Effective Grieving - 27oct21

In the sheer ignorance

only possible in the mind

of a nineteen year old,

upon learning of the suicide

of my stepfather

I incorrectly assumed

that repressing my emotions

was the height of spirituality.

Although my intentions were golden,

I set myself up for profound depression.

Three decades later,

when cancer took my mother,

my grief was informed

by the twenty-third chapter of the Tao Te Ching

where we read,

“…If you open yourself to loss,

you are at one with loss

and you can accept it completely.”

I walked in profound vulnerability

to every wave and eddy

of emotion, memory and imagination:

weeping, and journaling, and meditating.

Thus I was able to weather the second loss

much more skillfully than I did the first.

like Yoda jumping over clankers

in the first episode of the Clone Wars.

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