Letting Go: Grief and Attachment

Today we explore how our attachments to physical objects transform during grief. Loss requires us to reconsider what we hold onto and why, as we weave grief into the fabric of our lives rather than trying to overcome it.

• Grief isn't something to "get over" but something we integrate into our lives
• Moving to a new home revealed how many things I was willing to let go
• St. Ignatius teaches about "disordered attachments" that keep us from being closer to God
• Examining our attachments can help us move forward in grief

SPIRITUAL DIRECTION WHILE GRIEVING IS AVAILABLE

Art:  https://www.etsy.com/shop/vasonaArts?ref=seller-platform-mcnav
and  https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/candee-lucas

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F2SFH4Z6

Music and sound effects today by:   via Pixabay

Chapters

• 0:19 Welcome to Solace: Soul Plus Grief
• 1:10 Understanding Loss and Grief
• 2:42 Moving Houses and Letting Go
• 5:25 My Father's Mona Lisa
• 8:44 My Mother's Portrait of Me
• 11:45 Examining Our Attachments in Grief
• 12:42 Closing Thoughts and Contact Information

Transcript

candee: 0:44

Welcome to Solace: Soul + Grief. I'm glad you're here. My name is Candee Lucas. I'm a grief chaplain and a spiritual director. I was trained by the Jesuits at Santa Clara University and El Retiro Jesuit Retreat Center in Los Altos, C alifornia.

candee: 1:10

Loss is one of the most human and common phenomenon of being on the earth. If we are growing, if we are living, we are experiencing loss. The loss of a loved one can be the most excruciating experience of our lives. It has profound psychological, emotional, physical and spiritual effect on our bodies, our minds and our souls. When I started this ministry, I wanted to create a catalog of information that people could use as they needed. Some episodes are suitable for people in fresh grief. Others are more suitable for those who have been experiencing grief for some time. Please use the catalog in this way. I have found it's also useful to go back to an episode I found particularly helpful or particularly meaningful and revisit it, because as we travel along, we change, life changes, things change, our spirituality changes, our goals change and our relationship with our loved one who's no longer with us changes dramatically. Please remember you're always welcome in this healing circle of love and support.

candee: 2:43

I recently moved to a new house, closer to the water, and I'm finding out many surprising things about myself, and I wondered, as I made these discoveries, if those might too be useful for those of us still grieving and I use the phrase "still grieving because there's losses that we've suffered that we'll never quite get through or get over. Grief isn't something to get over, as most of you know. It's something that we weave into our lives. We weave into the fabric of our lives so that we may keep the memories close to our hearts. One of the things I noticed about this process is how many things I'm willing to let go. They seem important. They seemed important in the first place.

candee: 3:31

When the idea of moving into a new house came up, I thought maybe this is less important than I realized. I recognize my old attachment, and we've talked here many times about attachments, and especially those attachments that serve no purpose as we move forward in our lives. But so, as I look around the room, I know that one of the things that was important to me is a library, for instance, but given the opportunity to create a new library or curate a new library out of the existing one-- I realize I will probably end up curating a new library, but as I sit here in the new house it seems less important now, and so I thought of my father, who died in October. I thought of how it was necessary to move him into a locked facility the last year of his life, as he had taken to wandering and there were several obvious hazards in the family home that he'd been living in. And so I made that difficult decision to move him.

candee: 4:47

And when I talked to him about it, as I was asking him particularly if there were things he wanted to take with him, that list was surprising. It was some books about airplanes, about birds, especially pigeons, which he loved from a very young age, and some books about horses, and it was a painting that he'd done many, many years ago for my grandmother of the Mona Lisa. He had created it from a postcard and was shocked to see, when he finally saw the original in the Louvre, that his Mona Lisa was much larger than the original and the coloring much brighter. And yet somehow his beige and brown portrait rather than the odd green that the portrait now has looks quite appropriate. He was very proud of that painting. He mentioned several times to me that he had had it in the background on some Zooms he had done and people had made pleasant remarks about it, favorable remarks about it, and so that was one of the things that he wanted to take with him to the new facility, the new place he would be living. And in those first few days there he is in many pictures sitting under that portrait, looking vaguely confused, a little bit sad, but also somewhat proud of the portrait behind him.

candee: 6:26

Now I might be projecting what his feelings really were, because they kind of mirror my feelings at the time. I was not happy that he had to move from his home, but I also knew it was no longer safe for him to stay there and I also knew my stepmom was not able to continue caring for him on her own. However, a few weeks passed and he asked that the portrait be removed, and when we questioned him about that he just said I don't want to look at it anymore. So we took it down and put it in the closet, but it wasn't very long before he asked that it be put back in its place. What does this story have to do with grief? It has to do with attachment.

candee: 7:20

My father was very attached to that painting. He loved it. He thought it was one of his best works. He was proud that people commented on it when he told them he had made that painting, and he liked to tell stories about it, about how it didn't match the one in the Louvre. But somehow, during the transition from home to home, the attachment to that painting ruptured. It no longer provided the comfort, the reminders of his own life or whatever it meant to him, and he asked that it be taken down. He refused to give any of us an answer about why he wanted it removed and luckily, a few weeks later we were able to replace it, because, of course, there was nothing in that room that was him or his. There were a few pieces of odd furniture, a chair from home, but mostly my sister had purchased some new furniture that would fit into the room. So I thought of that as I was moving and packing up various things.

candee: 8:30

Do I have a Mona Lisa that I'm attached to or maybe no longer attached to? I do have something similar. In the 90s my mother painted a portrait of me from a photograph I had taken then in my mid-30s. In those days all the rage was glamour photos and so I had a glamour photo taken and she had used one of those photos to paint a portrait of me. Now I treasure that portrait because she made it, but to tell you the truth, it sits in the back and the bottom of my closet because it does embarrass me for some reason. I don't know if it's the fancy way I look because I truly don't look like that most of the time and didn't--- not even in my 30s; or the way she painted it with such tenderness that I can't bear to look at it.

candee: 9:30

Initially, I had this idea of putting it over my new fireplace and that it would be a big laugh for people. A portrait of me over the fireplace and then I thought how wrong it would be for people to laugh at that portrait my mother took such care to create. So maybe that's my close attachment, the kind my dad had to his Mona Lisa, on one hand so proud and on the other hand a memory of a past he could no longer bear. Because his portrait was more than 50 years old. He'd done it in the mid-50s, as I said, for my grandmother because she had a place for it in her living room. But understanding that my father thought that this piece was his finest work made it all the more treasure. I'm sure my stepmom took it home after the funeral, where it was displayed prominently, and in truth I wouldn't want to have it. It reminds me too much of him.

candee: 10:40

So there we are with our attachments, some good, some bad, many temporal, many not explaining to us what we need or why we need it, or why things are important and if that importance is transitory. So I urge you to look at your own attachments, whether they be to objects, objects that were important to our loved ones while they were still with us on earth, or attachments to certain coping mechanisms that worked for us in the past but no longer work now. Yes, St. Ignatius teaches us about disordered attachments, and what he means is, if there is something in our lives, an object, an emotion, an unresolved issue that keeps us from being closer and more open to God, we need to resolve it. Looked at in that way, we can see how it might be easier to put things down, to put them away, to put them in the past. All of what we do as we grieve is aimed at making us closer to God and God closer to us, making our hearts and our lives more open to him and his experience in our lives and our experience in his life.

candee: 12:22

That concludes another episode. A new one drops every Friday morning. You can find us on Apple, Amazon or Spotify. If you're interested in more information about grief groups, spiritual direction while grieving or a general question about Ignatian spirituality, my contact information is in the show notes. Please be very gentle with yourselves this week and to others. Travel with God at your side. Vaya con Dios.