Anam Cara

We Grieve for Ourselves

Gradually, you begin to understand more deeply that you are grieving primarily over your own loss. The departed one is gone home and is gathered now in the tranquillity of Divine Belonging. When you realize that it is for yourself that you are grieving, you begin to loosen your sorrowful hold on the departed one.

Part of what has had you holding on so desperately is the fear that if you let go, you would lose that person forever. Now you begin to glimpse the possibilities of being with him or her in a new way. If you loosen the sad grip of grief, a new belonging becomes possible between you. This is one of the most touching forms of belonging in the world: the belonging between us and our loved ones in the unseen world. It is a subtle and invisible belonging for which the crass obviousness of modern culture has no eye. Yet this invisible belonging is one in which so many people participate.

Though the silent weeping of your heart lessens, you get on, more or less, with your life, yet a place is kept within you for the one who is gone. No other will ever be given the key to that door. As years go on, you may not remember the departed every day with your conscious mind. Yet below your surface mind, some part of you is always in the person’s presence. From their side, our friends in the unseen world are always secretly embracing us in their new and bright belonging. Though we may forget them, they can never forget us. Their secret embrace unknowingly shelters and minds us.

The bright moment in grief is when the sore of absence gradually changes into a well of presence. You become aware of the subtle companionship of the departed one. You know that when you are in trouble, you can turn to this presence beside you and draw on it for encouragement and blessing. The departed one is now no longer restricted to any one place and can be with you anyplace you are. It is good to know the blessings of this presence. An old woman whose husband had died thirty years earlier told me once that the last thing she did each night before sleep was to remember him. In her memory, she went over his face detail by detail until she could gather his countenance clearly in her mind’s eye. She had always done this since he died, because she never wanted him to fade into the forgetfulness of loss.

While it is heartbreaking to watch someone in the throes of grief, there is still a beauty in grief. Your grief shows that you have risked opening up your life and giving your heart to someone. Your heart is broken with grief, because you have loved. When you love, you always risk pain. The more deeply you love, the greater the risk that you will be hurt. Yet to live your life without loving is not to have lived at all. As deeply as you open to life, so deeply will life open up to you. So there is a lovely symmetry and proportion between grief and love. Conamara is a dark landscape full of lakes and framed with majestic mountains. If you ask any person here how deep a lake is, they say that they often heard the ancestors say that the lake is always as deep as the mountain near it is high. The invisible breakage of grief has the same symmetry. Meister Eckhart said, “Depth is height.” There is a haunting poem from the third century B.C. by Callimachus which imaginatively captures grief and the richness of absence as memory:

They told me, Heraclitus,

They told me you were dead.

They brought me bitter news to hear

And bitter tears to shed.

I wept as I remembered,

How often you and I

Had tired the sun with talking

And sent him down the sky.

But now that you are lying,

My dear old Carian guest,

A handful of grey ashes,

Long, long ago at rest.

Still are your gentle voices,

Your nightingales, awake—

For death he taketh all away

But these he cannot take.

Translated by William Cory