Death - The middle phase in life ...

The Queen: A life well lived.

Like millions of others, I watched the Queen’s funeral on Monday.

I found the service deeply moving.

The reading of Psalm 34:17:19 jumped out to me and is worthy of including here …

When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous but the Lord delivers them out of them all.

As I am yet to meet a human whose life remains untouched by troubles, I think this is incredibly encouraging for us all.

As I watched the Queen’s funeral and cried and reflected upon what I saw about the life of this woman known the world over, I concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the Queen must have been profoundly loved. I came to this conclusion because of the multiple images of the Queen smiling, at this crowd or that, this individual or the other. Now of course we all have our game faces. However, the smile that she is so famous for is not forced nor does it fail to reach her eyes and the only way anyone can smile like that for prolonged periods is when it comes from within. Hence my opinion that she must have been deeply loved to have allowed said love to shine through her so sincerely for so many decades and to so many humans.

I very much respected the Queen’s acknowledgement of and referral to her faith. To my thinking, the love that shone through her was probably largely of the Almighty as well as from her husband and wider family. Many have written of Prince Philips supporting role for the Queen. A supportive love that spanned so many decades, I can only imagine her sense of loss thereafter.

As I watched Prince Charles, I warmed to him even more for the humanity he revealed over the pen that wasn’t working! Such trivial things are irritating but in the throes of the type of new and raw grief that he will be in, usual patience and tolerance levels can dip dramatically. I found myself wondering how he must be feeling faced with the task of following in the wake of a woman such as the Queen. And then I found myself thinking that actually, our new King need not follow in his mother’s footsteps but the deeply original footsteps that the same God Almighty has called, prepared and equipped him to take at this time.

King Charles will never be his mother but neither need he be. He will be able to reign over this country in a way that only he can if he follows his own relationship with God and the steps God calls him to take. I am curious to see how he adapts to this role that he has spent a lifetime preparing for.

I also wondered about the personal cost to all the family members who had to fulfil the roles assigned to them, so publicly, in such an early time of grief. I only hope and pray that each will find sufficient space and time, in private, amongst loved ones, to allow their grief to be felt and processed.

Whilst we are led to believe that grief is a quick thing that magically disappears after the funeral, the reality is way messier, with no set time or pattern. Grief is as unique as the relationship between the bereaved and deceased. And contrary to popular belief, it is not only time that is required to heal but also space and self care.

As I acknowledged my own feelings of sadness at the passing of such an incredible, inspirational, dedicated human being, I found myself wishing for one more address from the Queen. I wished that she had recorded a video for us with one more message of common sense and wisdom, encouraging us to work and play nicely together and to support her son in fulfilling his own commitment to us as whole heartedly as she had. And to remind us, that we will meet again. I wished for this whilst also recognising that this longing has accompanied my own grieving process for people that I have loved and lost when their lives have ended unexpectedly or without goodbyes.

I also noticed how the sombreness of the day was interspersed with moments of celebratory shouts and cheers. The process of grieving is to acknowledge and honour our own feelings of sadness or anything else whilst also beginning to feel gratitude and joy for the life that person lived and the time we had to enjoy them.

Death, loss, endings and grief are unavoidable.

How we choose to engage with life is deeply personal and when I look at the life and the death of the Queen, I see a life well lived.

Good grief …

Grief is a deeply personal experience.

One size does not fit all.

There is no set timeline within which to feel or not feel a particular way.

It is unpredictable in nature.

Whilst there may be similarities, no two griefs are the same.

Grief is unique to the person experiencing it; shaped and influenced by the length, depth and health of the relationship between the bereaved and the deceased.

Whilst grief is rarely spoken about openly, the reality is that it doesn’t disappear following the funeral. I’m fortunate to work within a profession that gets this. And the more people I talk to, the more I discover a whole community of people who recognise and understand the enormity and complexity of grief as an ongoing experience which impacts the whole body.

Grief is not something that we can or should rush.

There is no short cut, no glossing over, no willing it, or worse still, praying it away. Just imagine the tragedy of asking the God who gifts us with the chance to live and to love, to take away that which makes us alive, (our capacity to feel) following the death of a loved one. Wouldn’t that be the equivalent to two deaths?

The simple overriding fact is that grief is hard.

As much as I long to return to life as it was before this bereavement, I can’t. The world that I inhabited no longer exists in the way that I knew it. Or rather it is no longer inhabited by the one who made it what it was. This will take some adjusting to.

Grief is not something that I or anyone else can put a timeline on. It takes as long as it takes.

To strive against the impact of death is to prolong it, to surrender is to facilitate it. A truth we may do well to apply to life.

Yet in reality, it is hard to be with grief. Much easier to avoid or distract from it. Except this leaves us imprisoned by the very sadness that is seeking release. A deadening occurs that steals our sense of aliveness and ability to be present. The paradox is that only by being with the pain of grief can our experience of it along with our corresponding ability to reengage with life, begin to alter. And we can’t ‘be with it’ the whole time. We have to learn balance.

However, all too often within our quick fix, instant gratification, I want it now culture, we expect everything to be as we wish immediately.

In the case of grief, we may just want to feel how we used to feel. It is hard to accept that the only way to get to a new ok is by being with and walking through the not ok. And that’s not easy, quick or painless.

Grief is not a straightforward journey. And It’s not like breaking a leg where your body forces you to a total standstill. You know you need complete rest before you can begin to use and rebuild your muscles. You know that if you walk on a broken leg, by ignoring the body’s natural warning system of pain, or because you’ve fallen in to the cultural trap of ‘being strong’ or ‘keeping going no matter what’, you will probably complicate the original break and prolong the recovery period.

Yet when we sustain a wounding to the heart, matters are not quite so clear cut. We can’t see the damage for a start and us humans often like to see before we believe. And we can’t feel emotional pain in the same tangible way that we feel physical pain. It can be easier to override the body’s natural warning system by convincing ourselves that we can and should, stiff upper lip it out. Ultimately, it can be easier with grief to carry on as normal instead of making time to rest and heal.

Until that is, the body takes over for grief cannot remain hidden or ignored for long before it begins to manifest in physical issues. For there is an honesty and purity within grief that becomes stifled when suppressed. And whilst we may be able to fool ourselves and others that we are ok when we’re not, the body cannot lie. It knows when it needs time out to allow the healing process to happen and if necessary it will complain via physical symptoms that get us to stop. We ignore these warnings at our peril.

Despite being more aware of this than most outside my profession, I’m still not getting the work/life/healing balance right myself. I thought I was doing well by managing all of my responsibilities but after a week of doing so, I developed an unsettled stomach that required me to relinquish my ability to be vertical. And its grumblings conveyed a ban on the entry of more food. Always a major struggle for me. But clearly my body needed more time to process.

The overall message from my body is that I cannot continue as if nothing has happened. As I’m all too aware that unprocessed emotional pain can weaken the immune system thus leaving it susceptible to every virus, cold and flu that is inevitably doing the rounds at this time of year, I’m trying to heed my body’s warnings.

I am beginning to realise that whilst I know it is ridiculous to walk around as normal following the break of a leg, I haven’t fully appreciated the folly of continuing as usual following a bereavement.

Subsequently, I am attempting to understand what this means and looks like within my own life. A process which is quite literally shaking and challenging my ideas as to what is and what is not important. As it does so it invites me to recognise and relinquish previously held ideals.

Ultimately, I’m beginning to surrender, as in really surrender, to the process of grieving. Not on my terms or timelines but to whatever needs to happen within me in preparation for whatever new season lays ahead. Because, just as with nature, we can’t jump to the new wanted season without first allowing the existing unwanted season to do its work of change and preparation.

When Death Comes …

The cycles of nature teach us much about death and life

We don’t like to talk about death in our English culture.

We don’t like to talk about anything even remotely unpleasant really. Instead we adopt a mentality of, if I don’t look, see, or speak of said unpleasantness, I can simply pretend it is not so.

Yet such a passive approach falls rather majorly short in the face of the unpleasantness of death itself, with all its unflinching finality. We may not look, see or speak of the business of death openly, but when death comes to someone you love, you feel it with very fibre of your being.

And it feels …

Incomprehensible.

Surreal.

Irreversible.

Shocking.

Unbelievable.

Painful.

It stuns you in to slow motion. A daze and a haze that you haul yourself back from in order to undertake your day to day responsibilities. You can’t quite get your head around how said person can no longer be here. Yet you know that this is unarguably the case.

There is a gap. One that no one and no thing can fill.

Nor is it wise to try. And I have tried very hard with chilli peanuts and cake (not together) but food is so NOT the answer to the absence of life that death creates. Ditto alcohol/drugs/spending/suppressant of choice.

At least this is my experience. Yours may be vastly different. Or there may be some parallels. I don’t know. All I do know is that we need to talk about the difficult stuff, especially this death stuff.

Because as much as we look away,
denying our own and others decay,
death is here
and it’s here to stay.

And we need to talk about this cold, hard reality. Or rather, I know I do.

Because otherwise we risk failing to receive the fullness of the gift that life itself offers. For if death remains swept under the carpet or branded taboo or off limits, we give it the power and potential to destroy us from within. Maybe through an unspoken or unconscious fear that can paralyse us from engaging with life or risk. For some, a hardening of the heart in a misguided attempt to protect the existing pain whilst seeking to insure against more. Either option guarantees a death of sorts. The worst kind of death, the death experienced whilst still alive.

How can we ensure we don’t simply settle for a safe-chasing existence of mere survival, without facing up to the reality that death will come to us all. And in its own often unpredictable or even premature timing. We are powerless to stop it.

Yet paradoxically, by engaging with the presence of death, we can get real about the opportunities of life. We can re-evaluate in what, who, where, and for why, we want to invest our love, energy and talents. We can stop to question ourselves afresh.

What is my purpose?

What am I here for?

And what am I doing about that?

I never heard of anyone on their death bed uttering the words, ‘I’m so gutted I made the time to honestly and regularly review my life to identify where I was, where I wanted to be and what steps were required to get me from one to the other.’ Or, ‘I regret taking those risks, following my dreams, or committing my life to serving a purpose greater than myself.’ Or even, ‘if only I’d loved fewer people or held more grudges’.

And yet all too many of us ‘live’ our lives too afraid to be who we are, too cautious to pursue the dreams that arise within us again and again, too oppressed by the opinions of others, real or imagined, to actually risk releasing our own potential and to the benefit of all. Or for some, simply too set upon seeking security in the financial to risk pursuing the meaningful.

Others simply shut down their hearts, refusing to love if they’ve already lost. Whilst some engage in futile attempts to deny deaths reality by fighting the facts of ageing.

We all struggle in some way or another, consciously or unconsciously, with accepting death as a non-negotiable component of life.

Yet death is a given for all for which there is no avoidance, no escape, no get out of death free card.

I was going to write, no get out of life, alive, card. But of course, that depends upon your beliefs. Whilst many consider Heaven to be a defence against death on the part of those of us who believe, I consider a lack of belief to be a potential defence against the ultimate giver of life, by those who don’t. I’m talking here of the kind of life that is only possible following a total surrender to the only one who is able to take any of our lives from the natural to the supernatural. (Still got my L plates on here personally)

But, whatever our beliefs, it’s time to face up to the truth that death will come.

And the clock will continue to tick.

We need to wake up people.

You.

Me.

Us.

We need to live like we know that life is not an ongoing offer with no end point. It’s limited. It has an expiry date. I do. You do. We all do.

And amidst the mix of allowing space to grieve for the lost, loved one, the big question remains; what are we going to do about the reality of death?

Or more importantly, how will we allow it to influence how we engage with life?

Did Curiosity REALLY kill the cat?

Whilst driving home from a recent thought provoking conversation with a friend, I found my mind pondering the above.

Said friend is someone I trained with so invariably our talk turned to deeper themes like death, the role it plays in how we live and whether we are willing to do the work of making our dreams a reality. This ended with us discussing the crucial role of curiosity, along with our culture of curbing it.

Afterwards as I reflected upon our conversation, the saying, ‘Curiosity killed the cat’, came to mind. In our risk averse, fear driven culture, we can all too often use this saying to shut down anyone who dares to be curious as to whether there may be other ways of seeing, being or living, aside from those accepted by the unthinking majority as being the norm. Or worse still, as being ‘safe’. There is of course a time for being safe, but as an ethos for life, it’s more akin to settling for a psychological/spiritual death-in-life.

What particularly struck me is how readily we can throw such sayings about with little thought or exploration as to the original or intended meaning.

Yet further investigation revealed that the original saying was actually, ‘care kills the cat’, with the use of ‘care’ in this context meaning worry or sorrow. Even that’s not the full picture but if you are curious enough, google it yourself!

My issue with this saying is that curiosity can be marketed as a life-threatening condition. Despite the potential when exercised with wisdom, to be quite the opposite. For curiosity gives us permission to wonder, explore, imagine, play, envision and create, brand new ways of seeing, thinking, being and ultimately, living. It can be the birthplace of dreams, the beginning of change, the place of pioneering.

What is your curiosity calling you to explore?

I’ll end by returning to my initial question. Did curiosity really kill the cat? If so, which life, just the last or all nine? Either way, would curiosity be such a bad way for a cat to go?

As a human (mostly), death by curiosity doesn’t sound bad to me, at all. Whereas to die, or much worse to live, by apathy for example, would be truly horrendous.