The Sacred Time

“I couldn’t find anyone to tell me each minute, whatever I experience is a valid, beautiful moment—however tragic it is.  That’s what I needed to hear: Grief is a sacred time in our lives, and an important one…I’m looking at grief as a transformational process…the time that starts when something happens that turns our world upside down and we lose our old normal, until the new normal begins.”--Melodie Beattie, The Grief Club, pages 4-5.

 I connected with this description the first time I read it.  I didn’t know for a while, however, that this was what I needed—and what I still need.  I was firmly formed in what I call the “Culture of Bereavement Orthodoxy” (to which I have given the affectionate acronym, “COBO”).  I thought I knew what grieving was about.  Grieving was a process of recovery from a mortal wound.  Yet, I knew this wasn’t right.

I knew from my own experience and observations and work that “recovery” simply doesn’t happen.  “Recovering” does take place, but that’s different animal altogether.  I knew from writing about forgiveness that recovering from a deep hurt requires integrating that hurt and the associated scar tissue into a new identity and a new understanding of God, myself, and the universe.

Beattie has it right.  Grieving is about transformation rather than recovery.

I must describe my current life as better than ever.  Any other description would be untrue.  I have a wonderful life eighteen months after Anne’s death.  Yet, that description seems overloaded with difficulties.  I had a wonderful life once before as well.  Now I have a different wonderful life.

Some people and relationships and things have traveled with me into this “alternative” future.  Some people and relationships and things have taken a path now separate from my life.  Some people and relationships and things have remained fixed in my past and have been perhaps even been discarded.  So the image of “better” is a very limited one.  It’s a different wonderful life.  I had no reason before to imagine or envision such a life.  I have no reason now to imagine or envision a life other than the one I have.

In an article on “continuing bonds” with the deceased, Nigel Field talks about the process of transformation.  I will discuss the whole idea and experience of continuing bonds on another day.  Field, however, describes the two dimensions of this new life as “deconstruction” and “reconstruction.”  Deconstruction requires relinquishing the “expectations, beliefs and goals” connected to the former life. 

In neurological terms, these former expectations, beliefs and goals are well-worn chemical and electrical pathways.  They don’t fade from consciousness right away.  It does indeed take time for those “old-normal” experiences to subside and to be less painful.  It took a while for me to stop feeling like a stranger in the midst of my new life and to start seeing my existence once again as truly “mine.”  That’s what the process of deconstruction feels like from the inside.

The other dimension is “reconstruction.”  A whole new set of pathways and pathway networks gets built one experience, memory and challenge at a time.  That new set becomes the “new-normal.”  We really are all in that process all the time.  It is, as I have noted before, simply the pace of the deconstruction/reconstruction dance that makes things uncomfortable.

That dance is the indeed the time of mystery, I think, to which Melodie Beattie refers.  More and more, I am awed by the new joys and hopes that have come in the midst of loss and grief.  I have been surprised repeatedly that this is how things are really supposed to work.  It really is the case that grief is replaced by gratitude.