07/12/2023
Bearing the Unbearable
To all my friends, clients, and future clients, to all who are grieving and especially the non-grieving. I have been inspired to write this after reading a wonderful book called ‘Bearing the Unbearable’ by Joanne Cacciatore.PhD, in my own quest for learning more about grief, and how to understand it more, so I can help and support others, especially in my role as a funeral celebrant.
I have learnt that as a non-griever we can be selfish, putting a time limit on others grief for the sake of our own discomfort or lack of understanding, grief does not wear a watch! Grief can’t be constrained in time or space.
Our grief-phobic culture can throw out empty words and platitudes like “Just think happy thoughts”, “You can choose to be happy” or “Just remember the good time” this relentless ‘Cult of Happiness’ only makes grievers conceal their pain, or shame them into hiding. False happiness or positivity is toxic and cutting ourselves off from a genuine feeling to manufacture another, poisons our souls, by circumventing our suffering we magnify it.
As a non-griever, we should be mindful of what we are asking of those around us, reflecting on how short lived our support and compassion may have been, consumed by our own fears.
Grief is as deep as the depths of love that we have lost, to bypass grief we must bypass love.
Sorrow and contentment, grief and beauty, longing and surrender, can coexist, but we must first feel and inhabit our pain before being able to experience the ‘Unity of opposites’.
Grief’s most piercing message: there is no way around, the only way is through.
When the trauma of grief subsides there will be a continual grieving journey that will contain many bumps in the road, waves, and even black holes; like nature, grief has its own organic rhythm, its own pulse of change.
I make my own apologies for my lack of understanding in the past, but I’m very grateful for this learning now. I pledge to meet grievers with non-judgemental compassion, to provide a place to rest their minds and hearts, with love, and without coercion and scrutiny.
By Isobel North
