Tag: Grief

Loss and grief are so scary…

I was looking for a piece of art that would capture the despair at the heart of loss. My daughter directed me to Van Gogh’s “At Eternity’s Gate.” On its own, without knowing the title, the image captures the isolation and removal from the external world that pervades us when we’ve suffered a loss. Gripped by grief, we pull into ourselves. Face covered, nearly doubled over with an emotional pain that explodes beyond the mental into the realm of physical hurt, we try to hold ourselves together in the midst of feeling horribly and irreparably torn apart.

Then, there’s the title of the painting. “At Eternity’s Gate” speaks to how we are left, abandoned, as the one we love leaves us. Despite what we may have shared, we come to a point of finitude. We cannot join. We are not invited. We are left out, on the other side of the gate. Even though there may be others who are with us, the feeling of being left behind emphasizes how alone we are in the world.

The radical quality of this experience challenges us when we are in the position to empathize with those who are suffering. We know that what we will say will not and cannot be sufficient. Each person suffers grief in his or her own deeply individual way. For one person, being physically comforted may help to mitigate the feeling of aloneness. For another, being touched may be unbearable as it inadvertently emphasizes the fact that emotional pain cannot be externally soothed. In our desire to offer comfort we feel our own sense of helplessness. We too may be “shut out” despite our honest and sincere efforts.

The process of grieving our losses often involves being able to accept our helplessness against these experiences. Working with someone who can be present with the reality of suffering, who can resonate without trying to eradicate the experience of loss, allows us to move from a position of radical isolation to a sense of mutual presence in our aloneness as we stand at the various thresholds and losses that we will inevitably encounter throughout our relational lives.