Grief Unveiled: A Widow's Guide to Navigating Your Journey in Life After Loss
151
Grief Unveiled: A Widow's Guide to Navigating Your Journey in Life After Loss
151eBook
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Overview
Widowhood leaves you forever changed but does not have to mean forever suffering. Grief Unveiled is a love letter from a widow sister that will change what you believe is possible in life after loss. This book acts as a guide to those supporting the bereaved just as it illuminates a path for anyone traveling the road of widowhood. Based on her personal experiences in grief and those of her clients, Sarah Nannen offers a deeply intimate look at widowhood through the lens of hope and possibility while honoring the depth of grief’s pain. GriefUnveiled shows you how to stop just surviving and thrive in life after loss.
“Sarah illustrates the challenges encountered on the path through grief with such tender accessibility, offering both inspiration, empowerment, and solidarity to fellow widows.” —Christina Rasmussen, author of Where Did You Go?
“I remember not being able to hold back tears the first time I heard Sarah’s story. Partly because of what she experienced, but more so because I was overwhelmed by the amount of beauty, joy, love and vibrance surrounding her, reflected in her friends and family. With this book, her words, her story and her wisdom can help you do the same. What a gift.” —Elizabeth DiAlto, host of the Untame the Wild Soul podcast, author of Untame Yourself
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781683507512 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morgan James Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/10/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 151 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Journey Into Grief
I felt the cruel reality of widowhood slam into place when I saw the Marine Corps officers in full dress uniform standing on my porch. No. Please! Not him. Not me. This can't be real. Not this. Anything but this.
I wondered as I missed him so desperately inside every moment: Is this really all my life will ever be now — sadness, longing, and despair? Will I ever wake up feeling alive again? Will my heart ever truly sing without the accompaniment of grief's sting? Won't any ray of happiness always just be second best to this story I've lost?
We each have our own perceptions of what life after loss will look like. Within our lived stories of grief, we find the truth of our experiences to be vastly different than the way society has painted it to be. While the journey will be different for each of us, it's important to understand grief is a passage to be actively navigated. Grief is not a lifetime sentence; it's a hard road to be traveled. It's not something to suffer; it's something to move through. Without a bird's eye view of grief, it's hard to find your footing on the rocky terrain or even see the path ahead. Let's take a look at the topography of this path you never wanted to walk, yet lies before you all the same.
BECOMING THE WIDOW
One day you were living with your beloved by your side: paying bills, making plans, and loving life. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, he was yours and life was good. Like a switch on the tracks, his death violently and immediately twisted the course of your life in a direction you'd never choose. A devastating and terminal diagnosis. An instantaneous tragedy no one saw coming. All horrific. All traumatic. All too soon. All of it now part of your story. Time and function all froze when you heard them say it, nothing but the slow pulse of heartbeat and ringing in your ears. It all felt impossible. That he was dead. That you were now a widow. That you were left here to do it alone.
Almost immediately, people were asking you to show up. There were papers to sign. There were decisions to be made. There were bills to be paid. People needed to hug you. People needed you to hug them. But mostly, people needed you to somehow be OK. You didn't want this. You don't want any of this. You want the life you were living before he was dead; the life you were living together. The fog of grief is relentless. There's a felt sense of slowly losing yourself in it. You're exhausted. You're moving between the agony of longing and absolute numbness. You feel life as you know it coming unraveled. You're just trying to make it through each day. Life is about surviving now. It all feels more like being swallowed whole by the pain than living.
YOUR STOLEN SOMEDAY
Your life was so full before he died; always on the move, always working hard. You were living for your someday. Someday there will be more time together. Someday life will be easier. Someday we'll look back and know this hard work was just the beautiful path to bring us here together. There's no someday to steer toward now, not one you'd ever want anyway. You find yourself paddling frantically away from pain whenever possible, but never sure where you're heading. The truth is, so often you simply let go and submerge into the depths of pain because he somehow feels closer at hand there. Nothing makes sense in that space, but somehow everything does too. And so, you sink roots down deep into the pain of grief where you know how to love him still.
WHEN GRIEF FEELS LIKE LOVE
The word widow feels so hopelessly small, but you cling to the comfort of that identity anyway. It feels like the one tangible piece of loving him you have left. To be his widow allows you claim to continue loving him beyond the grave. That word gives you someone to be without him by your side. Your life after loss has become dedicated to remembering your beloved and the story you shared.
There is urgency behind the remembering; proving over and over to your broken open heart that it ever really happened at all. With each tear, you whisper back to life what's been lost, if only for a moment. Your sadness feels like the only tangible expression of how much you love him and you never, ever want to lose that. You feel the enormity of this task and dedicate yourself wholly to it. Your new title is universally understood to be a lifetime's work. You've now got a job to do. You're his widow: the keeper of his memory.
HOW LONG IS FOREVER?
They tell us grief is enormous. They say it lasts forever. They tell you that's normal and that's OK. Time marches on, oblivious to the depth of grief ripping through your reality. You are asked to begin again day after day, to face this storm and stay the weary, wandering, fog-filled course toward something called living that feels so foreign right now it seems impossible to be moving toward anything at all.
Time heals all, they tell you. And so, you wait for forever to be over. You wait out your grief. But from your knees, forever does not seem long enough to heal this hurt. The suffering remains. And then one day, you find yourself graveside, wondering if any of it was ever real. You see his name etched in stone and even after all the decisions, longing, and tears, it's still surreal to see his name spelled out there with such finality. This is the moment the journey into grief becomes real and you find yourself searching for where to begin.
GRIEF: THE VILLAIN
Grief is often misunderstood as being a cruel and heartless human experience we're forced to endure. We see those in mourning as victims of tragedy instead of people living out the inevitable reality of mankind. However intense and painful the grief experience may be, what's actually happening in the meticulous, irreplaceable process of grief is a systematic rewiring of our personal reality. It's triggered by the deeply felt loss of someone that was intrinsic to our sense of Self and it hurts deeply. The ground shifts out from under you when it strikes, leaving you grasping for anything solid to hold onto.
Humanity has always tried to explain the unexplainable. Inherent to the cultural systems we've created to do just that are the stories to explain and manage our most primal and deeply felt human experiences. We're all guaranteed to experience grief at some point in life. As a result, there is a culturally rich history of stories cautioning against what becomes of us when someone we love dies. And so, we come to the modern day iteration of belief systems surrounding grief, guided by the deeply embedded, proper Puritan roots of Western culture and painted colors of Hollywood "reality".
We have created the most impossible of dichotomies in grief between what we think is expected and what we actually experience. As a result, we harshly judge our lived experience against these stories and suffer all the more deeply. Combined with the sensed judgment of the people around us trying to make sense of their experience by observing ours, we find ourselves in a personal reality that feels unsafe. I'm trying so hard to be OK, I've been told over and over by clients desperate to escape the pain. This trying activates physiological responses inherent to our survival center. Our body and our thoughts literally respond to our lived and expressed grief as a threat to our personal safety and survival. One of the most profound and truly human experiences we will encounter has been made the villain. We cast off our grief in the name of saving ourselves, only to unknowingly reject the painful path so necessary for healing.
PAIN IN THE MEMORIES
Grief's lurking shadow is always there now it seems, plunging you into pain with every step. Tears linger at the surface. Every smell, song, space, and dream contains a memory of what is no longer yours to hold. The clothes in the closet, the boxes in the hall, even the mail reminds you of who's missing. Your broken heart is bombarded by remnants of a happy life everywhere you turn. Beautiful nostalgia has become the twisting knife in a painful wound you can barely withstand. And yet, you're terrified you might one day forget it all, too, and so you cling even more tightly to the memories despite the pain.
Some days you imagine running away from the wreckage and never looking back. Sometimes you dream of being rescued by another love story you don't actually believe in or want. You ache to honor him and do right by your love story, but some days, you wish you could believe in an easier, maybe even happier someday. The guilt that comes with that yearning is as bad as the grief. You want to live again but you don't want to do it without him.
WHAT WILL BECOME OF ME?
In my new role as widow, it seemed like I had been replaced by the fatal disease of mourning that might be contagious and was certainly fragile. In my earliest dance with grief, everyone I encountered treated me with great caution. Years later, some still do. Those with the courage to come toward my pain felt they didn't know what to say to me. Often, they said nothing. Some apologized for crying beside me. No one knew how to be with me because no one knew how to save me. They thought that's what I needed them to do. They saw only my story of loss, equally fascinating and horrifying. I was now a thing to be pitied with no hope for healing.
I'm here to stand beside you inside that swirling storm others aren't sure how to weather with you. I see you. I know you don't need saving. I believe in your someday even if you aren't ready to yet. As the sun rises each day, your story of life after loss is being written. I know this road feels too much to bear. I see you there in it because I have been on my knees on that same dot on that same forsaken map. I want you to know this task before you to stay the course of living doesn't mean what you think.
I, too, once misunderstood my charge as a widow, calling on strength to power my way through with only self-preservation and determination as refuge and guide. I refused to become the stereotype, determined to do grief right. For so long, I refused to come undone, and did everything I could to avoid feeling the depth of my own pain. I, too, once turned to pushing through the pain, trying my best to go back to living. I learn that when you bypass the wild darkness of your pain, you're left with nothing but mangled remnants of Self trailing behind you. When, instead, you point yourself in the direction of moving with and through the ache of grief, you slowly find your way home to your Self and a life that feels true and whole too. This is the journey through grief.
THE NECESSITY OF GRIEF
You honor his memory not with forever longing but with intentional grief. Sadly, we rarely have a model for what that might look like. In Western cultures and perhaps more and more worldwide, we've sterilized, internalized, and privatized our grief to the point that so few of us have seen our elders or peers express deep, primal, painful emotion or the ritual of remembrance. So often, we rarely even see one another truly weep. We have no felt permission to deeply grieve nor a map to follow into the shadowland that is mourning. We simply attempt to survive it. We keep it tidy and quiet. We're called things like inspiring and strong when we do. We keep our pain a big secret locked away inside for only the most private moments of release. In doing so, we miss the deeply profound experience that is fundamental to the processing our psyche requires to initiate healing.
We've been told mourning comes at us in five stages. It paints a picture of grief that is tidy, organized, and run by a rigid structure of rules it will follow. The stories say if we can just hold on tight enough and long enough, we'll manage to survive. We literally believe we can outlast grief, waiting until it fades away. We power through. We try. And we continue to ache, our broken hearts literally rotting away inside our bellies, left unattended to in the name of being OK.
Somewhere throughout the ages, we've lost our ability to honor the necessity of mourning and its vital role in the "psychic immune system," of our humanness, as Marianne Williamson put it. I'm writing because along my journey through grief, I found another path no one told me about. This path felt safe to take but was definitely not easy. You see, there is another model of grief in the aftermath of tragic loss that facilitates deep and powerful healing. So few know about it and even fewer are talking about it. This journey through grief brings you to a place of healing that is capable of powerfully transforming who you are and the way you live. It's a path I've walked and one I know others have found their way onto. It's yours to travel too, should you choose it. It's for anyone willing to lean into the journey and all they'll encounter there.
They say grief lasts forever. I say, grief leaves you forever changed but that does not have to mean forever suffering. Grief is an intense, hard-wired response of mind, body, and spirit to the death of someone we love. Its entire purpose is to facilitate healing so we may process, evolve and step into life again. When we grieve with intention instead of bracing against it or waiting it out, we allow ourselves to come fully undone and fully human. We methodically process the death and our new reality. We intentionally tend to our gaping hearts and troubled minds. Along the way, we learn to live in the present. In doing so, we come to understand how to keep the beautiful memories of what has been without the pain.
INVITING TRANSFORMATION
Grief and the death that screamed it to life are companions, yet very separate entities. His death is forever but your journey into grief is not guaranteed to swallow you whole, as the stories tell us. Artist Man Andrews said of grief, "it becomes something you can hold rather than something that overwhelms you — a part of you rather than a burden." When we get powerful enough to create space to grieve instead of pushing it away, a subtle shift takes place. Instead of protecting ourselves from grief, we curate permission to let it be. We move through this shadowland toward hope, healing and transformation. It's not a silver lining of grief; it's the whole point. Even with the heartbreak it brings to your story, grief is also draping your heavy shoulders with a cloak of transformation. You won't be able to see it for some time, perhaps, but it's there and it's happening. Everyone thinks they know exactly what life after loss looks like. I certainly thought I knew. I'm so glad I was wrong.
REFLECTION
We often believe grief has to look a certain way, especially as a widow. These beliefs can be so fixed as truth in our minds that they challenge our actual experiences. Take a moment right now to think about what you believe your widowhood means to you and even perhaps what it means about you. Consider which beliefs you've inherited from cultural stories and which are informed by your lived experiences. To understand where to begin your journey into grief, you must bring your beliefs into your full awareness. Free write what feels most true for you right now as you complete the prompts below:
• As a widow, what I feel most afraid of is ...
• As a widow, what I feel most limited by is ...
• As a widow, what I wish other people understood is ...
• As a widow, what I am most surprised by is ...
• As a widow, I am ready to ...
CHAPTER 2The Chrysalis
I wish to stop time for you to step outside the onslaught of life that swirls on all around you, oblivious to your pain. A million people need you to make ten million decisions, and a thousand more want simply to tell you they care. What I really want to offer you is a quiet and a safe space to collapse for a little while. I'd love to give you time to reflect, remember, and fold inward to feel safe in the surreal and numbing comfort of being fully engulfed by the heartbreak for a while.
I want to hand you permission to let go of the hustle and find a place where you can relax into a heap. No questions to answer. No decisions to make. Nothing you're supposed to have figured out. No task to tend to. No dinner to make. Simply space to dive under the murky waters and just be for a while, letting the river of grief and memories wash over the jagged pit of your pain. That's all we ever want on our darkest days: to be seen in an authentic way from deep within the safety of solitude and space to just be. This space to soften and come undone is where we begin our journey into grief.
THE CHRYSALIS
During my training with Martha Beck, I was blown away by her use of the life cycle of a butterfly as a metaphor for transformation resulting from struggle. The chrysalis holds space for the fragile, confusing, magic of metamorphosis within. In the chrysalis, you're neither a caterpillar nor a butterfly. Without the chrysalis, there is no becoming. The stillness is where the healing happens. Without it, you stay in the pain, stuck in the exhausting dance of outlasting your grief. It's the place you'll come back to over and over throughout the remainder of your journey through grief; the refuge you'll revisit after every summit and storm. The chrysalis is the key to finding your way through to your life after loss on the other side.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Grief Unveiled"
by .
Copyright © 2018 SARAH NANNEN.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Note From The Author,
Introduction,
Chapter One A Journey Into Grief,
Chapter Two The Chrysalis,
Chapter Three The In-Between of Grief,
Chapter Four Accessing Healing,
Chapter Five Moving Forward Isn't Letting Go,
Chapter Six Permission To Live,
Chapter Seven Mastering Your Reality,
Chapter Eight Healing Made Tangible,
Chapter Nine Body Wisdom,
Chapter Ten Reclamation,
On Grief A Manifesto,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,
Thank You,