Three Days of Grief

This week I did a lot of pretty interesting stuff. I took a three-full-day course on my favorite subject, which is grief. I also had an astrology reading and danced with a large snake. Really. I did all that in five days. But the grief training was the most exhilarating and life affirming of the three. Which is saying a lot, because it was a perfectly profound reading and I don't think there is anything quite like dancing with a snake.

During the grief training I kept wondering, what is it about grief that I find so fascinating? Why does it feel so good to talk about pain? I decided the answer was that everyone there was someone who knew a lot about the subject already. So there was a lot to learn from each other. And a lot to teach too. I was the only non-therapist or caregiver in the group. I was the only artist, so I got to talk a lot about my experience of making art and how grief informs my work and how my work expands those feelings of sadness or longing into something bigger than me. Something tangible that I can show or read or give to someone else to be experienced in an entirely new context that has nothing to do with me. And that in that process, the feelings, my feelings, are also freed.

But the main thing I came away with from listening and talking about grief is that the best medicine for grief is retelling the story of the loss. Who they were. How they died. What happened. The whole story.

I listened to the tantric dance teacher talk about snakes for a long time today. When she talked about their shedding I thought, grief can be a lot like shedding, after a while. For some, it may seem to disappear completely after a long time. But for most of us, grief is something that comes up, over and over again. It revisits periodically and when it does, it's an opportunity for shedding some of the feelings, again.