Grief's Value: Holding Others in Their Pain

July 11, 1985

Using Pain to Heal

On July 11, 1985, my six-year-old daughter Alexa fell from a tree in her babysitter's backyard. She had a spontaneous brain hemorrhage while in the tree. It turned out the hemorrhage was from a malignant brain tumor. After sixteen months of treatment, our darling child died on November 2, 1986. For those of us who have experienced the deep sting of child loss—or any loss—anniversaries bring forth intense feelings and memories. It's important for our continued healing to mark those days, painful though they may be. They are part of our journey toward wholeness and finding joy in life.

July 11, 2019. It's been thirty-four years since July 11, 1985. That's so long. It's a lifetime. It's more than a generation.

I still remember what I wore that day: white pants and a sleeveless dark blue silk blouse. I dressed well because Alexa had her gifted testing that morning and I had taken her to school.

Her IQ tested at 133—with a brain tumor mashing against everything.

It's still so unfair. It will always be unfair. But it doesn't change.

It crushes me and it's so hard to write these words because I want to avoid these feelings. I want to put my pen down, get up, and run—outside, to the kitchen, to the computer. Or pick up my phone. Or fill my empty coffee cup. I don't. Instead, I push myself down and remain seated and continue the flow of words across the lines and filling the page. These many years later, I know that running doesn't help. It doesn't ease the pain. It doesn't change the arc of life and experience—the experience that continues to call to me saying, “Here I am. I am your pain. The only way to hold me and not let me crush you is to use me to heal yourself first and then use me to help heal others.” In a small voice, I accept with tears in my eyes. I say, “Okay. Show me the way to hold someone else in their sorrow today and every day.”

For me, that is the only value to grief . . . to hold others in their pain and help heal their sorrow.

Stopping the Dance of Stress

Shoulders Rise in the Dance of Tension

My shoulders have become an extension of my ear lobes. Far too often recently, I feel them rise, rise, rise in a dance of tension as if they are hands reaching toward the gold hoops in my ears.

This is not the dance I imagine for myself. It lacks the fluid, graceful movements I prefer as I move through life. My imagined dance does not involve clenching, tightening, shoulders rising to where they don’t belong. My imagined dance has me light of foot, floating like mist through an English cottage garden.

Conflict with what I envision and the reality of what I feel as my shoulders tighten begin the ascent to my ears wakes me. I stop the dance of stress and breathe. I speak to myself in a gentle voice. I continue to breathe and lower those shoulders until they return to their proper place. I breathe again into the space and begin my preferred dance.