I have just returned from a grief retreat at the famous Kripalu yoga center. I spent three days in the company of around 40 other people who were there to process their grief under the gentle and guiding hands of two facilitators and writers, whose skill and expertise in the grief arena came from personal experience.
There are five cardinal rules about grief that I bring back with me:
- Grief is hot and messy
Climate change is real. How else to explain 90+ degree days in the Berkshire mountains, where the average summer temperature is usually in the balmy 70s? And being in a yoga retreat center, where air conditioning is a suggestion at best, and fans are at a premium, did not help matters. When, on the first night, as we gathered in the large, wood-floored practice room in which we were going to spend the next three days together sharing our deepest pain and processing our traumas and grief, you could feel the energy sap out of our bodies upon entering. Sweat began to pour down our faces, and we hadn’t taken warrior position yet.
But the heat and discomfort matched our mood. We were tetchy, wary, scared to fall apart in front of strangers. We kept the lights off and the fans on as we dug into our stories. The heat of our bodies matched the heat of our hearts. It felt good to feel bad as we waded through a tribunal of shared grief, and we hugged each other despite our sopping Lululemons.
At first we were afraid to cry. Our society is so terrified of death that we were apologizing to each other for crying at a grief retreat. But the heat dragged it out of us, and soon our hot tears flowed more easily, matching the temperature of the room.
One afternoon we were going to have a “sound bath”, where the tinny vibrations of a singing bowl and pestle were supposed to soothe our nerves and calm our brains. I went into the room and lay down on a mat, skeptical but curious. As I turned my head it began to spin, and I had to leave the session to right myself. Grief does many things to us, including making us dizzy.
- Grievers are my tribe
I feel very fortunate that I have had the love and support of an extraordinary group of friends and family to get me through my husband’s illness and death, and my first painful steps into widowhood. Unlike so many stories I have heard and read, my people have not left my side.
But even the most loving and intimate friends don’t know. They don’t know what it’s like to be a caretaker for a dying spouse. They don’t know what it’s like to experience anticipatory grief, primary grief, secondary losses. They don’t know what it’s like to have your entire life explode, and leave you to pick up the shards and piece it back together, when there are giant pieces missing. The whole you knew will never be again. And while they love you and can cradle you and listen to you, they can’t step into the fray with you. They think the you they know will return, while the you you are now knows the impossibility of that.
The minute I walked into the hot grief room, I knew I had found my people. While every person in that room had a different experience of grief, each one of us knew that our story was the worst one. We allowed ourselves to be humble, and to listen, and wordlessly nod and understand. The woman sitting next to me the first day was mourning her daughter, who died in a mass shooting that you have heard of. The man I sat next to after lunch nursed his wife through five years of cancer. The young woman I spoke with the last day had both her parents die before she left her 20s - and doesn’t know why she should go on. Another woman had her husband die, suddenly, of cancer, and her anger still reaches the rafters, five years later. There was suicide and protracted illness, gun violence and quiet hospice. Spouses, partners, children, parents, siblings, extended family. All dead. And we were here to pick up the pieces.
These people speak my language. It is the language of death. Of loss. Of hopelessness and redemption. Of loneliness and power. No matter what story we told, what language we used, the translate button was pushed and we all understood.
- The body holds trauma
My neck has a degenerative disc. My shoulders hunch. I get dizzy spells, and gain weight without eating. I fall. I get up. Every day, I feel my experience in every move I make.
When I sprained my ankles two years ago, my physical therapist, who is a holistic healer, took a look at my legs and said “your ankles are still in the trauma, they are still in the fall.” It was the first time I understood the muscle memory of the body.
While I was at Kripalu, which is, after all, first and foremost a yoga retreat, I thought that perhaps it was time to try yoga again. My first (and last) class was 15 years ago, and although I had already experienced traumatic loss at that point, it wasn’t as stuck in my body as it is now. So yoga seemed like a good thing to attempt, even though, as one of my close friends, who is a yogi, has pointed out, I like yoga about as much as root canal.
But this was different. This time, I understood what yoga could do for my body - it could unstick it. The gentle moves we used in the very beginning class I took stretched me out - and the instructor’s soft tones and instructions helped me feel each vertebra as I elongated my neck, my back, my arms in pose.
After class I felt strong, as I had standing in tadasana (mountain) pose. I felt that the kinks had moved, just a little. It has now been four years since my husband was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and three years since he died. My body has not yet relaxed. I always feel as if I am on high alert, with a need to pounce at any moment. Yoga helped me see that while the physical trauma endures, relaxation is possible -- down the line. And with it, the strength that comes from knowing that I have survived.
- Loss compounds
I am a competitive person. Just ask anyone who has played Scrabble or pinball with me. But I’m quietly competitive - I don’t want anyone to think I’m a sore loser. So I try to hold it in. But once I’m in the thick of the game, I can’t help but enjoy being on top. And I hate it when I’m not.
It’s like that with grief. Sure, all the books and blogs tell you that there is no comparing grief. Everyone gets to live with their grief, hold their grief up to the light and know that there is no one else who has experienced what they have experienced. And that’s true.
But there are those of us, out there in grief world, who know that, in fact, there actually is a grief hierarchy. We’re just not allowed to talk about it. Those of us who have been caregivers for brain cancer patients, for instance, know that brain cancer is the hardest cancer to care for. And those of us who have had a baby or a child die know that when loss comes out of order, it is particularly painful to resume any semblance of a normal life.
Then there are those of us who check off many boxes. Dead baby. Check. Dead husband via brain cancer. Check. Dead mother relatively young. Check.
Oh, and add to that a mother who left her children when they were teens. Check. And a mother whose own parents were dead by the time she was 13. So actually a whole legacy of loss. Check.
By the time I made it to the hot yoga room at Kripalu, I had racked up a lot of grief. I learned through the week that even with my new tribe, I was a stand out. Most people were there to focus on and heal from one profound loss. But I had many. Each loss has built on itself during my lifetime. Losing my baby was the saddest story of my life until it wasn’t, and my husband’s illness and death superseded it.
When I suggested a breakout group to talk about compound grief, I was the only one who showed up. I had won the grief game. Lucky me.
- The truth will set you free
As they sing in Hamilton, there are moments that the words don’t reach, where suffering is too terrible to name. And even though I have been writing about my losses for a long time, I have been walking around with parts of my story still secret. There is too much pain in releasing them to the light of day.
One of the writing exercises we did in grief retreat at Kripalu was to create the core of an essay. We used something called the Five Point Method to tease it out, piece by piece, story by story. In doing that work, I allowed myself to write about things that I have been tamping down, keeping in place, trying to protect myself. And others. I figured I will burn my journal before anyone gets a chance to read it; it’s safe to say the terrible words out loud in those pages.
And in doing so, I unleashed revelations about my story that I had not realized before. Unanswered questions started to find answers. The power of saying something out loud -- on paper -- revealed depths to my stories of which I had not been aware.
So now what.
I still don’t know if these truths will ever see the light of day. But they are more difficult to ignore than they were a week ago. I have been told that I can only tell my story, no one else’s. I can tell you all about glioblastoma and its statistics and the ravages it wages on those dying from it. But what I really need to tell you is about the ravages it waged on me. My gospel, which differs from any other.
I needed yoga and heat and a tribe to pry open the wound. Now I have to find the words that will set me on the path towards healing it.
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