“If we are identified with being married to a certain person, with a job, with our very body and life – that’s how deep it goes – there’s not any real peace or freedom because something in us knows that it’s all very fragile. So we are always on some level kind-of tensing against what’s around the corner.” – Tara Brach
When I was 20, I woke one morning in March at 6:30 to the information that my oldest friend had committed suicide. I say ‘information’ because that is the only way that I could process it. The moment that it went into my consciousness, a little part of me shut down. Within an hour of finding this out, I was sitting in a breakfast restaurant mainlining black coffee with a group of close friends. Within 8 hours my basement began to fill with our mutual friends – people who I loved with a passion born of spending teenage years together working at a summer camp – and we huddled together trying to understand our pain.
This morning as I walked to work, Tara Brach’s words on her podcast cracked that shut-off place open for the first time in 16 years.
I’ve written before about feeling like a bad friend. I do not write this for sympathy, but because if I compare myself to who I was until that day, I am a bad friend. I used to be the one who knew what was going on in everyone’s lives, the one who had people over, the one who would drive absurd distances to check in with someone at the merest whiff of unhappiness. Now I don’t answer emails for months, lose phone numbers, and generally hide away from the world. Only a few of those people who I sat and grieved with are still in my life because I let those relationships dwindle until they disappeared. But I think I understand now. All of this is because something in us knows that it’s all very fragile.
That day was the last in a line of three Marches in a row when I lost someone I loved. If I had had to learn any lesson it should have been that life is precious, love everyone fiercely while they are here. (In fact, psychologically I thought I had learned that lesson.) I should have become even more determined to see and talk to and know people. Instead, I started tensing against what was around the corner – because I knew without a doubt that something terrible was – and shut down. The lesson I learned was that it fucking hurts when people die, that there is often shame and guilt and agony surrounding death, and that the safest way for my sensitive heart to proceed was to become unconnected.
It sounds so simple written out like this, but now I can see all of the relationships that I have let slide, the chances I haven’t taken, and the love that I have missed out on and I am sad all over again. Grief is an unpredictable animal. And now that I know – now that the light has been switched on – I’m wondering how I can now heal. Somehow I need to learn to begin saying yes again.
“We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us.” – Charlotte Joko Beck
I experienced the same after my best friend died in 2001, later that year my other close friend got diagnosed with HIV and a week before Xmas my childhood friend tried to kill herself. After that my friendships have never been the same again. Letting people slip away. Pushing people away. I have now totally forgotten how friendship works. I am like an awkward teenager tiptoeing around, part of me wanting to shout: “please you, please be my friend” and another part of me just stay by myself. I guess in a way it’s time to face the pain. In lots of other ways though I have to first really befriend myself again. And who knows how long that is going to take.
Thank you for writing this. I was first bereaved forty years ago(not a friend)and spent years trying to heal, working things out, therapy etc. Feeling I was healed and then coming up against the same brick wall over and over again – missed opportunities, unable to connect.
Megg it sounds like you have come to this light bulb moment at the right time for you and that you have identified “how” the healing works, or at least the starting point.
I came to a point two years ago or so that I worked out what Mel says above, that I had to be my own best friend first. I am still working that out. Maybe I didn’t connect the grief with the lack of connection with others. Megg your post just made me do that.
Some days it feels easy to be my own best friend, to reach outside myself and then other days I am shut down, scared and unavailable. Maybe it’s all about the getting back up again and the reaching out. Never stop reaching out and connecting(I am telling myself). I feel that both of you know this.
When Mel writes that about being like an awkward teenager she has hit the nail right on the head for me! I berate myself for this sometimes, feeling I “should” know better at my age!;) Somehow it never seems to click. I am awkward after years of isolating myself.How can that be undone?
Let’s make a pact to stop being so hard on ourselves and to gently and honestly become our own best friend as we go forward in life. Too much time has gone by.
xoxoxoxoxo
I just read this and it took me back to your basement all those years ago. Big hugs to you girly.
Oh my. Yes. Yes, this is just how I feel! I lost my mom three years ago this week, and I’ve been studying my grief again, analyzing it from different angles. Just recently I’ve realized how depressed I have been. I have berated myself from stepping away from my closest friends when I “should” be stepping closer. But, like you all have said, I realize that I have been waiting for the other shoe to drop. In my two babes, I’m constantly reminded of this fragility, which makes me even more anxious and sad.
Yet, a few months ago, I had my own light bulb go on, and I knew that I had (Like Mel and Jan said) to make myself happy first. I realized that not only have I hidden from friends, but from my true self. I dug out my “Simple Abundance” book, started writing in my gratitude journal again, and explored ideas and books that have been in my periphery for a while (“Dance of the Dissident Daughter” was interesting on the Sacred Feminine).
So, I’m making my way, but some days grief sucker-punches me and I’m down, the wind knocked out of me. I just wanted you wonderful women to know that I get it and that you’re not the only awkward teenagers out there.
Oh Megg, this is how I’ve been feeling for most of my life, and I have not even experienced your kind of losses. Ever since I was a little girl have I carried that intense sense of life’s fragility within me, your quote expresses it so perfectly: “there’s not any real peace or freedom because something in us knows that it’s all very fragile. So we are always on some level kind-of tensing against what’s around the corner.” I believe there is something deep within us that determines how we react to situations ~ imagined or real ones ~ and thus the event itself becomes the trigger of that something, rather than the cause. I am not expressing this very well, all I know is that this is not becoming easier as I get older. But I think you are right, saying YES more often (to life, to love, to taking risks) is surely a good first step. Hugs, Kxo
I love you, friend. Plain and simple. Always and forever.
we don’t talk about the pain of healing. we know the pain of grief, of loss, but not that it also is uncomfortable, it hurts sometimes, to heal. it is necessary, it is a passage, and with good support and tending, it is totally bearable. thanks for the reminder. and i think that there is only love around the corner.
This is really something. I read this and feel a relaxing in my heart, a breath I didn’t realize that I was holding.
Thank you touching that release button. I’m going to do more breathing and accepting each day. More living.
xo
Aimé
Life is all lessons Megg. Because of our limitations we are bound to make mistakes, but with such mistakes we can learn and grow stronger. Everyday is an opportunity to make a difference in our lives, and this is a good thing. 🙂
What Megg and others have described, I felt a connection too, even though I have not experienced the same pain and loss. I feel a guilt that I should even claim to feel anything similar without having that cause. But something in me has always had a sense of the fragility of the world around us and the preciousness of all that we hold. I want to break free from this concept, because there is so much out there to believe in and give to yourself, from love to friendship to awakening. We must believe in what there is beyond the pain, and let ourselves befriend it.
Hi sweet Megg….how I have missed you. I have been a horrible friend by not keeping up with you and I am so sorry. That quote was like a slam in the gut….so true! So very true. I find myself in the same patterns as you when it comes to maintaining friendships, not because of major losses in my life, but because the introvert inside of me usually takes over. I am so sorry you have had to experience such loss in your life. That is a powerful insight you have had about why you let things fall away….I hope that you find a way to bring people closer to you…there is nothing more important than love.
The thing about friendship is that it’s very forgiving – I have sporadic contact with lots of people, but the friendship that connected us in the first place holds anyway. Isn’t that great! Sometimes I need to retreat and sometimes I love to be sociable. It’s completely ok to have an ebb and flow!
The other important thing to say is – not everyone can be rescued. It’s life, it’s karma, it’s the extent of suffering either physical or mental. And it’s ok to forgive yourself for something you could not have influenced anyway. I have also had a lot of loss in my life, and sometimes you get to do or say the right thing, and lots of times you don’t. As time passes I become more easy with that. I can’t say these things are without pain. But at my core I know it was their time to go – however hard that is or whatever the circumstances.
Hey Megg – thanks for being so open on your blog – what a gift of friendship that really is.
Hello Megg,
I came upon your blog some time ago. I don’t know that I have ever left a comment or not, but I did save your site to my IGoogle home page. It lists the 3 latest subject lines of blogs page. Untangling Grief caught my eye and I jumped over to read.
The last year and a half or so grief has taken center stage in my life. An online friend passed way too quickly of pancreatic cancer in July of 2009. My dad passed Nov 5, 2009, my mom on Feb 20, 2010 and an online friend lost her 20 year old son to suicide on April 16, 2010.
The friends were Air Force Moms like me. The 20 yr old CJ was an airmen who had been home on leave following a tour in Afghanistan where he was injured.
CJ’s mom is shattered beyond words.
Her husband watched as their son put a gun to his head and the mom witnessed the aftermath seconds later.
CJ had locked himself in his car and his Dad could not get to him.
Megg, I do believe it was self preservation on your part to go into shut down mode.
It’s easy to write blog posts about sunshine and happy times, it’s F-ING HARD to share the dark yucky sides of ourselves. In writing this message, you have pried open that yuck and let some of it drain away. BRAVO !!!
There is no going back in this life with redo’s. There is only moving forward and learning.
I wrote the following several years ago on my blog….
In the death of someone you love there is no more hearing
them speak. Gone is the ability to reminisce and travel in thought together. A part of you dies.
It’s like a piece of your heart has been chipped off and actually withers away.
For a time, a part of you just wants to be done with this living and join them. Your passed over loved one or friend is in spirit standing behind you ready to kick your ass and say LIVE !!!
IF you could hear them speak these would be their words to you …..
“Not only do you hold MY memories,
you also hold ~ MY SPIRIT ~ in your heart.
Get out in this world
and honor me and LIVE in my name.”
Megg, my suggestion to you is that you consider contacting the family of the friend who committed suicide.
Speak your heart to them in a letter. Share how you shut down and how now you are opening up. Share some fun times and memories of the friend who died. If you just read my suggestion and thought… ‘Ohh no, I could not do that’, please just consider it. YOU hold their memories.
Megg you are an authentic and wonderful writer. I need to be following your blog a little more closely. 🙂
Sincerely,
Debra