Epiphanies on Grief

This post was supposed to go up the morning of January 6th. 

I was working on it on the afternoon of the 5th when I read a text from my friend Justin, whom I’ve known for over 30 years. Justin started dating one of my best friends, Audrey, in high school. They started dating our sophomore year and have been a collective fixture since. 

“Audrey is dead” was all the text said. 

I read it and put down the phone, turning it over as if I could somehow erase what I’d just read. As if I could somehow erase not only the minutes since reading that one of my longest friends had died, but as if I could go further back and change the preceding 24 hours and somehow put her soul back in her body. Or change the years before that which led to her relatively early departure from this planet. 

Besides, I also had an email to write. Usually I can be flexible with timelines, but Epiphany comes on January 6. It’s kind of a one day shot. 

I tried to write. 

Nothing came. 

I’m at a point in my healing journey where I can now see my responses to stimuli much more clearly than I could in the past. I laughed at myself a bit as I moved between trying to find words for my email and picking up my phone to re-read those three words which I knew weren’t going away.

Audrey is dead. 

My friend is dead and she will not be coming back in the body she just left.

I know she will visit and will make her presence known in ways only her souls would; and, yet, loss of the body-ness of her specific form is gone, and it needs to be grieved. 

I closed my computer and decided I could get to the email in the morning. I had a noon lunch meeting that offered a hard deadline. “Great,” I thought, “I always work best with the pressure of a deadline.”

Only then, as I opened my computer to write the next morning, there were still no words. I cut and pasted some stuff about Epiphany from other notes I’d written, about how it’s both a celebration of the Magi’s arrival after the birth of Jesus and, in the Eastern Church, a celebration of the baptism of Jesus and the start of his ministry. But, no words came. 

This is a thing I’ve had happen over the last few years. I’ll try to do something I’ve always done, often done under pressure or expectation, only to find I cannot do it. It’s like I literally cannot move from the space of urgency that used to fuel my days. 

I sent Charles a few texts hinting at my feeling of overwhelm and the necessity of meeting the deadline. 

Charles: “You should take time to rest. Honor your body and y’all’s friendship”

Me: “We can’t afford that lol” I somewhat sarcastically replied.

Charles: “I think you should take 45 minutes today and go sit in the sauna.”

I resisted until it became clear that I wasn’t going to get anywhere with the email until I came back into my body. 

I made an appointment at a local Sauna and sat in the heat for 45 minutes. I let my breath soften. I thought about Audrey, and the joys and many tragedies of her life, and the gift of knowing her.

I let myself sit in the grief of losing her. 

Sitting in the heat of the sauna, it dawned on me. . .

Epiphany: part of healing involves making more room for grief, and grief cannot be rushed. 

Over the last few years as I’ve been focused on my healing journey, my relationship with time has been one of the biggest adjustments I’ve had to make. I realize how often a sense of urgency served as my motivator in the past: a nagging I couldn’t quite identify always keeping me go go going. I spent so much time trying to get to the next thing or replaying past things that I never sat with the one thing I could truly experience: the present moment. 

Grief has a way of drawing us into the present moment unlike anything else. Grief can be messy and raw, hitting a live wire within ourselves that demands our attention. However painful it may be, grief has a way of releasing energy that needs to be cleared. 

Grief is a way of remembering and honoring the love that connects us with the things we have lost. In our willingness to grieve, we are releasing the energy that binds us to the material and trusting it to the eternal. We are letting that relationship take on a new form as we honor the death of the old.

Every significant period of grief I have moved through has changed me; I always emerge as a fuller version of who I came here to be. Grief requires unabashed honesty and a willingness to look foolish for the sake of love transformed. My father died in 2011, and I’ve often said my relationship with him got so much easier without the weight of human existence. I know not only that he is with me, but that he loves and unconditionally supports me in ways he was not able to do from this side of the grave.

Another epiphany: the Epiphany we celebrate on January 6th didn’t happen on one specific day.

The day itself means different things even within the Christian tradition. It’s not about one specific day, but about what Jesus showed us in and through his life that we can access in our lives. 

Jesus did not take on flesh and come into this world so that I would freak out about a deadline. Jesus took on flesh so that I would know the kind of abundance we embody when we are fully present to all that is - including but certainly not limited to my own grief. 

As I write this, I have yet to experience the well of tears still waiting to spring from my eyes. I am still sitting with a layer of denial  which I know will be washed away by sobbing.

I don’t want Audrey to be dead and I’m ok holding onto this feeling for a bit longer.

I know this denial will yield, and the tears will come.

The invitation for me is to slow down enough to let the grief wash over me, to remain present with whatever emerges and to honor that as the love that will always connect me with those who’ve passed on. 

Another epiphany: God is present in our grief in a wholly unique way. 

Grief is a necessary part of healing. It is no surprise that we have so little room for grief in today’s society. You cannot think your way through grief; it has to be embodied.  Embodiment is a threat to systems that thrive when you are always looking outside yourself for the answer.
So much of our dis-ease in today’s world is because we’ve been taught to look for our reason and motivation for being outside of ourselves. Most of us are taught a false version of history to keep us in a state of anxiety about the future, without much time or attention given to the present that is the only true reality. 

God is All that Is. When we allow ourselves the experience of grief, we allow more of All that Is. When we invite God into the mess, we find that God is already here; has been here, and has indeed been here all along. When we bear witness to one another’s grief, we both offer and receive a sacred gift.

I’ve had so many conversations with people who’ve lost loved ones recently. I’ve heard the sentiment echoed more than once that it feels like people are dying at a more rapid pace than usual. I don’t actually know about death rates, but I do know we are collectively sitting on centuries of unprocessed grief. The lies and half-truths we’ve told ourselves for centuries are catching up to us. You can see it coming out sideways in the ways people treat one another, in the way we treat ourselves. 

Our capacity to be present with grief is directly connected to our capacity for joy. We need spaces to express our grief so we can open ourselves to the new possibilities being born in and through us. As we as a society claim space for grief, we will see how much time and energy we’ve spent avoiding being present to what is; and, in that process, we will find room for transformation.