Surrender

Although I am aware of the 5 stages of grief in the Kübler-Ross model, I am only ever able to summon a list of 4: denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance. Depression it seems, is the one I keep forgetting, and the one I am now hurtling towards.  As the intensity of shock passes, and my brain begins to comprehend this new reality, deep sorrow turns to melancholy and the lessons begin to settle. Melancholy is almost harder than the fierceness of grief. It is flatline. 

But anyway, I don't believe in those five neat boxes. What of guilt, or sorrow. What of love? What of the complex emotions borne of traumatic chemical imbalance? This sudden dearth of oxytocin? Of up-regulated stress hormones? The 'helpless-hopeless' sensation as a result of depleted dopamine? I am in cold turkey from the withdrawal of this once unrelenting mutual love. I am feeling the loss. My body hurts, my cells ache for their medicine. 

We are amazing, complex creatures. How do these feelings serve us? Where are the lessons in such pain? I am starting to sense that I have an opportunity to heal from all of my past hurts, to uncover the dark treasures I have embedded deeply in my tissues. I am cracked wide open, the wounds are once again fresh. What fortune! Now is time to heal from the shock of an assault, of difficulty to conceive, of a cancer diagnosis, of the anguish of a son on life support, of losses and deaths previously emotionally buried.

But oh how it stings. It burns. It crushes. 

I am being asked to question my beliefs. About myself. About life. About death, and beyond. I am being asked to treat myself with more love and compassion than I have ever shown myself. To shed my old friend Not Good Enough who is once again my companion. To see if I am able to be authentic and raw, to ask for help, to understand my love language. Am I able to be strong, and vulnerable? Am I able to feel without labelling my emotions and putting them into those convenient boxes?

I turn once again to plants for solace. White chestnut to help with the merry-go-round of unhelpful, repetitive thoughts. Lavender to naturally calm the nervous system. Lemon balm to ease anxiety. Magnesium, and ashwaghanda. Aconite for shock, ignatia for grief. We have oxytocin homeopathy. I am planning a family ritual around taking this love hormone, when the time is right. These things all help incrementally, quietly, supporting us back to a new wholeness. We recoil at our enforced shearing, but we are starting to grow back new coats, with a deeper understanding of what it means to be here now, to love, to lose. 

I dream and recalibrate. I moan and shake and sob.

Meditation is my friend. Nature is my ally. Mother Earth is ready and able to hold me and take my pain. She is grounding. She pushes up. Her tides give me hope and put me back together. The rhythm of the South Downs rocks me gently, unrelenting, unwilling to stop for grief. Cycles of life are easy to recognise in the wild abundance of nature, in the black gold. There is life and death in blades of grass, in ears of wheat hanging heavy, ready for harvest, in the hawthorn berries, almost ripe, astonishingly early. In giant hogweed and in poppy seedheads. In flowering mugwort and nettle seeds. On our brave new walks fresh beauty is revealing itself in versions of animal that were once obscured by thundering lurcher paws. I understand these delights now visible; rabbits, birds, sheep. I am grateful for them. I am excited to retain my newly recognised animal identity. The need to move and explore and be curious. The desire to be fully present and in my body. 

If life is a series of losses, great and small, ever increasing, how do we embrace the gifts of such loss? I am willing to open and explore them, and to observe these new feelings with curiosity. The pain of birth, of re-birth, the unexpected beauty on the other side of discomfort that we could not possibly previously have conceived of. The technicolour. The collective love holding us gently as we sway, grounded in our consciousness, antennae to the wind, faces to the sun. Surely we must include grace, trust and surrender in any model of grief? And those other emotions which are too grand and too complex to name?