My thoughts on Grief when someone dies

When our people die, we inevitably feel a void as we miss their presence in our lives. Life feels fractured and splintered especially when it was a significant relationship.

It’s comforting to acknowledge though that the extent to which we loved our person is relative to the amount of grief we are likely to feel when they are gone. Grief and Love are twins, woven together from the beginning of time.

Grief can be excruciating and exquisite, wild. loud and messy, lonely, silent and still. And in all its colours and expressions it can truly transform us into a wiser version of who we were before if we can embrace it with open arms.

Through grief we have an opportunity to alchemise gold and wisdom in our lives, but we must be gritty and brave and really face it head on. Keeping grief warm, moving and flowing in the body rather than it being cold, stuck and unexpressed is a powerful metaphor given to me by Emma Beattie, Before & After Life who trains under Weller’s lineage.

Strategies to not grieve and things to watch out for that keep grief cold stuck and unexpressed include: toxic positivity, taking care of others, keeping on keeping on, over working, rigid or fixed thinking, suppressing emotion, being overly controlling, blaming others, using substances, over socialising.

I learned more about Weller’s work through a 7 week training with Emma and the value of exploring Weller’s work impressed itself upon me. It has opened me to new possibilities in my own and companioning that of others.

Francis Weller teaches that with a willingness to take up the apprenticeship of grief, allowing it a seat at the table, we can experience a powerful reshaping of our character in the underworld. “Its an incredibly fertile ground with a webbing of hundreds of roots that drink in silence”.

Grief is a core human faculty that can be cultivated, and is not just a maelstrom of drama. It is more positively perceived as a human condition that binds us together as humans. Grief done together allows us to find ourselves.

Community containment in grief refers to the ways a community experience, express, and cope with loss and bereavement together. Funerals wakes and memorials provide such a valuable structured way for family and friends to come together, acknowledge their shared loss, and lean into each other for healing.

The 2 people I have referenced here include:

Emma Beattie | Founder, Before & After | Life:
Emma brings an animistic, post humanist, creative and poetic lens to caring, deathing and grieving. Her work, training and studies intersect a long line of lived experienced with personal loss. It’s from this place she offers creative anchorage through non clinical supports and facilitation for people, families, communities and workplaces.
https://beforeandafterlife.com.au/
https://beforeandafterlife.substack.com/p/feeding-unwelcome-guests

Francis Weller | Author of “The Wild Edge of Sorrow”:
https://www.francisweller.net/