Unfelt Grief

The waves of death do not break naturally on the shores of our culture. Countless artificial barriers have been patched together, each to “protect” a small stretch of beach. Knowing the water must move somewhere, we have connected our barriers and channeled the water to the narrow doors of hospitals. Rather than the whole coast absorbing the gentle remaking of the waves, all the force is collected and concentrated into a slow tsunami. This relentless wave silently rips through hospital halls. The brilliant, caring young people that have come to learn the way of healing are stripped away by this force. It hits like radiation: unfelt - until the symptoms develop. Cause and effect gets lost in those halls, drowned out by alarms, notes, sleep debt, and the sheer energetic intensity of daily life in a hospital. The staff don't even know what is stripping them away. It is not death. It is unfelt grief.

Grief is a powerful psychedelic. It is not possible to grieve and stay in mainstream consciousness. It is not possible to open oneself to the medicine of grieving and remain who you think you are. It is not possible to let death teach you of compassion, wisdom, and humility and remain unchanged. This is why we avoid it. We don’t know who or what we’ll be on the other side of grieving.

We need a hand (or many) to hold when we cross this threshold. What we have experienced in medicine is too much to feel alone. So most of us have numbed, a lot. Good! Numbing was a brilliant move to survive. And now, we get to go back. We get to feel what was too much to feel. We get to be changed by these sacred encounters with death. Hold my hand. We have exploring to do.