The Rituals of Grief

"Healing trauma requires a restoration of the matrix of life."

“Grief will the be the keynote for the forseeable future.” — Francis Weller

“Moonrise, Hernandez,” Ansel Adams, Authorized Edition Notecard, $85

In 1997, I sat in the basement of my childhood home in Montana and watched Ma Vie en Rose, a critically acclaimed French film about a 7-year-old-boy who feels he is a girl. It split me open: I was inconsolable. I cried for hours and hours, completely undone.

Several years later, while on spring break with my college boyfriend and his family in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, we sat down to watch some sort of family movie on Lifetime or the Hallmark channel. It involved a boy who has to sell his horse—and then his trip across the country to go reclaim him. Again, I melted down—to the point that all of my boyfriend’s younger siblings slowly retreated from the couch because I was such a mess. I could not stop crying. (And this movie had a happy ending!)

These memories stick out for me because at some point during the process of growing up, I lost the ability to cry normally. These days, I barely cry at all. Interestingly, my dad cries all the time—he is always moved, and it’s one of his best qualities, particularly because as an intensivist, he was always at the hospital in the middle of the night, intubating patients and spending time with families who were having the worst day of their lives. Somehow, his empathy didn’t wear out.

I managed to cry a little when Peter died in 2017, though not enough to match my internal experience of loss and grief. I recognized at the time that this was partly because I tend to overfunction—and I kept myself very busy in the weeks after Peter passed unwinding his life, organizing his funeral, and so on, all to give my brother a reprieve. Though if I’m honest, I felt way too scared to fall apart, so “doing things” became my own type of security blanket. (For more: “Do You Overfunction or Underfunction?”)

In the last eight years, I’ve been waiting for some sort of cathartic release—I easily get to the point where my eyes and throat burn and ache, like an over-taxed dam, but I’m lucky if a single tear sneaks out. I’ve even taken to resisting any type of tissue intervention, since I don’t want to signal to my body that crying is unwelcome. At times, I have felt desperate: Where are my tears? Am I not human? I feel things deeply and yet why can’t I express myself properly? After all, I also know that unprocessed emotion is not good for any of us, that when we stuff it down, it goes somewhere to wait.

On Friday evening, when I got the first text about the horrors and devastation unfolding in Texas, my tears showed up. And for the past five days, I’ve been able to experience an expression of external emotion that somewhat matches my internal state. I am so incredibly sad. Heartbroken.

Why this tragedy?

I think it sits on top of so many of our existential fears and the most fundamental, baseline reality of existence: Life is uncertain and unpredictable. While we profess to control and dominate nature, she is infinitely more powerful than we will ever be. (And as our actions on this planet become ever more consumptive, she will create balance by compensating with more force.) While we’ve built our lives to insulate ourselves from the threats of the world, we remain so vulnerable. You can engineer safety into the lives of your children—and provide the very best things for them—and it still might not be enough. Things happen for no discernible “reason”—terrible things happen to wonderful people. There’s no contract to sign that ensure you and your loved ones are not chosen for the worst suffering imaginable.

I’m taking Max to sleepaway camp next week in Maine. This is his first time and it was fully his choice. (Sleepaway camp wasn’t part of my reality growing up so I have no frame of reference.) I’ve been waiting for him to tell me that he doesn’t want to go ever since he asked me to sign him up, and yet, his desire is unrelenting. (And yes, for this, I’m proud.)

“But Max, it’s three weeks. Are you sure you’re okay with that?”

“Mom, you go to Australia for two weeks all the time—what’s the difference?”

I mean, fair enough. But the difference, I want to tell him, is that if something happens to me when I’m away from home, he’ll be fine; if something happens to him, I will die too.

It is hard to even think about. I want to resist looking at this with all my strength. When I sit with myself, it’s easy to see that this is my greatest fear, and because it feels so subsuming, so threatening, I’ve historically anesthetized myself to all of my feelings about loss. But I can’t do this anymore, apparently. My internal dam is at capacity. What’s happened to those parents in Texas is every parent’s worst nightmare. I am trying to feel it now, to be present with them—across thousands of miles—in their grief.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I read Francis Weller’s In the Absence of the Ordinary two weeks ago, or wrote about it last Wednesday: “Some Vital Medicine for these Times.” Grief is Weller’s wheelhouse. (You can hear an incredibly moving episode with him on Anderson Cooper’s All There Is: “Creating a Companionship with Grief”—and yes, he’s coming up on Pulling the Thread.) While I’ve never attended one, Weller is known for creating grief rituals and training other therapists and community leaders to facilitate them—these are containers in which people get to experience themselves fully. Grief and love, as Weller comments, go hand-in-hand. You cannot really love unless you build your tolerance for experiencing and holding your grief. We all need help expanding our heart’s capacity to hold what is unfolding in our world.

The grief rituals that Weller creates are a form of initiation where one steps over an invisible threshold—a threshold that marks how the world you knew has changed incontrovertibly. Grief always changes us—and if we allow it to, it can change us for the better. This journey over the threshold becomes easier when there are others who can hold us and witness us in our pain—including those who have walked this path before. We need community.

As Weller writes in In the Absence of the Ordinary:

When the safety of the familiar confronts the yearnings of the soul, it is time for initiation. It is a time of disruption and eruption as the demands of the soul make themselves known. It is at this point that the elders recognized the need to end the life of the youth, as they knew it, and ritually escort them across the threshold into a new sense of self.

Trauma enacts the same shifts in identity, often without the guidance, witnessing, and containment of the village.

…

We cannot go back to how things were before the cancer diagnosis, the accident, the war, the hurricane, or the death of our child: Nothing will ever be the same; and too often, we are asked to carry it alone, in silence.

This sentiment—that trauma enacts the same shifts in identity but without community or containment—is so profound. Trauma is often individual (and there’s often shame and secrecy, which creates further isolation), whereas initiation cycles have always been about the community and not the individual. As Weller writes, “What reconstitutes the psyche after trauma, in addition to understanding what happened, is reestablishing our place within the wider cosmological context. We must be restored and re-storied to complete the rough initiation that was precipitated by the trauma.”

I think one of the things that’s so difficult about what’s enfolding all around us today is that we can’t “re-story” in community because we can’t agree on facts anymore. What happened? Who is to blame? Why did this occur? While we are split on reality, I do believe that if we look deeper, we can agree on the feelings: So many of us (maybe all of us?) are devastated, terrified, and in pain—and maybe that understanding is all we need to begin knitting ourselves back together.

And we need to do this: We need to begin building containers in community for processing our grief and pain. Because we are all being initiated—and many more initiations are to come. Some of these will be collective, some of these will be individual, and some of these will be both—but they all belong in the container of a larger “cosmological context.” We are having this experience together. We can’t afford to let anyone spin out in traumatic isolation alone, in what Weller calls a suspended initiation.

Weller offers:

A study of Native American and non-Native American soldiers returning from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars was revealing. It showed that the soldiers who participated only in conventional PTSD treatments had a 40 percent success rate for the treatment. However, those soldiers who participated in traditional Native practices, such as sweat lodges, pipe ceremonies, and vision quests, had a 72 percent success rate in recovering from their symptoms. The difference was the restoration of the cosmological ground—the soldiers returned to the larger field of belonging. In the Indigenous understanding, it is impossible to separate body, mind, soul, and spirit. Any approach to healing must include all these aspects of our being. What is worth nothing is that when non-Native soldiers were offered the same rituals, they also experienced an increase in recovery from the trauma.

The most neglected aspect in our encounters with initiatory experiences is the lack of an adequate return. Severance without the possibility of return is permanent exile. Healing trauma requires a restoration of the matrix of life. Trauma often lingers in our bodies and souls as a suspended initiation.

We need to be gathering each other up in our arms. We need to witness and contain without interference or rushing to make our own discomfort with grief go away—we can’t “fix” this, or ignore this, or make it disappear. So many of us need to learn how to cry again. I know I haven’t been able to cry simply because I’ve been unwilling to look at and acknowledge my deepest fear: As my attachments in this world have grown, contemplating their loss is too painful. And know what compounds this fear? As I’ve grown up, I’ve recognized the limits of my own power, that I can’t control the future or guarantee the safety of my children. Terrifying. Terrible. Yet, numbing and refusing to look at this is doing me no favors: It’s doing none of us any favors. We can’t work with what we refuse to see. Our culture is soaked in grief: There is no way around this. We must learn how to embrace and be with it.

In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Weller writes: “Grief has never been private; it has always been communal. Subconsciously, we are awaiting the presence of others, before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow.” May we be those others.