Celebrating grief

I am a member of a book club in Vancouver where we have a small Arts council grant to invite local and emerging Canadian authors to come talk to us about their recently published books. In September the author was a British-born woman now living in central BC. Her book ‘The Suitcase & The Jar – Travels with a daughter’s ashes’, was the tale of her dealing with the death of her partner and then her 23-year-old daughter within a year of each other, both from brain tumors. I began the book with some trepidation as there has been a lot of grief in my own life in the recent past, but the past year has taught me to be open and empathetic to others journeys as well as my own. The book was simply written and its honest simplicity it conveyed a powerful message. This message was only further enforced when the author, Becky Livingston came to speak to us in September. Becky exuberated a calm positive energy brimming with life and a desire to share. Her words spoke to my own dealings with grief and trying to make sense of an often incomprehensible world. Two of my favourite lines from her book are:

“When you have lost so much you wrestle with the seductive illusion of certainty”

“Who wants to read a book if you know right from the start how it will end”

I love these lines because they indicate Becky's journey to acceptance of the place where her life has brought her. She celebrates the relationship with her daughter and also her partner, and chooses to embrace her life in all its uncertainty rather than turn her back on the world which has caused her incredible pain. Becky rather sees life as fragile because of her experience and yet in its fragility it is also full of possibilities.

Grief is a powerful emotion, one that can take hold of us and cloud us from surrendering ourselves to the beauty around us. Ultimately the illusion of life is that we have some control over how it unfolds. Once we relinquish that impression, we set ourselves free to celebrate each breath we take. Wednesday the 20^th of November 2019 would have been Jo’s 70^th birthday. She would have loved turning 70, of that I am sure. She refused to submit to a norm of aging actively resisting society’s norms of how one should behave at different periods of their life. I have written much over the past four and a half years both on this blog but also in my own private journals and poems, as to how much her death affected me. Maybe I have reached an acceptance stage, well yes I know I have but it is deeper than that – I refuse to allow Jo’s life to be shaped by her death. I choose instead to celebrate all that she brought to the world and to me.

I considered writing this blog to be published on Wednesday, but I have a different thought for that day. I choose instead to frame my grief as a journey we all experience in different ways and in different times of our lives. There is so much grief in the world today because people allow themselves to be consumed by a striving for some kind of certainty. There is no pre-determined path for each of us, there is not one way of achieving our desires and aspirations, there is not one way to express ourselves in how we choose to live our lives, but there is only one life. If we can allow ourselves to truly embrace the fragility of our existence, to pay attention to the simple in and out of our breath in any given moment, if we can look around and see the simple beauty in a woodpecker on a tree on a rainy mountainside, we can truly begin to celebrate the immense gift of live we have. “Forever is composed of nows” as Emily Dickinson so eloquently put. If we embrace the simplicity and uncertainty of living we can celebrate our nows, and so I celebrate all my griefs.

I grieve the loss of my health for six year - I celebrate how much I have learned about health and well-being in the process

I grieve my bicycle accident in 2011 and how it shaped my life – I celebrate that I wore a helmet and lived to write this blog

I grieve my broken heart – I celebrate how it has helped me grow as a person and fall deeply in-love with myself and my own existence

I grieve being so far away from my sister and my father – I celebrate how physical distance has allowed emotional distance to wither

I grieve how we continue to destroy our natural environment – I celebrate the youth that refuse to give up the fight

I grieve so much injustice and inequality in the world – I celebrate the people taking a stand together to change and I celebrate that I can educate young minds to question what is just and fair

I grieve my most human mother – I celebrate her life and the immense joy she brought to so many, and I feel blessed to have known her as part of my own fragile uncertain road

So take a moment, look up from your electronic device, take a breath and celebrate that you can.