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.

Content warning: This post directly addresses suicide

Originally published in 2009 as a column, but it’s history is deeper. Having experienced suicide as a survivor, I will try reach our to families when I hear of a suicide in our circle of friend or extended circle of acquaintances. Knowing the complexity of the immediate aftermath of suicide, when an friend in our community killed himself, I wrote this as a private letter to the family, something that I could just drop off at the door without intruding too much on a very private grief. They invited me in, and I spent a couple of hours with them and left the letter for them. Many months later, I ran into the victim’s octogenarian mother, who was not part of my initial visit to the family,  at a local event and she pulled me aside and asked me to please publish the letter as a column because it had helped their family begin the journey of grieving the suicide of a son, husband and father.

Of the over 200 columns I wrote, this one still gets people seeking me out and requesting a copy for someone that they know who has a suicide to grieve.

It occurs to me that I have been writing on grief and love for a long time now, and much of my thinking on grief was becoming well formed at the time I wrote this, which was bine years after my brother’s suicide and four years after our son’s death. It’s taken me another almost fourteen years to start this blog, but I have never stopped writing, so I have a wealth of staged exploration, knowledge and insights, because I wrote.

A final note: Since I wrote this, Canada now has Medical Assistance In Dying for hopeless terminally ill patients. We are exploring these concepts as a people, and possibly extending them to intractable mental illness and possibly dementia, which are more complex situations than terminal illness tends to be. 

One Wrong Turn by Peter H. Ratcliffe

Published Hudson-St. Lazare Gazette September 2009

More than four thousand Canadians kill themselves each year, with the vast majority being men.

In September 2000, my youngest brother Michael killed himself at age 43, leaving a loving widow, two children, two brothers, a sister, two loving parents and an extended family a lifetime of grieving pondering more questions than he answered quickly one morning with a rope.

My sister once chided me for saying clearly and directly that “Mike killed himself”, suggesting I could find more polite or sensitive ways to voice his final act. “He took his own life” was one several gentler suggestions she made. Mike’s act wasn’t polite or sensitive; suicide is never polite or sensitive, so to this day I use the “killed himself” to properly describe the violence he committed on himself and his family and friends. Suicide is a shocking abandonment of the deepest trust we share with a loved one; there is no polite or sensitive descriptor I could use.

Suicide is often described as a selfish act. I believe that when we live a life full of family and friends that our own life is no longer simply ours to decide what to do with. In any good life, our lives and souls become intertwined and conjoined to so many by blood, love, friendship and community. We can’t kill ourselves without doing major damage to those we have conjoined to us. So, it’s not just our life we’d take, but also many good parts of all of those lives touching and being touched by us. Perhaps that sense of family, friends and community pulls most back from the edges of despair they might find. Unfortunately some only find a blinding darkness that isolates them from those saving graces and they can’t find their way back.

The sole suicide I might be able to find personal understanding and compassion for would be a terminally ill patient in intractable suffering with no treatment options or hope of improvement. Usually, those victims have discussed that option to some form of acceptance with those closest to them and the trauma is mitigated by preparation and answering of the obvious questions we must ask. I refuse to judge those who choose that path because I can’t walk in their shoes, but I hope I’d choose to fight for one last breath surrounded by those I love.

Those of us left behind when someone kills himself or herself are referred to as survivors of a suicide. On the psychological trauma scale we have endured one of the most traumatic events a soul can experience. We survivors have suffered a random act of violence to our own lives; I’ve often called these events drive by shootings in our own life. We survived, but we will carry scars on our soul from that event for the rest of our life. Unless we heal and find strength, a significantly higher percentage of us will kill ourselves, encounter addiction, battle depression and a myriad of mental and physical health problems. This is the road we’ve been left on would never be our choice, but where we go from here is our only choice.

One of the great tragedies of suicide is that we don’t talk about it, but bury it. Professional media correctly doesn’t cover suicide unless it’s linked to a serious crime or is a very high profile public person. The view is that publishing information about suicides brings copy cats or might break down a barrier for those most at risk and who might be close to or contemplating killing themselves. The downside to that lack of coverage is that suicide is much more prevalent than most people think, and survivors are more isolated and less apt to talk or seek help. In the months after Mike’s suicide, I was shocked at the number of people who came to me and talked about suicides in their own family. I also felt less alone and less different for those discussions. Without open honest discussion, the rate of suicide will continue to climb, so I encourage survivors to talk to each other and help each other heal. We’re not alone, there are far too many of us survivors. We are unique in our experience and understanding of one of life’s great tragedies.

At the very central root of suicide is mental illness. No one with a completely healthy mind kills himself or herself. The mental illness that took this person from us may have been a life long struggle, or it may have been a singular sudden fit of irrational behavior. We may argue forever about which it was, it was probably somewhere in the middle, and we will never really know.

In any case, I eventually came to the comfortable conclusion that the man who killed my brother wasn’t the gentle caring Mike we knew as a son, brother, husband, father and friend. For that one deadly moment, a different Mike took over and destroyed that fine man we knew. Perhaps our Mike had silently battled inner demons and never reached out to any of us for help. Perhaps it was a sudden impulse on a moment of despair. Don’t ask the questions we can’t ever answer, spend your energy remembering the good you knew.

One of the issues that can gnaw at the survivors is questioning why exactly did they kill themselves. I suspect that even if there were a note or message that we couldn’t or shouldn’t trust anything that was said in a time of deepest despair. It is much better to cherish the memory of many years of a fine soul’s life in a balance of significance against that one terrible moment and self-destructive act that became beyond their control.

In my healing journey from Mike’s suicide, my thinking became much clearer. On Mike’s journey along the road of life, Mike had made many thousands of good turns to better places and a better life. Mike wasn’t afraid to change paths in life; he changed directions for good reasons and to great outward success. Mike was a loving, happy, proud, productive, valuable part of a family and society. He worked hard and built a life and family most would envy.

One morning at home Mike found himself in a dreadful place he didn’t recognize. He couldn’t or wouldn’t reach out to anyone for directions or help. He couldn’t see backwards to where he came from, or forward to where he thought was going. He couldn’t sense the value in his life or the love around him each day. On one side of his path was an immense cliff he knew he couldn’t possibly climb and on the other side was a dark quiet bottomless abyss he couldn’t understand but he felt was calling him. Mike, for reasons he himself most likely didn’t understand made that one deadly wrong turn of his entire good life and killed himself.

We must never lose sight of the value and meaning in our lives. We must never lose sight of those we love and those who love us. Those thoughts are multiplied for we the wounded survivors of a suicide. We survivors can understand and must comfort and support each other and do our best to make sure we don’t find ourselves one day on that path to a wrong turn.

We can spend the rest of our lives wondering and arguing amongst ourselves about what killed Mike and we’ll exhaust ourselves without ever really understanding. Or we can spend the rest of our lives together remembering all the great days and turns we loved in Mike’s wonderful life. I choose to only remember the great loving, laughing Mike.

I encourage every survivor of a suicide to compassionately try to imagine the immense pain that our loved one found themselves in that one terrible last day of their life. A pain so real and intense that it completely blinded them to everything of value in their life and left them with only the conclusion that killing themselves would fix the pain. Then find it in your heart to forgive them for that one wrong turn they made in a wonderful life. Find it in your heart to forgive them for the damage, betrayal, questions, confusions and challenges they left behind for you.

Drive any anger or darkness in your souls away and fill those empty voids with the wonderful loving memories of a dear loved one we lost who made one and only one really wrong turn. In honour of those memories of your love, find your way along this road to eventual healing.

Part of the ancient human instinct for survival is to not show weakness or fear. It’s a defense against predators, to appear strong in all ways, to increase the chance of survival by fooling predators into thinking that you are stronger than you really are, hoping the predators choose weaker appearing victims. This process likely predates the evolution of the emotion of love, but it remains with us. This process closes us to others when we grieve, sometimes to destructive effect. 

Society seeks strength and diminishes weakness, so there is immense pressure when grieving loss to appear to be strong. This is one of the most destructive things we do around grief, because it treats love that overwhelms someone as a weakness and promotes the resulting tears are weakness. The process of hiding grief from the public eye is isolating and dangerous. Grieving is not weakness, it is not an affliction, grief is a healthy natural part of life, grief is not a disability.

We need to talk more about love that we shared, we need to shine our love on that and illuminate the memory of a person without fearing that we will appear weak by appearing to others as vulnerable. This is probably the root of males having problems processing and expressing grief, our inability to communicate how we men are feeling. It creates a divide, an isolation within couples, within families and within communities.

The best eulogies are tearful, full of choke points and broken speech. Nothing is worse than a deadpan delivery emotionless eulogy that reads like a historical timeline. Perhaps I am biased, I have written and delivered those emotional eulogies that tapped into my deepest points of love and connected the mourners to them to the point that brought their tears. We are not weak when we cry, we are not vulnerable to harm because we are emotional, we are opening ourselves to share our love and our pain and to share care among the survivors. And we do no damage when our words make others cry from remembering a life. 

People say to me “I don’t know what to say to someone who has lost a loved one”. The simple answer is that saying nothing is always the wrong choice, because it doesn’t open any emotional connections, it doesn’t share your love for the person who died, and most of all it doesn’t share your love for the person who survives the loss and finds themselves grieving.

Too often we dwell on how the person died, the few months, days or minutes at the end of a life full of love. When we focus ourselves on the death, we ignore and push back the entire life of a person. So when we speak of the dead, speak of the life not the death.

I am often criticized because I say that the time for criticism ends when we die. After we die, are no longer available to defend or explain ourselves from personal attacks. If a bad person dies, they can inflict no more damage and we should feel some relief from that, but there is no longer a point in discussing the failings of a person who has died. If this constriction is uncomfortable, then you have no place in the circle of those grieving.  

We are entitled to choose who we will grieve, we are not entitled to push our choices onto others who will have had different life experiences with that person and will want the chance to grieve the loss as they see fit.

The great danger in grief is that grief is emotionally isolating at a time when we are in greatest pain from the loss. The mechanics of mourning, visitation, funeral, burial are meant to provide some structure of reverence and guidance as we start grief. Then a few days, or a few weeks after death, we are left alone with our grief. In my experience, the most difficult time in grief usually begins 4-6 weeks after death, when the friends and community that supports us gets back to their normal lives, and the reality and finality of death of a loved one begins to emerge from the fading flames of pain that starts grief.

We must understand our love for someone well enough to be left alone with it, to find small places of solitude to sort and catalog the memories and lessons from this life. The isolation we feel in the aftermath of the rituals of funerals is purposeful so long as we are strong enough to be alone with our grief.

Our grief, our final responsibility for loving this person.

My advice is to set aside specific times of the day when you will be alone with your grief, and other times when you will be with others who are grieving. The alone times are critical, the together times can be less rigid.

In the weeks and months of the summer and fall after our son’s death, when finding sleep was challenging, I cycled at dawn. I could cry with no one to notice, was it wind or grief causing the tears? The beauty of nature in our semi-rural area was healing. The expending of physical energy removed tension and unwanted weight. I became physically stronger and calmer. I ended each ride along the lake where he died in a water rescue training accident, on a bench at the Yacht Club he grew up at where he had his dream summer job, and I spoke to him.  Without that daily release of grief and physical energy, I might have exploded internally.

In the decades after my brother’s suicide, I called my parents on the anniversaries of his birth and his death. They never fully released their anger, they have both passed with some part of themselves still angry. On those anniversaries, I did my best to gently try to drain the pent-up anger from them, like draining an infected abscess. We shared tears, we shared memories, and we proved that we hadn’t forgotten. But the pain and anger were always just below the surface of their lives. They had never returned to fully loving life.

We parent on basically two ways: We teach how to be. We teach how not to be. In my case, most of the lessons were loving lessons on how to be. But in grief, they provided me with living examples of how I did not want to be after our son’s death. 

When grieving, it’s as important to find that safe place of comfort to process your thoughts alone as it is to share your thoughts with others who grieve this loss.

Always remember that grief is an evolved process. It is strength, not weakness. Grief is honour, not imposition. Grief is the light of the love lost, not empty darkness. We are meant to grieve shamelessly, not to hide or bury our feelings for a false show of strength.

Be well, seek peace and resolve to grieve loss honestly and without shame.

With a technician’s spirit, and once I had modelled my soul (see: https://distillinggrief.com/2023/04/24/a-model-of-a-soul/ ) as an invisible reservoir where we store and release love, I realized that grief had emptied me of most or perhaps all of the love in my soul. We often hear people describe grief as a dark place, and the loss of our son had turned me into a black hole where love had died.

I needed to find or build love to refill my soul, but like most people, love had usually come easily to my life, so love was not entirely a conscious process for me. Over time, I sought a better definition of love to allow me to recognize and build the love that I needed to refill and rebuild my damaged soul.

Through grief, I have come to understand love as a form of life force energy that can flow without friction over great distances. In many ways the energy of love resembles the energy of light. Light from the beginnings of time carries images of our universe from the beginnings of time, if we have sensitive enough imaging hardware. Love from previous generations remains accessible to those who seek it. When we connect with our history and roots, we engage with the love that those generations have left behind as memories, when we gather as family we refresh and spread the bright love that remains.

Light can warm us over great distances, and light is required by life. We don’t fully understand light in our physical world, and we can’t fully understand love either. But, without needing to understand love, we can feel when the presence of love warms our soul, and we feel cold when there is no love.

Our definitions and understandings of both light and love are based almost entirely on perceptions of the effect of having the it, and of not having it. Light and darkness, the brightness of love and darkness of absence of love. The warmth of light, the warm feelings of love. We fear darkness, we fear a lack of love.

I believe that the energy, or at least the understanding of all of the past loves that we have shared remains accessible, if we look deep enough and are sensitive enough to remain connected to that love it will outlast our lifetime. The journey of grief is an exploration of those memories so that we can find them again when we need them later in life, either to teach or to be taught.

I also define part of love’s energy as a form of gravity, another not fully understood physical force. Gravity holds and cradles us to our planet while still allowing freedom of motion and change. It’s an invisible but universal force that is critical to the formation and existence of life itself. Love has gravity. We speak of being grounded in love, of building a life on a foundation of love, yet those foundations of love are weightless and can follow us through life.

We find much evidence of this gravity like force of love in our conscience. Our conscience is our soul’s self-protection mechanism. Nothing is more protective of the love contained in our soul than our conscience. Conscience reminds us to not put our life and the love that it contains at risk. Conscience reminds us to protect the lives and loves of those around us, even those people that we don’t know.

It is via conscience that we take pride in and protect our relationships of love, and so it is by conscience that we can love life over not just a moment, but over a lifetime. It is by conscience that others might feel safe in sharing love with us, and accepting love from us. Conscience forces us to try to give some love back when we accept love from someone, a process that amplifies the love shared and love received, which is the very basis of friendship, community and of lifetime love.

Love is a life force energy that flows between human souls through connections that are made because of human passions.

We are each born to an existence of unknown duration. We humans gather and share the life force energy of love to change our existence into a life that we love living. Love is what changes the existence we are born into into a life that we love living, so logically love is life.

Without enough love in our lives, we exist but don’t really live. This is evidenced in the numbness that begins grief. Deep pain from the wounds of loss, deep numbness as we lose our will to love life, in varying degrees, for a period beginning immediately after the death of a loved one. Going from loving life to merely existing is like being put in a prison, a hopeless hollow feeling. This is not fatal, it’s not permanent, it’s a call to action, a warning that your own personal reserves of love have dropped and need your attention.

We will become mechanics in grief, looking for the leaks of our own life force energy of love and repairing each of them so our reservoir (soul) can refill with love to a comfortable, or hopefully even joyous level of once again loving life. 

Be well, seek peace, and understand that your own reserves of love are held in your soul so that you can love living this life, even after loss.