When You Are Lost In The Dark: Sitting with Grief

Grief is not an illness. It’s a natural response to loss. You may fear that you won’t survive the pain as the waves of sadness and sorrow come crashing down. It’s hard. It feels unbearable.

If I could capture this emotional pain and fear with a paintbrush, it would look something like 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa', also known as 'The Great Wave' or simply 'The Wave', a woodblock print by the Japanese artist Hokusai.

The wave breaks over you. You are submerged. Eventually, you re-surface, you breathe again and slowly enter calmer waters. This happens over and over until you learn that’s what life is like. There are waves and there are calmer waters. You know how to ride them both. You have grown resilient. You have become a wave rider.

I don’t think it’s always helpful to put a time frame on grief. An expiration date: in three months it’s finished. We all do it differently, and not every loss is the same. 

To be able to cope with feelings of loss and make it through the day, there are times you can only take on one step. And there are times when you can be with your grief. Supported through some quiet time, perhaps, or the love a good friend who is genuinely listening or the help from a counsellor or group. You then can begin to make room for the sadness and other feelings attached to the loss that have been buried and need time and attention to heal. 

I struggle with expressions such as ‘being on a journey’ or ‘lessons of grief’. Who in their right mind would have booked this trip or signed up for this course? 

I‘ve seen grieving patients getting trapped in the search for meaning in what can seem utterly arbitrary and meaningless. They think they’ve failed which magnifies the hurt. Yet there is a journey and there are lessons to draw from the experience of grieving, but they are never straightforward nor clear from the beginning, however much we wish. Only in hindsight, they might be.

So, if you feel lost in the dark right now, that’s okay. The first pain of grief will ease when you begin to acknowledge how you are. When you take a rest from the struggle of trying to make things okay when, clearly, they are not.

“The night will give you a horizon further than you can see,” writes David Whyte in his poem “Sweet Darkness”. “Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own./ There you can be sure you are not beyond love. /The dark will be your home tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see.”

When I am with people who have found a way to sit in the dark sure of love and be with their grief, the conversation often starts with something like: “I would have never chosen this, but …”

The story of Krishna Gotami has always touched my heart. She was a young mother who lived at the time of the Buddha. She had lost her child, and desperate in her grief, she pleads with the Buddha to bring alive her child. He agrees, but only if she can bring him a mustard seed from a house in her village that has not been visited by death. With her dead child still in her arms, she knocks at every door of her village. But instead of finding the mustard seed, people share their stories of loss and grief.

Krishna Gotami realizes that loss is part of life and she is not isolated in her grief. She buries her child and returns to the Buddha who instructs her, that if she wants to awaken, to continually reflect on the truth that all things change and are impermanent. Krishna Gotami is said to have reached enlightenment at the end of her life. 

Grief will break the heart open. It will shatter the sense of safety and belonging. So, do take the time you need to sit and heal when grief enters your life. It has, in fact, entered all our lives with the Covid-19 pandemic. Be kind with yourself and patient, also with others. Through sharing your sadness with others, and witnessing theirs, you will re-connect with life. Things won’t go back to normal, yes, but you will belong again in a deeper way. Grief is natural. It’s a shared human experience and if you let it, it will ‘give you a horizon further than you can see’.

Kirsten DeLeo, author of Present Through The End. A Caring Companion’s Guide For Accompanying The Dying and faculty of Authentic Presence, authentic-presence.org