Pomegranate

Christina Rasmussen, Second Firsts: Live, Laugh, and Love Again, Hay House, 2013

 

When someone we love dies, we need to sit with our sorrow for a time and grieve. We need to mourn and cry and pound on the walls. We need to acknowledge our emotions and the fears that show up—of our own death, of life changing, of being alone. Grief is overwhelming. The impact of the death sends an electrical surge through our body, and our brain’s main circuit breaker trips before our entire wiring gets fried, but we end up numb and in shock.

 

We find ourselves in a place of darkness, feeling vulnerable and broken. For a time, we will live here, in the space between the world we knew and loved and the unknown world that is coming. 

 

There comes a time when we have exhausted our grief, when we’re tired of wandering around the emptiness of our home and the loneliness of our heart, and we turn toward the possibility of a new life. How we make the transition is not obvious. Christina Rasmussen calls this the Waiting Room. Part of us doesn’t want to make any change because we don’t want to lose touch with the person we loved.

 

As a coach and crisis-intervention specialist, Christina works with people who feel stuck in trauma. Her Life Reentry Program encourages people to face their grief and, when they are ready, helps them emerge from the safety of their cocoons.

 

If you lose your spouse when you’re in your 30s, as Christina did, or in your 40s, as I did, you realize that you probably have decades of life left, and you have to decide if you’re going live all those years wrapped up in a blanket of grief or find out what life still has to offer. If I had been older, I might have given up on living in the city and moved to a cabin in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. There I would live simply, read all the books I never get around to reading, and watch the animals and birds go about their daily lives.

                                 

The words in Christina’s book are encouraging and supportive. It feels like she is sitting with us over coffee, making observations and asking questions that open doors in our perceptions that we didn’t realize were there. She shares her own experiences struggling with grief, and uses stories of her clients to illustrate the steps for creating a new life. We feel her compassion and warmth.

 

I’m going to share some of her insights. I won’t mention them all because she has so many.

 

- Be honest about your grief and emotions. Acknowledge the devastation and where you feel broken. Look at your situation objectively, without judging, as you assess where you are. Be kind to yourself because there are no shoulds or oughts in grief.

 

– Grief is so encompassing that it becomes your identity for a time. Yet the life force within you will start rumbling and remind you there is still life that you want to explore. Entertain new possibilities. Reclaim what brought you joy in the past. Imagine.

 

– Shift your focus from surviving grief to possibilities for the future. Set aside your fears and take small steps in different directions to see how you feel about each of one. As you look outside your grief, you will feel sparks of excitement and hope. And as you let other people in, compassion and love will begin replacing your sorrow and despair, and your new life will unfold.

 

– You have grown because of grief and learned more about your strengths, your need for others, and what you want out of life. Brainstorm about what you would really like to do, if you could do anything you wanted. List the steps necessary to make it happen. 

 

– Take the leap. Christina says she was in her Waiting Room for three years before she took the risk and started her new life.

 

I love the gentleness and understanding of Christina. She doesn’t say that you should begin taking steps to get out of grief after the first week. She doesn’t say it’s time after the first month. She knows that only the griever can decide when the time is right. But she wants you to know from the beginning of grief that there is hope and a new future, and when you are ready, her book will be waiting to guide you.

 

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The Pomegranate is a fitting image for grief, especially during the dark winter months in the northern hemisphere when plants and crops die before they are reborn in spring. Pomegranates are connected to the Greek myth of Persephone who was taken against her will into the darkness underground for a time, before she returned to the world of light and warmth. 

 

The pomegranate also speaks of solitude. Because of our experiences with grief, Christina and I discovered that there are times when we like being by ourselves. Solitude helps us clarify what we are feeling and thinking, and roots us in what is real. Every year Persephone returns to a place of darkness and solitude to rekindle her vision and bring hope back to the world of the living.

 

Last month, Christina interviewed me for her Dear Life Podcast. We shared a delightful hour together talking about grief, of finding refuge in nature, and when we knew we wanted to take the risk of loving someone new. You can listen to our discussion using this link: http://www.dearlifepodcast.com/episodes/ep78