get better?

I'm not used to traveling alone and taking care of myself. Will I be afraid forever?

When I get sick, how will I take care of myself?

When should I discard my spouse's clothing? When should I stop wearing my wedding ring?

How should I talk about this to my young/grown kids?

I hate feeling so dependent on others; will I ever feel capable again?

How can I deal with the first birthday, anniversary and holiday after losing my spouse?

Why do I feel guilty about being happy again? Why do I feel disloyal in thinking about dating?

I've been told that the one-year mark ends the mourning time, but I don't feel that way. In fact, I feel worse than at the beginning. Why?

What future is there for me beyond the feeling of unending, unchanging desolation?

How will I know when I'm ready to date? When is it too soon?

Am I forgetting my spouse if I begin dating? What will my children say? Why am I hesitating and troubled by uncertainty?

Am I going to spend the rest of my life lonely? Feeling like a fifth wheel with our old couple-friends, how can I have any kind of social life?

Will I ever be able to remember the joys, hopes, memories ... smiles ... without feeling sadness?

My husband was abusive to me and we had a horrible marriage. How do I mourn a loss that I'm not sure is even a loss?

"How do I live my life in a positive way without you ... not losing the memory and loving feelings of you, but incorporating them and going on? What tools can I find? How do I learn to heal in a way that's positive and energizing instead of depleting?"

Grieving is a process that unfolds during the 24 months after the death of your spouse. At the beginning of your mourning, it is not uncommon to have limitless questions with answers that feel completely out of reach.

Yet, despite the overwhelming pain, you instinctually know, somewhere deep within your heart that: "I need to stay alive, alive in a way that supports me and the "us" that was. I must seek a new emergence of myself after visiting the 'dark.' I sense that this awareness comes from the realm of my feelings, not from the sphere of my thinking." This is your beginning, to mourn and to heal.

Disaster looks us in the face and we survive. We hardly know how we do that, but we succeed. Underneath all the pain, there are elements of faith and trust, an "I can't lose" feeling, and the energy to go on and survive.

The entire article is excellent and I strongly encourage you to read it in its entirety. Now — I'll get on with the reason I highlighted several of the questions.

First, you'll notice that the majority of the questions are "why" questions. My advice would be to not spend too much time thinking about the "why" questions for one very simple reason: humans are quite bad at determining causality. In fact, for a number of these "why" questions, I don't think there really are any straightforward answers. As the article states, the answers feel quite out of reach. There's just too much going on all at once, and we are not able to collate enough relevant data to answer these types of questions definitively. Notice that I didn't suggest not to thing about "why" questions, I just said don't spend too much time on them. There are better uses for your grieving time.

You'll notice that the highlighted questions all begin with "how." I firmly believe that it is these "how" questions which will lead you through the desert of grief and out to the other side. There's something about asking "how" which engages the brain in a new way and changes our thoughts, feelings, and ultimately, our behaviors and habits. As I've made plain before, it is when our behavior and habits are changed that the pain goes away. How does the pain go away? Good question ;-)

Perspectives

I find that grieving is often about changing my perspective. It can be so easy to get caught up in myself and my desires for security, control, and approval. That's why I found it so helpful to attend a grief support group and read lots of books on grieving — it took me out of my head and allowed me to view my new life as a widower from many, many different perspectives.

I was listening to a talk Dr. Wayne Dyer gave about his book The Power of Intention when he said something that really struck me:

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

So simple, yet so profound. We don't live in a static universe, and things are constantly changing. In grief, however, sometimes we can feel absolutely horrible and despair that it will never end. What can we do at these times to feel better? We can look at our grief from a new perspective. When we do, our grief will change, and we will change.

Notice that I didn't say "improve." Sometimes the change is most unwelcome initially. I'll give you an example from my own experience. As I've posted previously, I've found The Sedona Method to be an immensely powerful tool for grief recovery. About a month after Deb died, I started reading a related work by Hale Dwoskin and Lester Levenson called Happiness Is Free.

[FAIR WARNING: This perspective will likely hit you square between the eyes as it did me. You have been warned.]

This book was about to alter my perspective to a point beyond which I could never return. It started out well enough, but by page 72 I was confronted by this:

Look within yourself and see if you are willing to live in a world without problems. If there is any hesitancy, it is probably because, without realizing it, you want to create problems in your life. We do this because as long as we think we are a limited body-mind we feel like we need to be like everyone else and to have a purpose in life. We are afraid if there were no problems there would be no need for us. And in a way we are right. Who we are not — our limited body-mind-ego — thrives on creating and then solving problems in order to justify its existence. The less we are invested in limitation, the less we need to create problems to resolve, and the less we even see problems in the world. As Lester repeatedly said, "See the perfection where the seeming imperfection seems to be."

Right. I remember reading this and wanting to reach through the pages and knuckle onto Lester's neck and shout, "gee Mr. Levenson, I guess you may not have noticed, but MY LIFE HAS BEEN FRICKEN DESTROYED!!!" The "seeming imperfection" — what was this, some sort of cruel joke?

I wasn't amused at the time, but that thought has never left me. Logically, I can see what he is saying. Why did Deb get cancer? Well, people get cancer, and Deb was a person, so she was eligible. Why did Deb die? That is what people do. They live, and they die. Seen by that angle, nothing was out of the ordinary, just life on planet earth trucking on as usual. But how far that angle was from how I felt!

Still, the thought kept gnawing at me. See the perfection where the seeming imperfection seems to be. I'm a big believer in "How" questions, so I found myself asking questions like "how is this situation perfect?" and "how could I begin to see the perfection here?" All I can say is, it is amazing what you can find once you start looking.

Letting Go

As my grief journey progressed, I came to realize that the end, the destination if you like, of this journey was to be at peace. Asking questions like "why did my wife die at 32 years of age, leaving me with a 2-year old son?" resulted in nothing but more fruitless questions. But we, as humans, are questioning beings. The secret seemed to lie in changing the nature of the questions — rather than "why?" I started asking "how" questions. How could I be at peace with her sickness and death? How could I be OK with everything that had happened? How could I get on with the business of living? How could I heal?

And an even more powerful line of questioning began with "what." In the throes of the waves of grief that washed over me, I clung like a shipwrecked survivor to a single powerful plank: "What could I do right now to help me be more at peace?" The answer to that question lay more often than not in the simple things: listen to peaceful music; light a candle; sit quietly on the couch; light some incense or smell some essential oils; get into some comfortable clothes. Asking what I could do at this moment to be at peace almost always led me to my 5 senses, and I did find some solace there. I had read that it is important for grievers to live in the present, and focusing on my five senses helped to ground myself in the present, if only for a moment. I was glad that I had found some readily-accessible shelter from the storms lashing at me. I took that shelter until I could venture out a little further down the road.

I have learned much from reading books about grieving, and one I highly recommend is called How To Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies. It was in reading this book that I finally understood what grieving is: the freeing up of the emotional energy associated with my past life as a married person. All that emotional investment had to be let go and released so that I could get on with life. The tricky part, especially for a guy, was twofold: one, how did I get a handle on my emotions, and two, how did I release them?

I Hate Mind Pretzels

Doing some basement cleaning tonight, I found two thumbnail black and white passport-style photos of Deb. I'm able to smile these days instead of sob, but it wasn't long before the rush of emotions began. I found myself thinking, "I was married for 12 ½ years to this person who is no longer a person. What does that mean?"

How does one even begin to answer such a question?

Thankfully, I've acquired sufficient grief tools by now that I was able to calmly sit on the couch and become grounded in the here and now. Within five minutes I was back to my usual self, able to get on with the evening. But the questions remain: how do people exist one moment and not exist another moment? What does that say about existence? About people? About me?

I read a book not too long ago by Thich Nhat Hanh called No Death, No Fear. He talks at one point about drinking tea, and how after drinking tea we don't look to the tea leaves for the tea — the essence of the tea has been absorbed by the water, which was subsequently absorbed by us. In the same way, the essence of our loved one is no longer in their body but has been diffused into the world, and a large part of their essence has been diffused into us. So does that mean that the essence of Deb is in me? Is this what widows and widowers talk about when they say that they can feel their Dearly Departed as a part of them?

Too many questions for one night ;-)