Working with those who grieve is a sacred privilege that takes tremendous compassion; and tremendous compassion, takes tremendous heart. The toll to those who choose to walk with those who are lost in the wilderness of grief, can be high. 

Every day, grief is living among us. It is part of the human condition. For me, the past 23 years have been at times a marinade of grief, and one I have willingly saturated myself in. 

These days, as I begin to slowly move away from what has been my working life, I now find whole days that come and go with no drama or trauma or visible reminders of grief. They are usually days when I do not leave home. But, for the past 2  decades I have felt like I needed to be fully aware, every day, of living and dying and all that comes in between and beyond those two things; I have had a hyper sensitivity to grief.

Understanding that grief is not something that lives outside of us or something we leave behind at the end of the day has helped me understand the value and purpose grief has in fully living life. Grief has so much to teach us, invaluable lessons, and lessons that come no other way than through loss.

Living with an understanding that everyone has a story that includes grief helps me have the the soft belly/strong back so often spoken of in yoga practice and so necessary for compassion. And even though there are days when it feels as though the world is trying to show me otherwise, the power of a compassionate heart cannot be over rated. And, it isn't free; it comes at a cost. It requires us to look inward, at our own losses, our own sorrows, and to stand directly in front of them. For many people, that is not an easy task. 

When I chose to work in EOL, I knew my own life no longer belonged only to me. When I worked in our local cancer center, it belonged, as well, to those who allowed me to come alongside when serious illness interrupted the life they had been living. People newly diagnosed with life-limiting diseases, people making choices about which way to go when they come to a fork in the road. 

People who were just living their life until that moment when their physician found a shadow, or a lump, or a marker that was 'off'. And also, those people caring for a loved one as they move through their end of life, people who helplessly watch every day as someone they love slowly slips away. 

When I worked in hospice my life was shared with the nurses and CNA's, the administrators and the volunteers who cared for our patients and their families with such love and tenderness and staunch commitment.

And when death comes, those people left behind who must learn how to want to live again, how to do their living for the rest of whatever time they have, without the presence of someone they've never known life without, or perhaps, someone, they gave life to, or perhaps, just someone they knew and loved.

It helps, to believe strongly, that pain and beauty co-exist, that comforting lies and unpleasant truths can walk hand in hand. 

That sanitizing grief diminishes it. I never wanted to be that person who tries to clean up the truth about sadness and grief. 

It's a messy business. 

And, it's a beautiful business. One that has enriched my life beyond measure. 

The moment we understand that all living things die; people, pets, plants, rivers, entire villages, dreams, hopes and futures, is a pivotal moment in our lives.

My experience has been that most of the work, most of us do with that understanding, is in trying our best to avoid it. And then when avoiding it isn't possible we try our best to ignore it. If we do speak of dying, it is usually someone else's dying, not our own. 

I find very few people eager to talk about their own dying.

I heard once that public speaking was the #1 phobia of most American people. As though we actually believe that the odds of being asked to speak in public outweigh the odds that they will be asked to die. Which in some ways is true because we are not asked to die. It is as much a part of being born as breathing is to the continuation of life once we arrive.

Finding a way to comfortably talk about death is as essential to living full and meaningful lives as anything else we will ever do. We truly miss something when we are not able to embrace the truth that we will all one day die. 

Some will say, it isn't that they don't know they will one day die, they just choose not to focus on it, not to discuss it and not to waste their time with it. But, I believe looking at it and talking about it are all as crucial to a healthy, vital, purposeful life as air, water and love.

Maybe, if we shift our way of looking at it, to something we do and not something that happens to us we could engage differently with the process. We could engage differently in the discussions and we could ultimately engage differently in the doing of our dying. It could become something we actually talk about more easily among our family and friends.

A death phobic culture, like the one we live in, makes it hard to do it any differently than we do now. I feel obligated, through the blessings in my life, to make a change in the way death is talked about and in the way it is approached. We can learn through the wisdom of those brave souls who have spent years companioning the dying and companioning the bereaved. 

We can create a new model for how to die and we can begin by asking how well it's working to believe there is no benefit to dying more proactively. When we embrace our eventual death and talk about it among family and friends one immediate benefit is in leaving behind a legacy of more than just brokenness and sorrow. 

These are crucial discussions for all among us who will fail to live forever, and thankfully they are discussions more and more of us are willing to have.

It is not a matter of if we die; it is a matter of when. And not a matter of how, but of how well. 

No matter how good a person you are, how much yoga you do, how many marathons you run or how much broccoli you eat, death is part of your life. So is the pain that comes with the leaving and with the being left. We can learn to do all these things better. In learning better how to move through the agony of leaving or the agony of being left, we will begin to turn a fear of death into a curiosity and a new opportunity for growing compassion.

We can do better. And we can begin by seeing our own dying. When we can do that, it changes what our living means. When the meaning of our lives transforms, so do we. And so does our planet.

We will all suffer, at times, and we will all eventually shed the earth suit known as our body. How we arewith each other in our living, how we are in our suffering and how we are in our dying, makes the difference in whether or not we feel the thread that connects us. 

We are all, living human documents of life. We may all find the source of what we hold sacred in different places and in different ways, but we all do it. We all have a Divine spark. We share this planet with billions of other living human documents, and each one of us has the ability to be restorative and healing. 

We can do it alone, but when we do it collectively, we can, more powerfully be the hope and we can be the healing this planet is so desperately in need of. 

So, I started this with the promise of sharing some thoughts on grief and I kind of fell down a rabbit hole of talking about death and dying. If you continue to download these podcasts, you may as well know now that I do that. I don't mean to but I know I do. And usually it all turns out OK.

Let me share some more thoughts about grief.

The following quote caught my eye one morning. 

“To be most effective at another’s bedside, we must first be comfortable in our own bed.”

This isn’t to say we can’t be effective at all if we haven’t walked in another’s shoes, but there is truth in the statement that to be most effective when putting ourselves in another’s shoes we need to have tried a pair on ourselves. 

Years of living have helped me unfold into who I am today. But it isn’t just the amount of time we stay alive that shapes our hearts to fit well with the hearts of others. Time alone does not do it. Just as time alone does not heal grief. Simply living a long time does not make us wise. The more extreme experiences we have in the years we live; the ones that stop us in our tracks, bring us up short, take our breath away and shatter us, if lived in partnership with the work we do around reconciling them, those, are what make us wise. If we are not interested in processing things that move us emotionally or interested in learning how the outcome might have been different or what role we played in the way it turned out, then we are destined to live a life of continuing to have things happen to us with no understanding of the power we have to influence all of it.

In addition, the predispositions we are born with and what we learn in our environment of origin also play a part in our ability to move through life experiences in a way that either hinder or feed being open to connecting to others. When I first begin to work with a grieving person we explore what their family of origin taught them about how to move through losses in life. Until we absolutely have to, we do not usually want to look at what it means to mourn well. As a result, grief work often begins as a kind of crisis work. Someone suffers a monumental shift in their life, usually due to a death, and the wilderness of grief swallows them whole. It can be a very frightening place to be alone. Grief is one of the most vulnerable emotions we have. A good grief counselor can walk into that wilderness, come alongside the bereaved and be perfectly content with just being there. A good grief counselor understands that it is not their responsibility to find the way out; it is enough to just be there. Together the path will become clear. 

It is not necessarily those who die that do the deeper teaching, but also those who are left behind after the death of a loved one. That is not to say the ones who die do not have a lot to teach but at some point their work is so private and inward that it becomes inaccessible from the outside; as it should be. At some point, taking our leave from this life becomes a sacred and private dance between each one of us and our co-creator. 

With the current trend in our country for Hospice admissions to occur very late in a person’s journey through illness, patients, on admission, are often already at the point where meaningful dialogue is unlikely. When a referral comes early or the person decides that treatment is no longer the option for them, the richness of time to develop a relationship easily results in life lessons unattainable anywhere else, but more often than not, my teachers became the ones who were soon to be left behind.

The fascination I carry for grief work developed slowly. My mother’s death in 2000 brought a keen awareness to how loss influences our lives. Although hers was by no means the first death I experienced it was, and always will be, undoubtedly the most meaningful. It was the experience of her dying that brought me to work with hospice and it was there that I began to explore the layers of grieving a person moves through after significant loss.

When we companion the dying and hold space for the survival and healing of the living; we are in a place of profound vulnerability. Since many of us lack training or experience in companioning others through grief, here are some simple things to remember when you encounter a friend in grief. These tools can be helpful in that they may not be therapeutic per se but they will not do any harm and anyone can do them easily.

1. Have no answers

Give your presence; be with them in the moment; listen.

2. Help them, if you can, to identify and name their feelings

When we can put names on feelings they can then become more manageable; once identified they lose some of the power to throw us off balance through surprise attacks.

3. Encourage them to share

Sometimes after long illness, the bereaved may feel confused by the depth of their grief. After all, they have had months to get used to the idea that the one they were caring for would die. Also the death, like all deaths, may signify the loss of a number of roles in someone’s life; caretaker, spouse, sibling, friend, parent. These can complicate the grieving process. In sudden “snatch-away” losses, the feelings of stunned numbness are designed to protect us from the full impact of the loss. Helping someone understand the normalcy of this can help alleviate some of the fear and confusion. If you encounter a friend in grief and do not have the time to encourage them to share, be as compassionate and present as possible and then make the time to check in soon afterward. Call or text or email them and tell them when you do have time to have a cup of coffee. Or a cup of tea. Or to take a walk. Don't ask them to let you know. Because they do not know. They may not be able to take that initiative. So ask, may I come by and take a walk with you tomorrow morning?

4. At least initially and at least until invited to by the bereaved, avoid all magical-thinking-talk

Magical-thinking-talk is when we say things like:

“At least now he’s out of pain.”

“She suffered for so long. You should be happy for her that she is free.”

“He lived a long life.”

“You’re young. You can always have more children.”

“It was God’s will so there will be something good that comes out of it.”

Most of us want, when we come upon someone who has suffered a significant loss, to try to make them feel better. We try to take away their pain. We don't necessarily understand that their pain is right where they need it to be. It's OK. It's hard and it's hard to watch, but it's still OK. What they need, almost always, is for someone to hear them and NOT try to take it away. They need someone to see them and still love them. They need someone to say, “I am happy to see you and I am so sorry for your loss.” or “I am so happy to see you and I am so sorry for the pain you are in”. 

Words like these do not ask a person to be other than they are. Words like these, make a person feel seen and valued and understood. Words like these make the world seem a little safer and a little less frightening.

Try this, the next time you run into a friend who has suffered a loss, try just being present with them. 

I'm sure there will be future podcasts about grief. After all, there is a never ending source of material coming at us every day to work with.

This is Sean Jeung. Thank you for spending this time with me. I hope you'll join me again, Where the Veil grows Thin