Tag Archives: mourning

birthday.

In the middle of my 37th birthday, after my windshield hits a bird in flight as I drive several miles to the deserted national park beach, I walk alone down the simple boardwalk toward the sea, while the car containing everything I planned to bring with me except for my towel, the sunscreen, and my sunglasses pulls away and drives off into the unknown. As I walk the planks, I realize one thing after another: I don’t have my water bottle. I don’t have my phone. I don’t have my wallet. I don’t have my lip balm. With each realization the sun seems brighter and harsher.

Panic begins to rise. I see myself desiccated with bleeding lips and blistered feet staggering back to the village. Other scenarios begin to swirl before I take a series of deep breaths, shed my cover-up garments and sunglasses, and march into the waves. I push myself to go farther and deeper into the waves than feels comfortable.

A perverse impulse arises to keep going. To abandon the site of perceived abandonment, as well as every other wearying and disappointing thing in life. To trust that some powerful current and my weak swimming skills will ensure a relatively swift demise.

And yet, simultaneously, I watch worry arise about being bitten by a shark. I would bleed to death on the beach alone even if I were able to wrest myself from the jaws and struggle to shore. And, even as I fantasize about being swept away by the waves, I am paranoid of every perceived strongly sucking current.

I will myself not to lick my lips. Not to swallow any sea water. Not to turn around and scan the beach for the return of my companion who drove away.

I am determined. Determined to find some meaning and enjoyment in a ribbon of moments that will continue for an unknown duration, embroidered with anxiety, rage, and a twisted thread of suicidal ideation and nervous self-preservation.

I face the horizon. I step toward it again and again. I feel the water, warmer than the air, pummel me again and again to the sand and then gently suck me toward the depths. I repeat words to myself: “trust acceptance presence.” I watch pelicans flap and swoop. I see fish jump and splash back into waves. I notice subtle changes in the cloudless sky. As I appreciate the beauty, I am simultaneously grateful for and resentful of it—beauty and wonder always tempting me away from my fatigued and hopeless death fantasies, back to life and optimistic curiosity.

I experience the present moments as a metaphor, a symbol deeply meaningful, if hackneyed. You are tiny, truly powerless in the vast flow of the whole works, a rag doll at the mercy of the ocean. At some level, always, and especially at the end, you are totally alone.

And yet you have your choices. Brace against the waves or try to flow into them? Succumb to anger and panic? How will you respond when, if, your companion returns? The sun beats down and I receive utter clarity about my place in the scheme of things, the insanity of certain active patterns, this ridiculous situation. Happy fucking birthday. This is your gift. It’s only trite because it’s virtually impossible not to get this sort of message if you are in the ocean and paying attention.

I feel emptied. Humbled. Let go of and in the process of letting go.

I recline onto the water, relax, and begin to float. Mostly. Part of me believes that something at my core is so dense and heavy that I will always begin to sink. At some point I stand up and see my companion coming down the boardwalk. He does not join me in the water but sits on the dry sand with my shed garments. I turn back to the expansive, comforting, and dangerous embrace of the ocean for what feel like long minutes before joining him, ambivalently hoping he’ll join me first.

I thank him for returning, and we talk while I bury my goose-pimpled legs in warm sand and shiver. An ocean of words can drown you as surely as the ocean, but there are no casualties in this specific sea.

Squall turns to tranquil pool and the day proceeds.

-=-=-

For a late lunch we order food that turns out to be so spicy it is painful to eat. As I masochistically masticate, determined to buck up and not waste food, I keep overhearing a mother at a nearby table threatening to hit her small blond daughter:

“Eat, or you are going to get a spanking.”

“Sit still in your chair, or you are going to get a spanking.”

“Behave, or you are going to get a spanking.”

I note the passive construction of this threat. She does not say, “…or I am going to spank you.”

Not, “I, a full grown woman, am going to strike you, a small child.”

My appetite recedes by the second.

A friendly cat jumps into a chair at our table and curls up contentedly. My companion goes inside for something. I reach out to pet the cat and as soon as I touch its fur, I am weeping with my face flat on the table.

Animals are such easy and safe companionship. No cat has ever threatened or abandoned me. I wonder: if I had been raised by a pack of feral cats, would I have simply died, or would it now be easier for me to sustain intimate human relationships?

I feel waves. Gratitude for animals. Missing my cats at home. Rage and frustration at the tenacity and trickiness of the old, deep neural wounds of abuse and how they cause me and the ones I love to enact stupid slam dances with one another when we’d really like to flow with a sense of security and ease. Impotent despair at sitting here witnessing a child’s brain being carved in just this way.

-=-=-

Not long after my companion finds me weeping face down on our lunch table, I confess to him that I had thought about suggesting a horseback ride on the beach, but I figured it would be dull and depressing after our Costa Rica horse rides where we were allowed to gallop and jump.

A few hours after this, as we pull up to the horseback ride stand, I learn that he had previously arranged for us to ride horses on the beach for an hour at dusk on my birthday.

The guide explains that he recently stopped allowing people to gallop on the beach. Too many people lied about their equestrian experience and it was dangerous to let people unfamiliar with these horses take off on them. It could be bad for business. I understand this.

If people would just be honest about things, we’d avoid a lot of trouble. Too bad we so often don’t even know how to be honest with ourselves, and that it is frequently emotionally, if not physically, unsafe to be honest.

On the ride, we learn our guide must return home immediately after our appointment to put down a sick horse. The horse is 40 years old and our guide has known him most of that time—longer than he’s known his children.

The guide does not seem sad, but he briefly snaps at my companion, who is riding the horse that the other horses do not like.

As I watch the guide ride off with the two horses we had ridden on leads behind him, I nearly began sobbing.

-=-=-

After riding, we go on the ghost walk tour, where we hear quite a bit about the difficulty of burying the dead on a barrier island. It doesn’t take much of a surge for everything to come floating back up.

I wonder what one does with a dead horse on a barrier island.

-=-=-

I don’t sleep very well that night. Things float up—symbols and metaphors can seem singularly grave and portentous in the dark of night—and I shed a lot of tears.

The next morning, the older women staying in our bed and breakfast want to know how my birthday was.

“Good.”

I hate myself for this dishonesty but it is the proper social thing, even though I’m pretty sure it’s obvious I’m lying. But it isn’t completely false.

My birthday was life. It was difficult and painful and full of mourning. And there were also: the ocean, beauty, a cat, horses, attempts at connection that were valiant if foolhardy, clarity, and peace and semblance of meaning found within it all.

Next year, I’m considering a solitary retreat in a cave somewhere for my birthday. We’ll see.

not so serious.

I think it’s hard for us to hear the word “mourning” without conjuring up great loss, people dressed in black for a year, but it’s like this…

While I am celebrating the sense of satisfaction I got from sitting down and writing something that I’ve been incubating for almost a month now, I am also mourning the fact that I lost track of time and missed my chance to connect with my partner before it was time for him to go to sleep.

Like all the needs, mourning is always woven in and out of everyday life. The thickness of its thread varies.

some notes on mourning and related topics.

  • Mourning is a universal human need.
  • Mourning is not synonymous with pain, which is not synonymous with suffering. Pain of various types is an inescapable aspect of human existence. Our unskillful responses to pain create and increase our suffering. Mourning is a skillful response to pain—a way of being empathetic to ourselves and expanding our ability to be compassionate with ourselves and others.
  • Once I was asked, “What is mourning?” [ref]My NVC training thus far has included a practice form called Needs Meditation, in which a dyad explores what the needs mean to them. One person asks “What is [need word]?,” allowing the other to speak to this need until complete. When the speaker is complete, he then poses the same question, often with a different needs word filled in, to the original asker. This pattern continues, back and forth, until some time limit is reached.[/ref] My answer at that time, which still rings true, was something like: Mourning is when you notice some part of you crying out in pain like an inconsolable baby, and you turn toward that part of yourself with great care, pick it up, enfold it in your arms, and simply lovingly hold it, allowing it to be without asking it to change or explain itself, until there’s a break in the crying.
  • Our culture in general does not encourage or make any space for mourning.Most people I know were taught very early on to react to their own pain with other strategies including, but not limited to:
    • Numbing
    • Dissociation
    • Denial
    • Blaming
    • Lashing out
    • Distraction

    These types of strategies transmute pain into suffering, while the underlying un-mourned pain continues to cry out inconsolably even as we do our best to shut it out and muffle it.

    When one imagines the volume of the un-mourned pains of even a short lifetime crying out, our culture’s problems with addiction, consumption, violence, depression, and wanting endless external entertainment/engagement makes a lot of sense. Facing the abyss of inconsolable babies screaming out is daunting, and that is an understatement.

  • Pain is caused by a wound—physical, mental, or emotional. Most of us are better at caring for our physical wounds than other types of wounds. Mourning can be seen as a method of caring for mental and emotional wounds.

    Sometimes you have a minor cut or scrape and all you need is to wash it off, apply some antibacterial substance, and apply a bandage. Not doing this can lead to infection, scarring, and so on. Likewise, sometimes mourning can be as simple as noticing that something hurts and giving yourself just a moment to acknowledge that. Without jumping to anger about it, without pretending you are invulnerable, without immediately moving into “fix it” mode. Improving things can happen next, but put the bandage on before continuing to work. Don’t ignore the little wound or things will start to fester. This is basic first aid mourning.

    Of course there are other injuries that require serious, long-term, and/or repetitive care. I am thinking of metaphors like surgery mourning (which may itself need to be mourned) and physical therapy mourning. As some acute pains heal up and leave us with some lingering aches when the weather changes, requiring application of Tiger Balm and a little massage mourning.

    This metaphor is stretching, so I’ll let it rest, except to point out that most pains heal completely given prompt and appropriate attention. Many slowly heal and leave some trace behind. Others are chronic or progressive—they don’t go away and we can’t fix them, but we learn to care for ourselves and continue with life as best we can even as we hurt.

  • Mourning and celebration are are intertwined. They are not opposites. To mourn something involves celebrating its value and acknowledging the pain caused by its loss or lack. We do not grieve that which we have not loved.
  • It is easy to hear the overwhelming cacophonous wail of your hidden basement nursery of un-mourned pains, and imagine being sucked into a perpetual Hell of despair, darkness, and diaper-changing (and the stench of pain poop is unbearable!).

    The truth is that it can take time, and there can be a lot of despair, especially if you’re new to granting yourself space for mourning. But no baby cries forever. It either calms down surprisingly quickly in the face of attuned empathetic presence (and having whatever immediate needs are noticed be met), or it tires itself out and sleeps for a while.

    When your pains learn you will attend to them, you will notice there are fewer exceeding loud screaming fits, too.

    You are not trapped in endless mourning forever.

  • Mourning involves connecting into pain felt, which often brings up great sadness. Most people don’t want to feel sad, and so may try to avoid mourning. The paradox is that feeling the authentic sadness when it arises makes more room for spontaneous authentic joy.
  • Mourning is about listening for and attending to pain as it arises, letting the experience be, flow, and change. It is not about seeking out, holding onto, or wallowing in our pain and suffering. Just as we allow our babies to learn to self-regulate and grow up, we let our pains heal and leave us as they are able.

    I spent years not allowing myself to mourn. Now I allow myself the space for this need. In my experience, often my previous strategies for trying to understand and work through my pains led to a sense of being sucked deeper into my pain, hopelessness, coldness, and disconnection from my self and others.

    Now when I recognize myself mourning, I feel like I am being washed lovingly with warm soothing water. There is a sense of being cleaner, lighter, and more connected. There is a sweetness to it, even when it feels intensely painful. I know that I can feel my authentic sadness and still know my authentic joy. A lot of trust arises from this knowledge.

I have a lot more to say and learn on this topic, but this will do for a start.