A Joyous Perspective on Grief: Don't let it darken your memories

It's Friday, and time for another Friday Night Thought Tale Hour with the Hendersons. We are 99.999% sure it will be the very last Thought Tale Hour we will have here at the Enchanted Clover Leaf Cottage. Next week, we should be in our new home, starting a new set of memories. While preparing for this transition last weekend, I had an intense conversation last weekend with a woman who was in the throes of grief. A recent loss of both parents still enveloped her with sorrow. And now, as she faced the requirement of giving up her childhood home where she had said goodbye to both as they took their last breaths, she was being hit by that blast of intensity that only grief can give. Certainly, I understood. I sat listening just having a conversation with my husband about letting go of some items that really should not be moved with us. But leaving them behind felt like leaving behind a piece of my dear son who we lost nearly 11 years ago. So I thought I would share tonight how I have been able to find a way to travel through the passages of grief and begin to see them as only a part, not the definition of my life. 

“We shake with joy, we shake with grief.  What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.” 

~Mary Oliver

Grief is such an urgent and forceful energy. It’s immediate and demanding when it arrives. In fact, it is so powerful a human emotion that some cultures have rituals around grief that enable them to confront and express it, and the storm within our bodies and minds that it stirs up. I’ve learned that there is a way of relating to our experience that opens us to the totality of it, that is, we learn to embrace it all, the joy and the heartache. But some experiences are harder to be with.

It’s difficult to be with physical or emotional pain, and we often retreat to the mind in search of distractions. We grasp onto a memory or an item that we see as a part of that person lost. But when we are able to entirely be with our experience, something that feels like transformation happens.

The truth is, grief is the word that we use to describe the indescribable, visceral heartbreak we feel in the face of loss. 

The pain of that loss is so big that it demands expression. But we don’t have to make it a permanent fixture in our lives. It does not have to darken every memory or every new experience either. Grieving is a passage that must be traveled thoroughly. It is the most difficult of all transitions to letting go of the sorrow that envelops us. But it should not become a perpetual rest stop.

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” 

~C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

The statement in Lewis’ quote is a rhetorical invitation to consider what it might be like if we were to embrace it all: the pain, the sadness, the love, the joy, the grief. All of it. Without the

evaluation of our experience, without our thoughts adding layers of guilt, shame, or embarrassment when the urge arises to express it. Despite the feelings that tell us that to be strong means to not break down. Regardless of the fear of what might happen if we do.

The truth is that a powerful emotion, when embraced, is the stuff of transformation.

And yet there’s really nothing magical about it. The thing is, our body is actually calmed by the expression of grief if we allow it. And the calm metamorphosis that follows is like a return to the flow of life and has the quality of magic, but it is also a real physiological phenomenon.

Some people turn grief away at the door, while others invite it in to make itself at home in our lives. Our ability to work with grief entirely means to simultaneously meet the powerful force of grief when it arrives, and let it move through us, unimpeded by the thoughts that would turn it into a story about our sadness. 

Free to be released into the light of our memories. 

As I talked to my friend, I could relate at how even months later, grief still comes to the door now and again seeking expression. It follows an image, or accompanies a song, surrounds an item. I now choose to meet it with full acknowledgment and allow it what it needs. And once it has passed through me, it's no longer blocking the doorway. I can see out to where joy is still standing. Literally and figurately. I have allowed myself to think it through.

“Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.”

~C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

So tonight, Chris and I will be thinking about passages and new ones ahead of us in our lives. As we enter into them, we will still take with us the essence of grief that touches us both as we sort through items and memories. I am making a cocktail called, “Sweet Memories,” as we choose to cast warmth upon our transition, and find new ways to bring along the parts of us who make us who we are. Cheers.

Sweet Memories Cocktail ***


2 oz Midori® melon liqueur
2 oz vanilla vodka
1 oz pineapple liqueur
1-2 cup ice
orange slices

Blend ingredients until smooth, garnish with orange slices.

***Always drink responsibly.