Place Without Boundaries

 The death of someone close pulls us out of our normal life and throws us into a place that exists between the world of the living and the world of the dead. We feel alone and isolated by the trauma. People don’t understand the importance of the words we haltingly speak. We feel detached from everything we have known and trusted, and abandoned in a place without any familiar landmarks. We feel hollowed out, like the Clothespin giant sequoia in Yosemite whose center was burned out by a fire, yet continued to live. 

Grief is not limited to the death of someone we love. We also grieve over the loss of a job we loved, the death of a long-term relationship, and having to move from a home we had spent decades modifying for our lifestyle.

 

If you have never lost anyone close, you may wonder what grief feels like. Some people describe grief as being a dark night of the soul that lasts for weeks, months, or longer. Others speak of grief as being an ocean whose current pushes and pulls us around. There are other images that fit, of course, and you have your own. I think of grief as a wilderness that has no trails for us to follow and we have to find our own way through.

 

            Death is not just where something ends, it’s also a threshold where something new begins.

 

The Celtic festival of Samhain, observed at the time of Halloween, believes that on that evening the boundary between the living and the dead thins to a gossamer veil and people in each realm can dimly see and talk with each other. It’s a place that transcends time and physical realities. A place of spirit. Various cultures believe that this connection is possible throughout the year, and you may have experienced this if you felt your loved one’s presence or heard them talking to you from the shadows in the night.

 

When two grieving people share together, they speak from their experiences of the thin place.

 

If you are religious, you already believe in what cannot be seen. If you love to be in nature because you feel the presence of something greater, then you also know this to be true, like when you are sitting in a grove of birch trees and listening to birds sing of ethereal places, or standing on the top of a mountain looking over the land and being snockered by awe.

 

The line between despair and hope is made of sand. Sometimes recovery is a matter of turning and taking a step in a different direction.

 

In this place that is not a place, we sense that grief can teach us something important about how life and death work together. Death clarifies what is important in life. We can also take this time of being set apart to look at our life and see if we are doing what we want to do with it. If the future you envisioned and worked for has been taken away, you now have the opportunity for a course correction. Be bold as you take risks and cross a new threshold. (Be bold anyway because life is always shorter than we want.) 

 

If we let grief guide us, we learn how to dance in the space between what has been and what will be, between what we know and what we allow ourselves to dream, between apathy and belief, between feeling defeated and believing in ourselves. We each have strengths and compassion that the world needs us to share, and by taking the risk of loving others, we learn how to dance with life and death by holding one in each hand. 

 

There is only this dance, and it has been going on for a long time.

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(Next time, a look at Suzanne Roberts' new book Animal Bodies.)