You don’t honour grief. Grief honours you.

“It’s really hard when you lose a pet, it's like losing a friend,” she said

This is what the stranger said to me as I was cuddling her Boston Terrier outside the coffee shop (I am a massive dog ‘bother-er’ if you didn't know that already. I can’t help myself from asking the question ‘Can I say hi to your doggo’ every time I see a dog in the street).

She had just asked me if I had dogs and I had accidentally said “No, I have cats. I mean cat, one just recently passed.”

I am still getting used to saying cat. After two months Ginger still feels very present. Zac cat his brother wanders around the house and lets out an unusual cry almost hourly. I wander around the house and find myself looking in the spots he used to lie just in case he is there.

There was something comforting about the conversation with the stranger. I felt the loss and also whole and seen and connected all at the same time.

Rewind a few days before and I had been holding a grief circle for those deeply feeling the devastation in Palestine right now.

There is so much collective grief amongst us. Never before have we seen families livestream their families’ deaths. I hardly have words for this but what we found together sat in a circle, people from all walks of life, with different stories and backgrounds – was a connection. A connection to each other and to the deeper wells within us that are being moved.

The air was heavy, but it was also light. I decided to speak also and as I did, I shivered and I shook as tears ran down my face.

Today as I write this I feel grief still but I feel more here and more in awe and reverence for life than I think I have in the last few months.

And it got me thinking about something that gets said a lot.

“I want to honour my grief”

And whilst I get that and celebrate the humanness in that endeavour I am not sure that’s what happens.

I know a lot about grief. And I don’t just mean professionally although that helps.

In fact, it is how I entered the world in many ways. As my mum was carrying me she was also still grieving the loss of my sister who died just months before I was born. I was a growing life contained in grief.

In many ways, I sense this has given me an innate ability to be with others when they experience grief. It was a role I had been given to ‘do something’ with grief. This pattern of doing continued when my dear grandparents passed and I went into writing eulogies and making sure everyone was OK. Doing. But not meeting.

And this pattern continued well into my thirties until I met my grief differently. 

The sense I have now is that when we do meet grief  (and I don't mean some mind version of this being graceful).

I mean the version where grief takes its own form, tears, heart pains, shivers, wandering around the house looking for a dead cat, crying in unexpected places, numbness…the list is endless as she is a mysterious teacher.

When it arrives in all its mysterious ways.

I sense that grief is honouring us.

Grief, that raging whisper from the soul is honouring our own humanity.

So do we need to honour it?  We can set the conditions sure and I think even saying that is a really important part of it. But when we get down to it the notion we have to honour it is perhaps only a useful concept of something to ‘do’.

And the soul speaks in a depth of feeling that alters us from the soul up. It doesn’t speak in concepts. And it does not do (not in the conventional way anyhow). It feels. It informs. It transforms.

It transforms whatever small version of us is locked into the holding of it. In doing so it reminds us of our humanity, the much wider sense of humanity that is both bigger than us and also binds us.

So perhaps we can set the conditions to honour grief to help us get ready to let go into grief honouring us.

And a reminder that all of this will arrive in its own time. On its own terms. And you will be ready and your soul will cradle the parts that don’t feel so ready.

With great love and respect.

Jo

RIP Ginger and may all those about to take their last breath know they are loved.