Good Grief

What do you do with grief?

In August I lost someone I cared about deeply. My friend, client, mentor, and teacher. She was a magnetic and magnificent woman, and a huge expander in my life. She looked at me and saw only my potential. It is hard to imagine losing her. I still get pains of utter denial. “How did we lose her?” a friend exclaimed furiously after her death. How did we lose her indeed?

I had never lost someone I felt that close to before. Conceptually, I know death is a part of life, that this won’t be the last time I experience the pain of loss, and that one day I too will die. That this time is fleeting, and we need to grab every precious moment and recognize it for what it is. But knowing something conceptually and experiencing it are two very different things.

The death of a loved one brings the experience of the fleeting nature of human life into focus. For me, I felt a sense of duty to her memory to honor myself, and ask for more from my life. It was like her death gave me the permission I needed to stop hiding my gifts. Each time I feel a wave of grief, I allow myself to feel it and then ask myself what I can do to honor her belief in me. Sometimes the answer is “have a good cry”. But most often the answer is “move”.

I move my body, I move my perspective, I move to a different location, I move into a creative activity, I move my tongue and speak the truth, I move consciously in the direction of my highest good. I feel like she left something here with me, some of her confidence, some of her vision, some of her light, and I get to be a steward of it. It is that sense of responsibility that moves my perspective of death to a place where I can recognize it as more than just an inevitable and unavoidable part of life.

Death is a movement.