Grieving Shouldn’t Be Lethal

GRIEF SHOULDN’T BE LETHAL

This week we’ve lost two celebrities while they were in the wake of inexplicable grief.

Sinead O’Connor

And Conor Angus Cloud.

Sinead had just buried her son 18 months prior to her death, though based on her tweets, she was still struggling with acute, painful grief.

Conor Angus Cloud lost his father, and self-professed best friend last week.

I don’t want to stand on ceremony, or even act like I know something that others do not, but it is obvious to me that this is pointing to the absolute emergency that is the state of Western Culture and it’s totally inept, inadequate, and uninitiated relationship to death.

It’s no one person’s fault.

It is the fault of a culture obsessed with life at all costs.

That is so unfamiliar with endings that it becomes petrified and frozen in the face of it.

Culturally we grip at anything we feel slipping away.

We believe that we ourselves are God.

Yet have zero understanding of how small and powerless we truly are, by design.

We value accumulation and holding.

While demonizing tha act of purging if it doesn’t look like it’s in service to more accumulation.

We abhor uncomfortable change. While exalting safety as it’s own kind of God.

We mistakenly believe that the subject of death is not suitable for children. Even in the most reverent of contexts.

We constantly warn our kids that if they take risks they will die (of course this is proper in context, but are we over sheltering them?)

Our medical industrial complex preserves life well beyond the point in which it has any quality. And has made this a self-professed virtue.

We have indeed made extraordinary advances in service to life, and this is not to scoff at them. However, we have to balance this out by honoring the beauty of endings.

We are, as Stephan Jenkinson says, a “death phobic” culture.

I don’t know where the future will lead me. I am in service to today, and today alone.

Though I do feel a rising call to explore the beauty in endings. To create a container that holds people through complex and even traumatic losses.

Six months before Tanner died, our house came down with Covid and I had an outsized fear response.

Following the brilliant call of my soul, I unknowingly began to create the container that would eventually become the one that held Tanner’s death.

I knew I needed to explore my fear of death. It began with the words “Deep Anchored Trust”, and ended with me inhaling all of Jenkinson’s work.

Little did I know, I would put into practice all that I had learned. Since then, I have been eternally grateful that I followed that soul nudge.

I have no idea where I would be now if I hadn’t been to the metaphorical gym, training my death muscles beforehand. Even though I thought I was doing it in relationship to myself.

I’ll never forget being absolutely dumbstruck by the contrast in how my different tribes held death and greiving.

My children, my online spiritual community, and my in person Arabic community had an amazing response.

My spiritual community taught me the value of ritualizing and sacralizing my pain. Feeling each and every emotion. Having permission and approval for each and every strand.

My Arabic community taught me how to vocalize my grief. The wail, the keen of the broken heart, and how that mirrored back to me that the universe had indeed torn open.

My children, the ultimate gurus, reintroduced me to the animate world, and helped me cultivate a relationship with Tanner in spirit. As they are still so very intimate with what exists beyond the veil.

And then there was my white western family who immediately gripped tight to the known. Trying to zip their pain back up, neat and tidy, into their physicality, terrified that even a small piece might come spilling out. Horror written across their stoic faces, but no other part of them matching their petrified expression.

This last group were my main “supports”. Frozen and terrified of me. They had no idea what to do with a grieving mother. So they mostly left me on my own, mistakenly believing I “needed” space. Or thinking I would know what I needed and ask.

I needed them to bound in with outsized care. I needed them to know what I needed.

WE NEED TO NORMALIZE DEATH

So that when people are met with what is now the “unthinkable” they have a container in which to relate to their loss, and most importantly to their loved ones.

We need to educate ourselves about how to hold others inside of the immense pain of grief.

And most importantly, just like motherhood, we need to normalize the fact that the death portal isn’t “normal”.

Rather that the insanity we feel in the wake of loss is a normal response to an outside of normal event.

It is a sacred threshold.

There is no “back” to return too.

Death steals the ground from beneath our feet. “Back” is an illusory place that simply doesn’t exist.

Grief doesn’t ever go away, and nor should we want it too.

It is the substance that cracks the heart wide open. It IS THE HEALING.

It is compassion, and love, embodied.

By the very act of engaging with it, grief sanctifies and exalts our soul.

And perhaps if we grieved more, we’d find answers to the many problems that collectively plague us.

——

Holding these two, and their families in my heart tonight. Each one enduring multiple losses.

Wishing for them, the love and support I both found and cultivated.

My heart is both cracked wide open and set on fire as I write these words.

#angus #conoranguscloud #anguscloud #grief #death #sineadoconnor #sinead