Words to Ponder Over: We're Dying All The Time

Not so much a "Words of Comfort" post, as much as a "Words to Ponder Over/Think About".  I was listening to Brian D. Smith's podcast Grief 2 Growth, while he was interviewing Clare Goldsberry.  Clare is the author of the book "The Illusion of Life and Death: Mind, Consciousness, and Eternal Being", and is a student of Buddhism.  At one point in the interview, she talks about the impermanence of all things, a theme I personally have been hearing more about lately:

"So we don’t really like the unknown, and we don’t like change. And I think one of the things about the Buddhist tradition....It’s a philosophy of change, and how to adapt to change, because everything will always change. And whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, even our bodies are constantly changing. Day by day,  our cells die....we experience little mini deaths every day as our cells die. We get....new hair, we get new skin, we get new fingernails, things are always changing. We’re just not that aware of it. And I think this lack of awareness, about change and about impermanence really keeps us from looking at at death and what it is, and how we can have a good death and what it means. People think death is the end."

You can hear and/or read the whole interview here.

Brian's interview with Clare reminds me of an old science article I read years ago about how the human body replaces its cells every 7 years.  Actually, according to livescience.com, the truth is more complicated than that -- skin cells and cells in our digestive tract replace themselves in a matter of months, while certain cells in our brain are with us from birth until death.  But it does raise a fascinating perspective -- that, for the most part, the earthly bodies we inhabit now are not really the same earthly bodies we inhabited 10 years ago!  As Clare points out, everything in our world is in a constant state of flux, a constant state of change, and that leaving our physical earthly bodies behind at the time of "death"  is really about us going through another change as we go onto something new.

Videos That Have Helped: TED talk with Nora McInerny

Nora McInerny is no stranger when it comes to dealing with grief.  Over the space of 3 months in 2014, she lost both her husband and father to cancer and had a miscarriage with her second child.  Since that time, Nora has re-married, authored several books, including "The Hot Young Widows Club" and "Bad Vibes Only".  She also is the host of the podcast "Terrible, Thanks for Asking".  

Nora has the rare gift of handling grief with equal parts grace, wisdom, and humor.  In 2019 she gave a TED talk: "We Don't 'Move On' From Grief.  We Move Forward With It":

 

Nora's talk has been one of the most insightful videos on grief I have seen to date.  Some of my favorite quotes:  "Everyone you love has a 100 percent chance of dying."  "I'm just trying to do what I can to make more people comfortable with the uncomfortable, and grief is so uncomfortable."  "We don't look at the people around us experiencing life's joys and wonders and tell them to 'move on', do we?"  Again, I say: watch the whole thing from start to finish.  I think that Nora really understands some of the emotions we go through when we grieve.

Articles Worth Reading: Grief and the Orthodox Church

I recently stumbled upon an article from the St. Paul Orthodox Church in Frehold, New Jersey, USA.  Lots of good advice here about how those professing the Christian faith can handle their grief.  The author(s) point out that getting through grief takes work, that different people don't grieve the same way, and that Christians oftentimes cannot feel hope without a corresponding sense of loss -- and that's OK!  Also noteworthy is that Jesus himself could not hold back his grief in the Bible:

"For we must be reminded that Jesus is recorded as having wept on two occasions. He looked out over his beloved city, Jerusalem, and poured out tears of grief because she had denied her destiny. His grief was an expression of His love and His disappointment at the coming tragedy for the people He so loved. Jesus wept at the thought of the unrealized dreams and the unfulfilled hopes which the eventual destruction of Jerusalem would mean (Luke 19: 41 - 44).

Jesus also wept when He visited Martha and Mary after the death of Lazarus. Those who stood near Him on that day were quick to interpret His behavior, for they said, 'See how he loved him' (John 11: 35, 36)! Grief was rightly seen as an expression of love."

 

The article can be read in its entirety here.

Practices That Have Helped: Focusing on the Present

Over the last few weeks, I have heard from multiple people, in multiple places and circumstances, saying the same thing: stay focused on the present.  That can be a very difficult thing to do for those of us who are grief-stricken.  Oftentimes our minds are going in every which direction and living in the present moment can be a major challenge for us.  Our minds spend a lot of time in the past, focusing on past memories of our deceased loved ones.  We may have a strong yearning and aching in our hearts for a time in our lives that is over and will not be returning.  Our minds might then drift into the future, and then we can become anxious and overwhelmed, thinking about all the negative things that could happen to us -- we simply have no way of envisioning a positive future for ourselves.  Life might begin to feel very bleak and dire for us.

The fact is that none of us knows what the future holds.  Think about where you were 10, 20, 30 years ago.  Did you ever imagine back then that your life would be where it is today?  I sure didn't.  If anything, if there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that my predictions of how my life would look in the future have almost always been wrong.  How many of us, back in 2017, would have correctly answered the question "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"

When we really think about it, the present is all we have.  Things and events constantly crop up in our lives that we didn't foresee.  And it's not just the future that we have an incomplete picture of -- every now and then I will hear about someone from my past, many years ago, and I will learn about something that was going on in their lives during the time that I knew them that I wasn't aware of.  In that sense, we don't fully know the past either, or we're remembering it with a lot of missing information.

Back to the present.  There's a saying I try to remember whenever I feel worried or anxious: "Mile by mile, life's a trial.  Yard by yard, life's not so hard.  Inch by inch, life's a cinch."  Life becomes more manageable when we focus on what's immediately in front of us and leave everything else out.  The past has happened and cannot be changed, and the future is unknowable.  What's become important for me is what I do and how I live for today -- not in a sense of "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die" -- but in terms of "What can I do to make my life better right now?  And what can I do to make the lives better of those around me?"

Over at hopefultransitions.com, Sherry Williams White has a great article, Living in the Moment.  Sherry was 26 years old when she lost her 47 year-old mom to cancer.  She knows the difficulty in trying to stay focused on the present:

"When someone you love or care about dies, you experience a wide range of emotions. Your mind goes over and over what happened, wanting to know every detail. You begin to think about all of the things you could have said, should have said, could have done, and should have done. You begin to think about all of the things that person meant to you. All that you shared in life and all of the wishes you have for the future. You begin to focus on what will happen next. How will you go on? You think of all there is to do and all there will be to do in the future. As you fill your head with this huge list of things that must be done or will have to be done, it is easy to feel overwhelmed."

Sherry also has a number of practical tips in her article on how we can live more in the present moment. Like anything else, it takes practice, but is very much worth doing!