This is an advanced and long post. Grief is not simple, it is as complex as the life we have lost. There are a few links early in the post that new followers might wish to branch off for a warm up before the main course, so that the rest of what I am saying might make more sense to you.

Anger is a common component of grief and anger is the most dangerous and destructive emotion. I commonly refer to anger as a cancer of the human soul that consumes love. Grief wounds the human soul and often cancer finds a place in a wounded soul.

 In my self-developed model of the human soul (see more) I believe that we build metaphysical connections with loved ones that allow us to give and to receive love from each of those that we love. When we are grieving, we are bleeding the life force energy of love (see more) from our soul because of the loss of a loved one, and as our reservoir of love drops anger can come to feed easily.

As we love someone longer and deeper, we establish trust. When we trust, we flow deeper love with less resistance. A special loved one dies and all of the connections we have with them, small and large, deep and shallow will bleed love from our soul towards the memory of them. The process of healing grief can reconnect those broken pathways of love to the permanent memories and monuments that we build in the gardens of our grief (see more), and the loss of love from our own soul eventually comes to a stop.

If we consider that our soul contains only love, and is entirely responsible for our love of daily life, a sudden flow of love away from our soul can trigger panic. The loss of a deeper and more meaningful love, by its depth and breadth, can empty a soul in a very short time causing extreme anxiety and fear that can outwardly present as anger or resentment, or if internalized as numbness.

I experienced that complete emptiness after the death of our son, but at that time I had no capacity to describe or explain it, so what I felt was simply described as numbness. Numb is a common description of how many people feel when grief first sets in. Numb is often a description of the symptom of not knowing how to feel, not understanding what you feel. That’s logical because every grief is so different, a new and uncharted journey without a map. Numb is uncomfortable and unpredictable, and so, we are often made afraid and become angry by being numb.

When we internalize our anger in grief, often we are punishing ourselves for not having done more, for not doing something, for not seeing this coming, for not somehow intervening and stopping the Universe from taking this life that we loved. There’s an irrational sense of failure, of hopelessness, and of personal responsibility that is unreasonable to place on ourselves. These negative emotions can become self destructive and self defeating quickly, and they can form lasting bad habits as well,  because in our sense of failure is a sense that we might actually bear that responsibility and we twist that to we deserve to have our life punish us for the death of a loved one.

Another side effect of grief is that we lose trust in life itself. We question the purpose of the life lost as well as our own life. This is especially challenging for some who seemingly have very well defined purposes that have been derailed by grief. Grief will change how you see your own life, and questioning your own definition of purpose is a healthy and natural part of grief as you heal. But, this questioning of purpose is not wise too early in grief, because your soul is under filled with love and unbalanced to make such significant decisions competently.

The simplest explanation of the pain that we feel in grief is that we have become addicted to the love that we share with each person that we love. People who truly love life will gather love from one or many other people, from many activities and passions. The complex cocktail of love that we build for ourselves is addicting, and that wonderful addiction truly defines us in daily life. When any component of that cocktail of love is removed, we might lose the feeling and love for our life until we find ways to replace or regenerate that part of the blend of love that we live for.

That collection of love that defines our love for life is blended, not compartmentalized. So, when a significant loved one dies and our soul drains some of all of our sources of love, we can lose some or all of what defines us. Through grief, we may become someone quite different from our usual normal, for a time or for a lifetime. These changes can become negative or positive, they can redefine us as we heal, but left unchecked or unhealed they can destroy much of what we are and much of the life we love living.

In the first couple of years after our son died, I could not look myself in the eye in a mirror.  I saw that empty space, the confusion, and the destruction of so much that I had loved about life. I saw my own empty soul and wanted to avoid it. I had lost sight of my own value, a value that I had spent decades building and maintaining. My son was a large part of that value, but in those years any love that flowed into my soul drained through the wounds that his loss had left, wound that I had not healed because I did not understand how to best heal them, or even that I was the one who needed to choose to allow my soul to heal them.

While I was numb, there was very little outward anger. I had internalized it and the cancer of that anger was consuming any love that flowed into my soul. Think of it as an auto-immune reaction of the soul that was addicted to love, now unable to expand and live on the little love remaining.

As the reserves of our collected love flow out and away, we create room for that cancer of anger to come to us. The more full of love our life is, the more we become dependent on a feeling if security that an abundance of love generates in us. In grief, we sense love flowing out of us, and that triggers panic. The deeper the love, the faster that outflow is, the more we feel panic. Panic threatens us and often triggers anger.

Slowly, in spite of the serious injury to my soul, love started to collect again. I could smile, and after a time I could even laugh without guilt. My soul was healing itself. As I explored myself, modeled and explained what I was feeling, I came to understand that I could help myself to heal.  I understood that it was I who was responsible for how I would change through grief, that I could build a solid joyful memory for each of those broken pathways and that that memory would reduce the amount of love flowing out of my soul. Building good memories was my path back to live and loving life. Each fixed memory, each monument to that love built in my soul improved my feelings about life.

The vast majority of anger in grief is tied to the things that we just can’t change. It’s a lot more than simple frustration or resignation; anger is often a violent call to a forced reflection on mortality and the meaning and purpose of our own lives as well as the life of the loved one we have lost.  We are drawn into the vortex of coming to understand that love is meaningful to us, but also that love can be suddenly taken from us by any random event of the chaotic Universe. This loosens and may weaken or break some of our foundations and beliefs, upon which we have built our purpose for life.

In my writings I speak of the three choices we have as Ignore, Change, or Accept (insert link). We can’t safely ignore the reality of the death of a loved one, and we have no capability to change death, so any death brings us to a forced acceptance of that death and the changes it will bring to our lives. It is human nature to fight or resist forced change, especially those changes that we see as negatively impacting our lives.

The question we must inevitably ask ourselves is: How much of our life, a life that we loved,  are we willing to, or expected to sacrifice in memory of this death? The simplest answer I have found is that the person you are grieving would be ashamed and disappointed if their death caused any damage to your life (see more). They would not want that responsibility for any part of the ruin that you allow to be inflicted on yourself by their death.

With this perspective, it becomes your responsibility to heal and to minimize the damage to your soul and to your life. This is the foundation of what I mean when I distill grief to:

• We grieve because we love.
• No love, no grief
• Deep love, deep and complicated grief.
• When we love someone, we accept that one of us may die before the other.
• The person we loved has died; our love for them hasn’t died.
• Grief is the final responsibility for having loved someone.
• Grief is love, now expressed by one.
• If we build a comfortable grief, we can more easily carry that love through the rest of our life.
• Comfortable Memories and Monuments to heal, to remember, to teach, to inspire, to enrich the rest of your life.

If you made it here to the end of this post, thank you for reading my words. I hope it might give you some healthy food for your soul.

Be well, seek peace, extinguish anger, and learn to love life more each and every day.

In my years of talking and writing about grief, the most common question people want answered is “How do I get through grief quickly?”

This is a continuum of the general concept that grief is an affliction, an evil thing that must somehow be eliminated from your life as quickly as possible. The pain of early grief is very real, with the emotional pain often bringing physical pain and changes in your life that are uncomfortable. No rational human would want to stay in that pain, so the first instinct is to find the fastest way out.

The early emotional pain is an evolved process of humans. It has evolved to teach us more about the one we loved and about how and why we love. The pain and confusion reflects our lack of understanding and preparation for grief, which in a good life is truly unavoidable. Because it arrives with pain, we often can’t see past grief’s pain find to the underlying purpose of grief, which is to teach us and enrich us.

My experience with grief has taught me that what we need to find is not a way out, but rather the fastest way to resolve the pain of grief, so that we can find a comfortable way to incorporate the memories and lessons of the love we have shared into our daily lives. If we can make sense of and soothe the pain, then we can linger in the warming afterglow of that love we have shared for a lifetime.

Back to my basic simple distillation of grief:

• We grieve because we love
• No love, no grief. Deep love, deep and complex grief.
• When we love someone, whether we speak the words of not, we understand and accept that one of us will die before the other.
• The person died, the love we shared with them doesn’t die.
• Grief is the final responsibility for having loved someone.
• Our grief is our story of the value of a life changing love, now carried and expressed by one of the two who have loved.

This distillation of grief puts grief into a perspective of being a fortunate honorable endeavor, rather than being an affliction or injury. Fortunate, because you are the lucky one who survives to remember and tell the story.

Where do you begin?

I suggest that you start by writing a private eulogy in your journal (more here), because that process quickly isolates what you initially see as the main value and impacts of the life you have shared love with. I dare say that this eulogy will expand and deepen with time, so feel free to update or re-write it as you slowly become more aware of the depth and breadth of the influence of that love shared.

I have written many more eulogies than I have delivered. I often write a quick one before a funeral or memorial gathering because it helps me organize and focus on the true value of that life and makes conversations at those events less awkward and more comfortable.

I have delivered eulogies for the major deaths in my life, my brother’s suicide at age 43, the untimely death of a best friend and key employee, and for our son’s death at age 20 in a firefighter training accident.

Whether you deliver it or not, the process of eulogy organizes your early path through grief. It is important to understand that you can use the concept of eulogy at any point in your grief, even years later, and especially when you are finding grief confusing or distracting.

People who grieve well have learned to focus on what’s important, on what they want to remember about this person, about the lessons from this person’s life that others will find valuable.

What is this person love about their life? What did the love doing that you shared with them? What did they teach you? What will you never forget?

We can’t undo death. We are at our best when we don’t allow death to undo the love that we have shared, or the life that we have, and by doing that we deny death the ability to change our lives in negative ways.

But, we can’t honor a life after a death if we run too quickly through grief without fully understanding how this life we shared love with has enriched us and making that enrichment a part of every day we have in the rest of our life.

You will find less pain if you seek the true purpose of grief as a comfortable and permanent enrichment of your life and lessons for the lives of those around you. More good memories, good teachings and less or no pain is a way to define the best possible grief.

It begins with your attitude.

If we treat grief as an affliction that needs to be cured, then naturally we will try to hurry thru grief as quickly as possible. If you believe in the process as stages of grief, we will try to do them each quickly, so we can say that we’ve been there and done that. More importantly when you are confronted with a recurrent emotion, you will perhaps resent the return of that thought you believed that you had dealt with.

On the other hand, I believe that grief is a highly evolved process that informs and teaches us about love. It is a purposely lifelong process of gathering and cataloging the positive feelings of love that you have shared. Grief as a teacher can make you more aware of all of the types and versions of love that you share in daily life, and grief can make you better at loving those people who surround you.

The initial shock and unbalancing of emotions that quickly follows a death can cause people to hit the road towards acceptance and run through the process too quickly. Grief becomes a hurried 20 cities in 14 day unguided tour through a strange place you never really wanted to go to. Your hurried schedule is fixed, you have only so many hours to explore and absorb each place you go to before you must get back on the bus and head to the next place. At the end of two weeks, you can’t remember much about any of the places you have visited, you barely know which city you’re in, and you are exhausted rather than enlightened.

The model that I have adopted for grief is different. I have built a peaceful garden like emotional place in my daily life for each of the loved ones that I have lost, not just lost thru death but also lost thru disconnection. Loss thru disconnection, if unresolved to peace, can be more traumatic and damaging to our daily life than loss thru death.

I’m an older geek, so I have built an emotional ability on the model of a Star Trek transporter that disassembles a living breathing person and re-assembles then somewhere else. I can “beam” myself completely between each of these quiet peaceful places of the collection of memories and lessons I have built in life. When life calls, I can “beam” myself right back into daily life, with all of its noise and responsibility.

The word peaceful is operative here. If the emotional place you build in memory of a love lost is not peaceful, then you will avoid visiting it because it isn’t comfortable. These places are full of the most valuable parts of your life, so not visiting them comfortably would become tragic over a lifetime.

It is imperative that you extinguish any anger that accidentally comes into these places of memories. Anger causes fires that destroy the memories that you most want to hold onto.

Simplified, my process is to resolve anger that I find in grief within my daily life. When I find resonance, peace, and happiness in a memory of someone I loved, I take that memory to the safe peaceful place I am building. That process isolates and protects the memories I wish to keep alive from the fires of any remaining anger.

My emotional transporter is programmed to sense danger and to not allow me to visit these places when I have active anger. This keeps the responsibility for extinguishing anger front and center in my daily life.

More on anger in another post, but well managed anger is a natural and often healthy part of grief. In some grief, for me it’s often my brother’s suicide, recurring flares of anger are normal events that may never be resolved to my complete peaceful satisfaction. I believe those flares are self-protective warnings, sparked by some fear of ever finding myself in the emotional sate he was when he killed himself.

Keeping the unresolved anger in daily life keeps that anger from becoming an emotional wildfire. When I seek peace from the anger, I must cleanse myself of it before I visit my gardens of memories of lost loved ones.

When I began this process of creating emotional spaces, I thought first as a library with rooms for each person I have loved. But libraries are passive places that require no effort or input. So I came to the peaceful garden concept, because one must visit, tend to and nurture a garden to derive real benefit and satisfaction from it. Gardens will suffer weeds, drought, flood and untended unused gardens die. These emotional gardens I have built need me to visit, to bring new memories, to trim and adjust old memories. These gardens live and breathe, keeping the past alive with my help, in the same way those I have lost once lived and breathed.

No hurry, but In your grief, build a safe and accessible emotional garden for those memories that you wish to keep alive. Keep it free of anger and of the noise and responsibility of daily life. Bring it newly discovered memories when you transport yourself there, and bring some flowers back every time you visit it.

It’s June 6^, 2023, today we pass the 18^th anniversary of the death of our perfect 20 year old son James.

James was home from a brilliant first year at University on a prestigious full tuition and fees scholarship that he had been awarded. He was newly in love with a beautiful young woman that was such a good fit that I can imagine that they might well have married. He had his dream summer job, managing the bar at the yacht club he grew up at two blocks from our home. He had worked and trained as a volunteer firefighter since he had turned 18, and the Fire Hall was two blocks from home and two blocks from the yacht club, so he signed up again for the summer to help a community he loved.

James died in a firefighter water rescue training accident in Hudson, Quebec. Ironically, he was ejected from and run over by the rescue boat that he has helped raise the money for our small waterfront town to purchase. The official report on this death clearly defines the accident as avoidable.

In the sleepless night following his death, I immediately saw that if I presented as angry, I could potentially destroy more lives than the one we had just lost. Anger from me could subject those who were there, those in the decision chains and those who held the wheel to my anger that would attract the collective anger of a town. I had that power. I decided that it would be unfair and unproductive to wield it in anger.

The official report a year later focused on weak chain of command, lack of professional training and inadequate safety equipment. The young man driving the boat made a bad decision, in large part because he lacked enough specific training to not make that terrible decision. It was his mistake, but it also rested on the shoulders of a fire department and a municipality.

Immediately before the accident, James had swapped places with another firefighter who was uncomfortable with the high speed maneuvers being demonstrated. Had he not compassionately traded places, another family would have likely lost their son and ours would have remained more whole.

The politics of elected officials hiding from accepting responsibility made it worse for everyone. The nerves and emotions of a small close knit town were stretched past the breaking point, because James was correctly seen as an example. People who knew James saw and felt his great promise for the future and also knew he was a firefighter. And some even became angry at me for not being angrier than I presented as.

Small town closeness brings unique outpourings of support for grief. Our house filled with people offering sympathy and food. The town filled with satellite equipped news trucks and a phalanx of reporters gathered at the end of our driveway. We became the top sad news story for a very long week.

The mechanics and expectations of a Line of Duty death are complicated, often inconvenient, and anything but small and personal. The emotional and spiritual challenges surrounding the processing of grief for an “honourable death” linger for a lifetime, but all of that pales in comparison to the real challenge of losing a child under the magnifying glass of media and public attention. The media sought anger, and in that I am proud to say that I disappointed them.

I am immensely proud of our family and James’ friend for the ways we have rebuilt our love for each other and for life over the past 18 years, for the impossible work we have each done to repair our individual souls and our collective family soul.

We often express the journey of grief as being a climb out of a deep dark place we have been thrown into by a loss of a loved one. My perspective is different with time to better understand grief.

We were not tossed into a canyon of darkness, we remained in place, but it became a place darkened by the sudden draining of the love we all carried and shared with James. Slowly, as we each healed this tremendous loss, as we each managed and grew around the perpetual pain of the loss of a son, a brother, as grandson, or a friend we each found some thread of new light in our love for James, a light that we could climb towards. 

Paths through grief are individual; it is not a team sport. Yet, literally hundreds of us each followed very different parts of that light that was guided by our love for James. With each passing year, we look around and ponder James’ life and his death from a position on a slightly higher plane or plateau than we once were. We are gathered on a high ground, a plateau build on the shared collective love of a special person. We have each changed, we have each redefined ourselves with influences from the best of James.

A charitable foundation wisely being managed by friends of James who are now professionals with families of their own will award the 18^th James Ratcliffe Scholarship this year to a deserving student young enough that they could have never met James.

There are many wonderful stories of how James’ life, through his death, brought positive changes to the world that surrounded his life. The people, who loved him in life, still love him long after his death.

If I have a message on this anniversary, it would be to forgive the mistakes of others.

Forgiving frees us from carrying the anger for the wrongs of others. Forgiving does not free them from the responsibility for those wrongdoings, or from the requirement for them to mitigate the damage they have caused. We forgive for us, not for them.

Anger is a cancer of the human soul that consumes love. If we remain angry our soul becomes a brittle hard hollow shell, we lose our humanity. If we forgive, we stop the cancer of anger from emptying our soul, and we can begin to rebuild our life and our love of others and our love of life.

We must also forgive the Universe for its unthinking randomness that brings pain to so many of us. We cannot change the Universe, but if we harbor anger at the Universe we destroy ourselves and our own life.

Please find forgiveness for those who have wronged you. When forgiveness seems most impossible, it is likely the only key to the prison of anger.  

Be well and peaceful. Seek to build and rebuild love each and every day, and grant forgiveness for those who have failed you.

The only fairness we can find in death is that, without exception, death will eventually come to each and every one of us. Death is never fair. it has no ability to be fair.

The Universe is unemotional, a massively chaotic place ruled by rigid mechanical laws. There is no fundamental capacity in those mechanical laws for what we humans call emotion. Actions and reactions are rigidly defined.

Without emotion, there can be no concept of intent of if or when a death happens. I don’t believe that the Universe ever intends to do anything specific, so it doesn’t specifically choose who will die today and who will live another day.

The journey of grief will usually bring a discussion of fairness, and even in the death of a very old person we will express that this death just wasn’t fair. The person who died would perhaps have been treated more fairly if they had lived another day, another week, another year. Declaring the death unfair helps us to define targets for the negative energy and anger that we need to deflect and re-direct in grief.

Timeliness is a concept and discussion of fairness in death is further skewed by the decedent’s age, the young they died the more unfair it seems. The death of a child or young person seems more unfair than any other death. We mourn the loss of the life, but we also mourn the loss of our hoped and dreams for that life.

When our son James died eighteen years ago at age twenty in a firefighter training accident, he was a perfect child on a path to what we believed would be greatness. The world lost that potential, the compassion, the sense of morals and ethics we had helped him develop. We especially miss him when his friends make each logical step of life, a graduation, a wedding, the birth of a child. We express anger at the Universe because the random Universe that brought his death stole those joyous steps in our son’s life from us.

The perceived fairness is further skewed and magnified by causes of death. A tragic accident, a tragic disease, a horrible crime, suicide and every known cause of death are basically the intersection of a random emotionless Universe and our human beliefs and interpretations of the value of our lives and the uniquely human concept of fairness.

These discussions of fairness in death are not a waste of time. These discussions are important human emotions in the evolved process of grief.

Our analysis of the fairness of a loss may shape our grief, and likely reshape the rest of our lives. In the unfairness of losses of life to accidents involving drinking and driving, the unfairness of the loss of innocent lives brought organizations lobbying and shaping new initiatives and laws to reduce those difficult losses for others. The people who have been saved the grief of such losses will never specifically know that their lives have been spared by the efforts rooted in the loss of a loved one. But, the efforts and memories of how unfairly someone died has shifted society ever so slightly, reducing the number of drunk drivers reduces the number of opportunities for completely random intersections with those who might have become innocent victims.

Cancer is a disease of randomness. Our own bodies randomly create the cancer that might kill us, that cancer slips under the fence of our immune system and a silent killer quietly develops. We know that environmental and lifestyle factors can shift the odds towards or away from some cancers, but cancer is just a random event brought to us by the incredible complexity and statistically minute imperfections of basic human life.

In grief, I found some small comfort in the randomness of the Universe. The Universe has broad shoulders and no capacity to care what we think, so it’s an ideal dumping ground for any anger we find in a death. What you can’t explain can just be blamed on the Universe. Keeping the anger within yourself will destroy your soul over time, dumping it on another person will destroy them, but the Universe has unlimited capacity to absorb your anger.

The most difficult death for me to clear of residual anger remains my brother’s suicide in 2000 at age 43. It will always come back to me that while the randomness of the Universe contributed to the creation of his well hidden pain, Mike was complicit, and he chose to bring death to himself one day. As I age and ponder death and grief more calmly, it is still suicide that brings the most anger back to me.

You are grieving a death. That death is unfair, because all death lacks any sense of fairness. My simple question is will you allow that unfair death to diminish you? Will grief injure you, rob you of life’s enjoyment, rob you of love of others, and rob you of love of life? If you accept or allow those negative things to happen, then you are complicit in damaging yourself beyond the inherent damage of the loss itself.

I suggest that it’s far better to be taught by grief. Come to better understandings of the purpose of life by exploring the feelings of the loss of a loved one. These explorations will add positive value to your daily life as you will love more deeply, more urgently and with more gratitude for the love you build in your own life.

How would your lost loved one wish you to grieve them?

By diminishing or by growing?

Be well, seek peace and build and rebuild love each and every day.

I do not fear my own eventual death, instead I fear not living and loving today while I have this precious gift of another day. I fear that those who will grieve my eventual and inevitable death will become lost in that grief, and so by these writings I want more people to better understand grief in their lives.

In the darkest months after the death of our son I came to this statement in my private journal started after my brother’s suicide five years before: “If I can figure out how to heal and live with this loss, how to return to loving my life and loving those around me, then the rest of my life will seem much simpler and easier for having well healed this grief.”

When I tell someone that I write about grief, a common reaction is that it must be depressing. The subtle undertone is that I might be depressed. There is challenge writing this openly about my experiences and ideas about grief because this opening of my soul is as vulnerable as a human gets by their own actions. There is also challenge knowing that everyone reading this is somehow broken and seeking answers.

Quite the opposite of depressing, grief can be a great comfort, an affirmation of our own wholeness and personal worth. Learning to consciously grieve towards healing has become a great strength in my life with benefits extending far beyond the death of loved ones. I have visited that thought many times, and eventually stopped seeing grief as an affliction or an imposition, but rather see grief as an evolved opportunity to explore and understand more about what I love and the mechanics of how I love. Through several significant losses, this shift in perspective made grief a friend rather than an enemy, a teacher rather than a torturer.

Grief is a cleansing process of distillation of our own souls, de-cluttering, purifying and concentrating the important parts, often ridding ourselves of the parts of life that hang heavily on us as we seek purpose and meaning in the efforts and trials of daily life.

We are the lucky ones. We have these days, hopefully years and decades ahead of us to build love in our lives.

Having a positive attitude on grief, considering it as a responsibility for having loved someone rather than an affliction will make grief seem much easier, less damaging and much more productive.

Do not discount the pain and confusion that it took me to get here. If my writing is to have any purpose it must be to walk along side you, to help guide you in your grief and help you find the least damaging path through you grief. If I help you find that path which causes you to no longer fear the next inevitable loss in your life, then you will have become stronger and I will have succeeded.

I owe much of my positive attitude and acceptance skills to my late Aunt Jane, the indefatigable promoter of positive attitude from the 100% Danish half of my blood.  A fiery energetic redhead, dark clouds feared her and stayed away from Aunt Jane’s shining light and positive attitude. She faced every challenge in her life with excitement and resolve, and I visit her memory often to fill my soul with her love.

The death of a loved one can quickly become very damaging to even the tightest woven social fabric of a solid family, and destructive to already worn thin social fabrics of less close families and circles of friends.

For visualization, I like the metaphor that a community or family is a social fabric woven from the invisible pathways of love connecting our soul to others that we share love with, a group of people of our own choosing (friends, lovers, career and community) and of our blood (relations). The threads we use to weave these social fabrics gather and concentrate the flows of love’s life energy and make us feel secure and accepted, they bring the light energy of love to our community and our family.

This social fabric is alive with the energy of love from many places, sources of love big and small. We weave it where we have safety and security of communal love and it becomes both strong and very elastic. When a member of our community of love gets pulled down or off center, it is this fabric that helps pull us back to the surface or back to center.

The pathways of our flows of love are filled and plumped up when love flows, stabilizing and locking them into our plush comfortable social fabric. When someone dies, their pathways deflate and disconnect, and the pathways we shared our love with them also deflate because they are no longer connected to a living soul but leaking love from our soul into the torn void of the loss.  

The person dies, and all of the pathways of love’s energy that were connected to that person both into us and out of us are now disconnected at that end. Until we, the survivors, collectively anchor and attach these loose ends of our social fabric, our fabric will easily fray and unravel. The more involved and connected that person was, the more our once solid social fabric is torn and threatened by grief.

In this view of grief, we can explain the fear we feel from grief by the instability that we feel when a small or large group of our supporting threads of love are suddenly no longer connected. We are afraid to fall under, have lost our sense of center, and we feel a lack of foundation and stability that makes us uncomfortable and fearful.

The process of repairing our soul’s fabric is akin to darning a wonderful comfortable old sock that we just can’t let go of. We use threads from our own love, we tie down the loose ends, we weave patches across the holes, and we rebuild the fabric to stabilize it for the rest of our lives, and we wear the sock less but know that it’s always there if we want to wear it again.

The healing process of grief is where we repair all of the loose ends of a connection of love that was valuable to our life. We will seek out the ends of our connections, anchor them as memories, and tie them together. We weave the loose ends and our own love into a repaired fabric that our soul will grow around.

This process of metaphysical healing mimics our body’s healing, and there will always be a scar left behind, the repair will never be perfect. When I say that grief must change us, the scars it will leave behind and our reaction to them is a representation of how well we have healed. Some will remain fragile and tear again and again, some will be more visible and some will be invisible to those around you. The ideal repair allows us to visit comfortably, without pain, without fear of falling, so we may sit at the center of all of those connections and feel the love that we have shared and the love that we still share for that life.

The denial of changes that grief brings will make you resent those scars, but ultimately you will resent and become more diminished if you leave those loose ends to fray further, to leak more of your love, to destroy more of your own love’s fabric. The damage that you don’t repair will slowly spread towards your own center and continue to destabilize your own reservoirs of love.

There are points in the journey of grief where we are precariously walking around the hole left in our love, picking up and anchoring loose ends. At some point, we have walked around the entire damaged part and we then start to build bridges between the loose ends that we have now firmly tied and anchored.

There is great fear in grief that we will forget the loved ones we lose. If we don’t build those bridges across the holes in our soul’s fabric, we will one day fall into them. Sinking back into the sadness and pain, we will struggle every time we seek to visit the central part of the love that we shared so well in life. If we fall and struggle enough, we will stop visiting the love that we shared, we will begin to forget.

While we are tying down the loose ends of our grief, we will naturally connect with the loose ends of other’s grief. Some of these new common connections are important, because once tied together love can flow between our two living souls always flowing through the love that each of us shared separately. Through these connections we continue to learn about the person that we have loved and how their love has enriched other’s lives as well as our own.  

Humans are not solitary animals; we are lovers of community and the sharing of love with those of our choosing. These flows of love become essential to our feelings of well being, of wholeness, of comfort, and are central to the great joy of loving life.

The invisible fabric we weave with shared love is the essential difference between existing and loving living. A death has damaged that fabric, grief warns you of this by fear of greater loss, and grief is the call to action to begin the repair to that fabric comfortably.

Healing is a conscious choice. We must give our soul permission to heal, to become strong and comfortable again. We will repair this hole in our soul using our own love to anchor and connect the loose ends of loss. This is the magic of a soul, in the worst loss; all your soul needs to begin is love and your permission to heal.

Start visualizing the fabric that you had woven with the one you lost. What love flowed to that person from you, what loved flowed from them to you? Then begin seeking the loose disconnected ends of that love. You will connect some of the broken pathways back to your soul, and some to others who also loved this person. You will weave more of your love into this repair and form a beautiful scar that somehow makes you comfortable when you see it or feel it. The comfort comes from understanding how you loved and knowing how your soul heals. Future losses will bring less fear, and you will become expert at weaving repairs to your soul, from big losses, but also from the inevitable small wounds of daily life.

Be well, seek peace and weave or re-weave your social fabric of love each and every day.

When someone you know suffers a loss, many people just don’t know what to say, and this discomfort surrounding grief brings deeper silence and isolation to those grieving. So, here is my not so short guide attempting to help you to speak more effectively to grieving people, mostly by understanding things not to say.

There are two basic rules:

Rule 1: Saying nothing is always the wrong answer and will likely be misinterpreted as a lack of caring and compassion on your part.

Rule 2: Slow down and think. Think about what you say or will say, because saying something is also very risky, a literal minefield full of explosives and quicksand, because grief is very emotional and extremely personal. Unthinking is unfeeling, so think before you speak and speak with considered feeling.

From here on, most of this post will be exclusions, generalities of things to not say. If you respect those boundaries, you have a better experience as you acquire more experience and comfort.

I am blessed with the curse of a near photographic memory. In the public visitations after our son’s death, a big event in life of a small town, a Civic Funeral for a Fallen Firefighter, we saw and spoke to many more than a thousand people.

I don’t really know a thousand friends, so the majority of them were not close friends or family. But, eighteen years later, I probably still remember every comment that, in that painful moment, I found insensitive or painful rather than comforting or considered. I remember the look of dread on some faces as their turn in the line approached us, the time they would feel compelled to intelligibly speak some form of compassionate wisdom, coupled with the horrible realization that they were now too close to just turn around an bolt for the nearest door.

If you won’t want to be here, imagine how I feel. I am trapped, wounded and cornered by convention and circumstance. Approach me carefully but confidently, because I am looking for things to be angry about, I am a bomb of emotions waiting to explode.

Keep your beliefs out of it

In the aftermath of a death, even lifelong rock solid beliefs can easily turn to quicksand, they can become unstable quickly. Before this death, we have probably never had a conversation on what you believe and what I believe.

This is not the time to offer your faith, unless your faith is certain to be their faith. I admire and accept all compassionate faiths, I understand that faith is a good thing for many, but faith, organized or disorganized (I am mostly agnostic, but believe in some major things common in most religion) is the most personal choice of any life. But this gathering is not the time or place for either faith or politics unless you are close enough to them to know for certain.

Platitudes hurt more than silence

Leave the greeting card phrases and platitudes at home. “He’s in a better place” is, for me, the killer unthinking platitude when someone has died. It’s a greeting card based in belief that there is some place we go after death, and that place is better than here.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is an insensitive thing to say to someone currently feeling like they are being slowly killed by grief. We’re drowning, choking on life here, gasping for breath and you want us to see the bright side, which is that we’re getting stronger?

This is our experience; make this time about us, not you.

“Just give it time”. Please don’t tell me that you understand our grief because your 93 year old Aunt Edna died six months ago and now you are healed just fine. Also, I fully respect the very real challenges of grieving a beloved pet, but bringing that to our grief for a related human is just not helpful. There are orders of magnitude between them.

“Call me if you need anything”

 We heard this hundreds of times; we never called anyone for help. Because of good people around us, help just showed up, sometimes in the most wonderful ways.

We are broken, we are vulnerable, and we are very unlikely to call someone for help. Part of that is that we avoid sucking people unwillingly into our downward vortex, our days have been ruined and we avoid dragging innocent people into our tragedy. Yes, that’s perhaps stubborn and insensitive of us, but it’s how we responded to a loss of a loved one.

Asking me to call is passive support: it puts the onus on me to request your help. If you really want to help, check back later I will be doing another post on ways to actually help.

“How are you doing?”

If that’s not obvious, you really have little business here talking to me. It’s probably much better to visualize me without an arm, the wound still bleeding profusely, and then speak about what you don’t see. Avoid the obvious, the wound and blood; we’re here to dig much deeper and to talk about the missing arm. Stick with me; I’ll talk more on that later in the post.

How and what to say

I could go on for days with examples about what not to say, so let’s pivot first to how to speak with those wounded by grief, and then give you some practical pointers on what you might say.

How?

Make eye contact, even if your eyes are filled with tears, especially if your eyes are filled with tears. It’s said that the eyes are windows to our soul, so looking people in the eye when we speak to them makes a magical connection with their soul, and presents your thoughts as honest and soulful. Tearful eye to tearful eye is the most direct and soulful connection, in many ways it’s exactly what those grieving need.

Without eye contact the most profound statement is diminished to irrelevance and background noise. If they are reluctant to make eye contact, please keep looking at their eyes while you speak, they may furtively glance back seeking a connection and if you have turned away they will judge the veracity of what you say by your lack of commitment to making eye contact.

My pain was so visible that it took me about two years to look myself in the eye in a mirror, so understand that you will see pain before you engage.

Physical connection is good, but respect boundaries and usually approval. If offered a handshake, be firm but much gentler than usual. Shaking a thousand hands over a few days gets painful. Let the receiver choose when to break the handshake.

I am an unstoppable hugger, but with acquaintances I preferred someone asking me before they launched into a hug. Hugs create the intimacy for deeper connections, mouths are closer to ears and there is opportunity for more privacy and short quiet thoughts. Hugs need to end before they might get creepy, but generally let those grieving dictate the length and intensity of the hug.  Start small with a hug, and again let the receiver define and break the hug.

I never thought about it, but I’ve been told that the giver of the hug places their arms over the arms of the receiver, at over six feet tall that’s easy for me to say. When giving a hug, offer open arms and let them engage or not. When their arms hug you, your arms will naturally engage over their arms in the giver or inside position.

What to say?

 Say something about the person who has died, something that you respect about that life, or something you have learned from that life, or a happy time you shared that you remember.

Say something that shows that you know the deceased was a good person who gave something of his life to others.

If you’re on the periphery the social rings of this person, the obituary can usually provide things to mention that were important to the family.

Make what you say about the years of life of this person, not the months, weeks or minutes of the death of this person.

Make it all about the life of the person who has died, and you’ll get it exactly right for those who are grieving.

Bring peace and love, share it with consideration and sensitivity with the living so the love continues.

In any good life filled with love there is an implied but usually not discussed acceptance of grief.

We grieve because we love.

No love, no grief.

The longer and deeper the love the more challenging the grief.

When we love someone, we implicitly accept that one of us will die before the other.

Grief is the final responsibility of loving someone.

When someone dies, the love doesn’t die.

We are meant to incorporate the lessons and memories of that love into our lives.

Grief is often seen as beginning, some number of stages we must suffer and pass through and a conclusion.

I see grief as a continuum of love, an ongoing expression and celebration of the love that we shared, and an ongoing proof and reminder that the only thing that survives our death is the love we build and share in life.

Grief teaches us the true value of life and love.

We have no education or preparation for grief when we first experience it, so we see and feel the pain and run from the love we shared. We often leave the love behind and feel hollow.

If you are anticipating grief, you still have time with a loved one. This time is about them and the last days, weeks or months of your shared love, not about the pain it will cause you after they die. This time is where you can come to understand how they would want you to grieve the loss of them. 

The death of our 20 year old son James in 2005 in a firefighter training accident and my lifetime path to healing has shaped my view of grief, of life and of love. When he first chose firefighting as a part time passion, I had a frank discussion with him about the risks of a line of duty death. Two years later, when he died, I knew how he wanted me to grieve the loss of him. That didn’t lessen the pain, but the path away from the pain was much better defined for me.  

I feel my love for our son every day not as pain, but as a deep and meaningful reminder of the great love we shared and the urgency to live and love while we are still living.

Cancer is a horrible war that families battle together. The point of a diagnosis of terminal and the point of entry into palliative care defines the timeline ferociously.  My father-in-law had less than two weeks in palliative care, but with his pain managed and a crushing timeline, he lived more in those two weeks of saying goodbyes and last visits than he had in the years of battling cancer before that.

My father battled heart failure. One day his doctor told him nothing more could be done. The surgery he needed would kill him. He had months, perhaps a year, or days, there was no concrete answer. He lived far away, and we had a family vacation planned.  I was ready to cancel to visit him, so I spoke to him  honestly and he did not want me to cancel the vacation, he assured me he felt like we had lots of time.

I decided that there were things I needed said, so I wrote what I call a Living Eulogy. Why waste kind thoughts about someone by waiting until after they die? I found a time I knew he would be alone, and phoned him to read my eulogy for him to him. We cried, we laughed, and in the half hour we talked a lot about his life as a father, and a bit about his impending death. It was cathartic, a wonderful sharing of mutual love.

A few days into our vacation, I got the call that my father had died at home after cleaning up from breakfast, quietly and peacefully napping on his own bed. It was exactly how he had wanted to die, and I had no regrets about not having seen him recently, because that is exactly how he wanted me to grieve this loss,

In life, we are all dying, we just don’t know when. If we know when, we have a window of opportunity to prepare. We can dread that, it’s natural to want to avoid it, or we can engage and involve the main character of our coming grief in what will be the last opportunity to express and share our love for each other. The gift of that time  should not be squandered, it should be used well and thoughtfully.

Love like one of you will die tomorrow, love like you will live another hundred years, but most of all love while you both can.

Be well and peaceful, may the passing you anticipate come to you with you as ready as possible for the inevitable end of a life that you have loved.

The purest forms of love are unconditional love, wide open pathways between two souls where love can travel instantly with great force and reaction. The soul contains our conscience which tries to protect us from danger, and an unconditional wide open pathway for love to flow out of our soul is a very great danger. As a result of life, our souls develop self protective controls over the flow of love, both into and out from our soul.

Trust is the fundamental flow control of love

In the early days of a relationship based in love, each lover will chose exactly the type and volume of love that they will unconditionally offer this new lover over the forming pathway. The flow control applied on both sides of the pathway is trust.

Trust is where we decide if something is desired by our soul or dangerous to our soul. As a result, in a healthy early love, there is a natural limitation on how much of what kind of love you will gift to a lover or friend, followed by their receiving flow control of desirable or dangerous. 

To love, we must both trust ourselves and each other.

Basic rules of love’s flow  

Pure love is meant to be gifted unconditionally, with no expectation of acceptance or of a return of similar or different type or quantity of love from the friend or lover that you gift your love to. The unconditional part of love is what makes it much easier for the receiver to accept the gift, any conditions become a weight we carry, an undefined debt we owe. An unconditional gift of our love is basically our expression of our trust in the friend or lover we give our love to. This trust opens the pathways between our souls that allow love to flow with fewer restrictions.

When love, consciously or subconsciously leaves your soul, if that love is not received and accepted by the intended soul it will fade away and the energy of that love will be lost to both lovers. This happens when there are obstacles in the delivery and acceptance of our gifts of love. Often these obstacles are called walls, which are representations of impenetrable scars on our souls from past love injury by other lovers, or by broken trust in this current love. These “walls” are absolute flow controls set to completely stop the inbound flow of love as a self protective measure, and they are very hard to tear down because they require a rebuilding of trust. People who have these walls, these scars from love that block inbound love, also have strict limits on how much love they will allow to flow out of their souls. This is compounded by the inbound walls seriously restricting acceptance of love, and their soul can become self-starved of love to the point of panic.

The nightmare lover is the one that is hungry for love, the one that really seems to need what you offer, the one that has wide open acceptance of your unconditional love, but they also have walls blocking trust and very limited flow of love back to you. These are hoarders of love. These relationships become exhausting and draining because they slowly empty your soul of love, and you can’t see past their walls that have resulted from life’s scars, or the scars left by failed lovers.

Trusting love

So how is all this related to grief?

No love, no grief. Deep love, deep and complicated grief.

Lover or friend, we grieve those who we have trusted in sharing our love, those who have opened their souls to us and that sharing of love has caused us to open our souls to them.

In the deeply honest trusting love of those who we will grieve the flow controls of trust have disappeared. Often we say things like “They are an open book” about someone who trusts us with the contents of most or all of their soul.

We always initially see death as a betrayal of our trust in the Universe. The Universe has caused a trusted loved one to die, and we have this gaping wound in our soul where we were connected to their soul. The love we would send their way is now spilling out of that wound and we long ago forgot where the flow control to stop the flow is.

The process is the same whether the grief is for a life lost, or for a love lost. The sense of despair and fear comes from watching our souls spill love that we feel will be forever lost. Almost immediately we begin building walls, because if we can’t trust life or love, then we need walls. Those walls might protect and stop the flow of love out of your soul, but they often completely block the flow of love back into your soul.

After our son was killed in a firefighter water rescue training accident in 2005, my soul emptied completely and I build solid walls around me. We shared an unconditional and deep love, we had even discussed the possibility of line of duty death as he chose firefighting as a way to give back to the community he grew up in. We had done everything right, we had talked openly about accepting the risks, my last words to him were; “I love you, see you after practice”.

The Universe had betrayed my son and our family. Life became lonely and dark, but worse there was little hope of refilling my soul with love because I had closed off and built walls.

Your grief, its depth and intensity, will be based largely on how freely the love you shared flowed. If you loved well, you will grieve deeply, know that this is a great honour based in the trust of someone who knew you. Your goal is to tear down walls, to end your anger at the unfeeling Universe, to reduce your fear, to heal your soul without building solid walls that deny you future love..

This story is a long way from the happy ending that is today. Not a perfect ending, but a happy one.  You can get there too, it will take time and it will take conscious thought and unconscious work that might exhaust you, but your soul wants to heal, your souls naturally wants to fill with love, your soul naturally wants enough love to share with others that you have chosen and will choose to share love with.

When your soul has finished healing, you will have been part of one of life’s great miracles, the rebirth of your own loving life. That is a marvel, a sight worth seeing, and one that doesn’t happen without grief.