Dr. Mary Lamb Shelden

Losing love is like a window in your heart.
Everybody sees you’re blown apart,
Everybody feels the wind blow.
~Paul Simon, “Graceland”

I lost my father to lung cancer when I was in my mid-twenties, when my daughter was just three years old. It had been a rough go – just under a year between diagnosis and death, in my memory, and by the end, the great man who had towered over our family was half his former size. I spent the years following Dad’s death fairly fixated on my own mortality and demise, and I developed a couple of chronic conditions that fed this fixation. I was worried all the time about whether I might have this or that terrible disease, and I learned I wasn’t alone in this. The internet was a relatively new phenomenon then, but what it offered almost immediately was food for worry, and a community of worriers. I had plenty of conversation partners – people in the prime of life attending to all the little aches and pains, anxious that it might be cancer, trying to ensure that, if it was, they would catch it early. I went to see many doctors, who generally could not even help me address my symptoms, let alone their root causes. Finally, after roughly six years mired in this obsession, a new idea occurred to me: the more fearful question for me was not so much, what if I died, as it was, what if I lived? What if I pulled through? What might be asked of me then? And really, what was I here to do?

Up to that moment I had admittedly been angry with my father, for reasons I thought myriad and complex. I was mad at the breadwinner complex that kept him so many hours away from our family. I was mad that he hadn’t stood up to my mother more in her moments of fury. Even as I fumed, I could see that I what I was really mad at him for was dying. I would have made it about the cigarettes, had I had the option, except that for much of this period, I was still myself smoking. Indeed, I may have ultimately given up smoking, the better to be mad at him for it. Then, as I let go of this numbing habit, I found my anger easing, and my grief and love for him welling up in its place. I began again to recall the early mornings of my childhood, when I would awaken and come downstairs, and see him through the banister rails, in the living room – in lotus, or mountain, or child, or sirsasana, and I would tiptoe past him to the kitchen and get out the milk and cereal for us, for our quiet breakfast to come. This vision of him is as clear to me today as it was 47 years ago, and I cannot now recall it without a wash of pain that fills my eyes. The hurt is simply attendant to my love for him; I cannot retrieve one without the other.

Grief hurts, to be sure. There is a reason they call it heartbreak; to grieve is to be broken open. But grief has important work to do, and it is best if we understand that as we stand here, open to all the universe, it is then that we may best be filled. “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding,” says Gibran. It hurts – but like death itself, the pain of grief is not unceasing. It changes. It eases. It passes. If we can bear simply to be with it, in it, we will learn almost immediately that it ebbs and flows. But if we are attentive, we can give the pain of grief permission to go, knowing that, like the tide, it will be back, knowing that we will not get it all done at once, or maybe ever, at least until the moment of our own passing. Grief hurts, but it also teaches. It teaches us what matters, what to hold fast to, where we have erred and what are the consequences of error. It teaches us what we are capable of bearing, and why it matters that we bear it. And at its best, it teaches us that those around us have also known grief and can help us to bear it.

Here’s the thing: love entails loss. When we love truly, we don’t merely risk loss – we guarantee it. Loss is an inevitable part of love, in just the way that death is an inevitable part of life. We are mortal. If we love, we will suffer. It can be hard to remember, here in the thick of it, that grief is just part of the rent we pay for being human. That, indeed, if the rent is high, we are among the lucky.

© February 22, 2018