Grief touching us
Image: Credit to the Marginalian re-telling the story of The Shadow Elephant - a story about lightening the load of our heaviest emotions.
Sadness is with us. A young boy in Bendigo, Central Victoria, died yesterday as he was hit by a truck while walking to school.
‘Talk to your children about your feelings’, was the message from the school, a community now grieving the loss of a student.
As a counsellor who has also worked in suicide bereavement, I know this is the right message - putting words to feelings - is what is needed, if we can. And, if we cannot do it right now, then when we are ready. This makes me think about different acts of listening.
Don’t press past what a person is willing and able to talk about - but let them know the door is always open for them when they are ready to talk and to be listened to. Perhaps acknowledge that this is difficult to talk about if they have no words.
Listening can also be an act of stepping back, slowing down and just being with someone, asking what they need right now. Saying, if you don’t know what you need now, that is also okay with me. I am here.
So how do we speak about the losses and sorrows that are so painful to put words to, and about the things that for some might feel like these lines from David Whyte’s (2007) poem:
THE WELL OF GRIEF
Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,
turning down through its black water,
to the place we cannot breathe,
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water cold and clear,
I think much of the consolation is in the act of being listened to and also being accepted in whatever way you mourn. Mourning looks different for different people.
The process of mourning is allowing and knowing that, there are many stories that can be told and will be told over the next many months (and years to come) about this loss for those touched deeply by the grief.
But I did not know him well, some might say (inferred): Who am I to feel the twinge of sorrow? To you I say, it is human to feel, as underneath there might be a sadness and another related or unrelated story of grief.
And then, perhaps there’s also a caring for other people expressed in you, feeling what they are feeling.
A care expressed in trying to understand what they are going through.
