What is “Natural Grieving”?
A New Way to Find Sanity in Life in the 21st century
Throughout my private practice in homeopathic medicine with a specialty in mental/emotional problems for over twenty years, I listened to many patients who were struggling with grief. In classical homeopathy, a form of medicine practiced in Europe since the 1700’s that has its roots in Ancient India, there are numerous natural medicines for complicated grief, depression, shock, anger, and other overextended stages of grief. This is not to say that grief is a “diagnosis” — grief certainly is a natural, normal and universally-experienced response to final loss.
Yet, there is also the grief that becomes complicated, snowballs over time, and causes one to get deeply mired in a feeling that can’t be moved through. People can spend decades, even a whole lifetime, mired in grief-induced depression, anger or deep mourning. What I have come to see is that the emotions of grief are like torches that are carried along the journey — ancient neurological messengers of a call to feel and adapt to life’s losses. These torches are only meant to shed light on the truth of our love and loss, not to carry them for too long — whatever that amount of time is for the individual. The eternal message is that grief is the flip-side of love. It is the truth of who we are in a life that reveals both birth and death. We are born into a life that will eventually culminate in death, with many little deaths along the way. This is all very normal and natural. But not being able to return to one’s life, however transformed, is not natural.
The problem develops when we hold on to the torch of an emotion too tightly. We get burned, even devastated. The torch of anger, for example, scorches our whole being, and our experience becomes overwhelmed with a feeling that stays on so long that we have forgotten even that it was related to an original loss. After my dad died of a gunshot wound in the morgue parking lot I became deeply angry, but never even realized that the anger was a grief reaction, or that the 10 years I was caught in anger was even related to grieving his death. If I had known about the grief process, about suicide loss, and gotten the support I needed, I probably would not have been carrying the torch of anger for so many years.
I also saw that those who were able to move through their grief in their own time did so through empathetic family and friends or through supportive grief counseling. Clearly, the grief process is not meant to be done alone, and those who move easily through the process learn certain life skills such as identifying what emotion you are feeling, where that emotion fits into the whole grief process, and an understanding that there is a beginning and completion of the process. Ultimately, grief will lead you to a greater understanding of death, which usually follows a complete emotional catharsis with someone who can walk in your shoes, with you, who knows empathetically what you have been through — only because they have been through it too.
Dr Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Stephen Levine and others popularized the grief process related specifically to terminal illness, and many writers have discovered unique aspects of grief specific to suicide loss, trauma, sudden accidents, loss of a child or baby, loss of a parent, and so on. What I noticed in my own personal process of grief of my mother (long-term dementia) and my father (suicide loss) is that I wanted more than just to move through stages of Shock-Denial-Anger-Bereavement-Acceptance, a seeming infinity for the rest of my life.
I also wanted to find Understanding, Hope, Empathy and perhaps, even Joy again. I found empathic understanding from my grief counselor, but mainly through deep sharing in a mentoring group of 10 women led by Dr. Barry and Joyce Vissell at The Shared Heart Foundation. We all moved through parts of our griefs together, and this got me thinking about how co-mentoring each other’s grief was natural and very empowering for each of us. I also publicly shared my shame around feeling different and isolated as a child growing up in a culture that shames those who die from suicide and their family survivors. Shame is a very prevalent emotion in suicide loss. I then spoke at a conference with the AFSP, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and became deeply aware of how suppressed grief, such as with suicide loss, can take on an identity of its own.
This form of grief snowballs the more it gets suppressed, especially from cultural and religious shaming of the act of suicide (“He committed suicide” as if he committed a “crime.”). I also created a personal grief timeline and found that I had experienced a major or minor grief or loss every 3 years of my life to date since the age of four, beginning with my parent’s divorce in 1965, a time when divorce was rare and even shamed. With 50 years of suppressed and complicated grief it was time for me to get some skills and move through along my journey.
When a culture such as ours does not support time for grieving, meaningful rituals, and life skills around death and grief, we become disconnected from our own nature. We become disconnected from the life cycles of birth, death and regeneration seen throughout the natural world every day. We no longer see the natural beauty in death, grief, and loss. John Muir, the grandfather of the environmental movement, wrote in 1875 nearly 145 years ago:
“The common purity of Nature is something wonderful –how she does so vast a number of different things cleanly without waste or dirt. I have often wondered by what means bears, wild sheep, and other large animals were so hidden at death as seldom to be visible? One may walk these woods from year to year without even snuffing a single tainted smell. Pollution, defilement, squalor are words that would never have been created had man lived conformably to Nature. Birds, insects, bears die as cleanly and are disposed of beautifully. The woods are full of dead and dying trees, yet needed for their beauty to complete the beauty of the living… How beautiful is all death…The earth has no sorrow that the earth cannot heal…There need be no lasting sorrow for the death of any of Nature’s creations, because for every death there is always born a corresponding life.” (from journal entries, 1872–1875)
Natural Grief is a process that is indigenous and traditional to all cultures in history. Indeed, history tells us that ancient religions sprang up as a balm for the shock of death and grief. These universal impulses were fully integrated into the culture and provided a safe and public circle in which to wail, cry, scream, and find emotional and spiritual support throughout. Even in cultures where the belief system is to detach from grief and not disturb the spirit of the deceased in the Other World (as in Tibetan Buddhism for example), there is still a period of time when the family is supported through their grief. A variety of signs are seen in many cultures that wear a color, ribbon, clothing, or other public display indicating the person is in mourning. This was the black mourning costume in Victorian America, or wearing white in the traditional Chinese culture, or wearing a rainbow colored arm fabric in modern Philippines.
With the modern individualization of people there are so many different beliefs and unique expressions around grieving and death. There is a freedom to choose one’s beliefs but also an embarrassed isolation that makes it difficult to share one’s grief. The hospice movement has helped but is limited with a few counseling sessions, and often the depth of one’s religious or spiritual capacity remains untapped. Over 150 years, the industrialization of the funeral business has taken the dead off of our hands, but we have also lost the connection to natural death, to the safety of a home vigil or public sharing in which to express our inner life with family, friends, and even the spirit of our lost one. Grief has become unnatural, complicated and often shamed in our 21st century American culture.
A new model for natural grief lies in reclaiming our newly deceased, keeping them at home for a celebration of life, or in the one or three day vigils still practiced in Europe and especially Ireland. Judaism and Islam have their one day laying out of the body, and rituals for public mourning. A century ago, the philosopher Rudolf Steiner lectured and wrote extensively about his perceptions of death, grief, and how important it is for us to stay connected with our loved ones. He developed specific ways of laying out the body in a three-day vigil, grieving with family in the privacy of a home environment, and celebrating the spirit of the dead. His small book The Dead are With Us speaks volumes. Another book, Staying Connected, is a series of writings on how we can find understanding and healing with those on the other side, and is still deeply meaningful after a century. Journaling of letters to our loved ones, reading them poetry, sending them healing intentions or prayers, are all ways we can stay in touch. The veil separating us from the other side is a very thin veil, accessible to all regardless of religion or belief or path in life.
It is the sub-molecular particles of “Awareness” or “Consciousness” that remain eternal and pass through numerous levels of spiritual development, according to physicists and many philosophical and spiritual paths from East to West. One could even say that this lifetime is actually an act of preparation for the greatest inner work to be done after death. If our inner work in this life is to learn to love and find empathy, Steiner said, the afterlife is an entire process in which we have the opportunity to fully “walk in the shoes” of those with whom we shared close connections in this Life. If death actually is a “final stage of growth” in which we birth ourselves, then what greater healing lies ahead for this next stage of the journey?
Whatever we believe, to know that love and empathy lie ahead on the journey is a beautiful thought. How we process our grief, naturally or unnaturally, is the healing that lies awaits us in moving through our loss and back to a life, transformed.
