Invite Your Sadness in For a Cup of Tea

Since sadness comes up daily for me, (not every moment but at the edges of so many moments) I’ve been sittting with her and trying to learn her ways. My bossy ego would rather that sadness gave a proper warning and come only when I am ready and prepared, when all my tasks are done and I have decided to watch a film full of loss or when I am talking with a dear friend in her own real grief. Silly as that ego wish is it’s preferrable to sobbing in a grocery store when I see a man who looks exactly like my deceased Dad from the back, unsteady gait and all… Slobbering over produce and wondering why four years after he died I still sob sometimes..

I can feel the letting go and finality of continuing to release many people and phases of my life daily and I am reflecting on how I can stay present to myself and others during very difficult times of loss and grief. Cliche warning: the only relief I have found, the path to an inefficient transformation of grief into something more lovely and textured, is to simply allow it to flow. Grief is a heavy handed story teller, she’s a stomach achingly empty and not hungry at all and she is a paradox in my daily life. Shes unwelcome and also central to who I am now. And so in my seventh decade Im trying my best to make peace with her. She’s not leaving me any time soon.

I have discovered that my sadness is not as frightening as I have believed her to be when I was a youngster of 40 or 50. She's a quiet and kind companion when I invite her in for tea. Time spent with her can open my heart and make me feel forgiving of myself and others. She reminds me that only a coward and a fool would trade grief for forgetting and even though I know the answer I ask her if its really that stark. She’s too wise to answer when I ask these things. Sometimes she pours another cup and raises an eyebrow because she knows I don’t forget, and I can’t, so here we are, grief and I.

Grief demands to have her say, she knows her power and when I will stop complaining for a minute and listen she speaks mostly of loving compassion. In the face of death (and other irreversible losses) there is no other answer. I must love myself more, I must forgive myself for all I didn't do, all that was unsaid all that will not be resolved in this lifetime. I choose to forgive others of their own chosen paths their self medication and misdirection of pain and blame, of not seeing my pain of not seeing their own.

I still do enjoy a sturdy whine about the unfairness of it all, for me and everyone else who has lost love or buried and scattered their people in this life, some dead, some insane and some just gone. Its what we all do eventually and its what we most believe we can avoid or at least that we can negotiate a fair quotient. There has to be a fair number of painful endings, an algorythim that will finally determine that I will be safe from anymore intense loss. Grief nods “no” and offers me a cookie. No one knows how much or how long they will sorrowfully live long after others. In my reasonable mind I know this is a good thing, but Im not reasonable often.

Grief really only becomes unbearable if I push her out and hold the door closed in anger. I've been there as well, staying so busy and running so fast to avoid her, holding her at bay with all forms of VERY IMPORTANT ACTIVITIES. And of course she insists on being heard and seen anyway. She’s a flash out of my exhausted eye, a scent that I know as a memory, a book with my mother’s handwriting in a margin. She seems to hunker down, extremely patient in her knowledge that she will endure and then sneaks in a window, comes uninvited into a dream. She’s also tricky in that she doesn’tb always look the same, at times she is beautiful and makes me pause in awe, and at other occasions she is bitter and jealous, making me want to toss her out immediately. Its the same ‘solution’ to let her have her say, even have a whole day to bellow and be unproductive. It all must be ok because Im not capable of more.

My grief for those I've lost is as constant as the love I feel for the living. That is an odd comfort, to know that love does not evaporate or even diminish, for me it has grown to where I can see a 360 degree view of the things I could not understand or accept in my loved ones who are dead. Their physical departure streamlined my emotions to only love and acceptance, and some regret.

I'm writing to any of you who struggle to invite your sadness in for a cup of tea. I'm here to tell you that in 6 decades of life (and more than 3 decades of working with others in a healing realm) I have learned this truth, grief only eases, (just a bit) as we allow it to be felt. She doesn't ever pass entirely and that is the way it is and maybe needs to be. How odd would it be if your thoughts of a loved one who has passed never raised sadness or made you catch your breath with the finality of their loss? What if you never felt wistful or nostalgic about their quirks and sweetness? Then they really would be gone forever.

The sadness that flows is a reminder of how dear our loved ones were and of how much we long for their physical presence. I feel waves of love within the sadness of an empty chair or in reading the last words we wrote to each other, or in seeing a long lost photo.

You are just fine and healing from all life's losses even as your eyes fill and your heart hurts. Grief never leaves but she will be gentler and compassionate with you if you let her in.

"Open to what ever you experience without fighting. Let it be present just as it is. Let go of the battle." Jack Kornfield