I’m grieving (again)

I am writing this to you, but mostly I am writing this for myself. A deep love letter of companionship to the ache in my heart that feels ashamed to admit the magnitude of loss that currently dwells in my inner world (again).

Grief is not linear. I’ve said this a thousand times in my circles, on retreat and to the beautiful souls I sit with one-to-one. Grief comes on its own accord and timeline, it doesn’t care if we have deadlines to make, a mortgage to pay or family members who are unwell. I have lived and breathed this understanding for the last six years since my Mum died, and the many years before that when we lost her to depression. I have come to understand that the void I feel from losing Mum would be a black hole that could suck me in at any moment, with any memory. I have formed a relationship with this particular loss, I know its edges and am familiar in its longing. I had, in many ways, considered myself to have accepted and understood grief.

Oh Nici… 

What I wasn’t nearly prepared for was the monumental impact of cumulative grief. The complicated tangle of emotions we experience when one loss compounds another, where one grief bleeds into the previous, where we can’t catch the end of a single thread. When a tsunami hits land it is often the second wave that is most destructive, they call it a wave train. The force and impact of the second wave churning up the rubble and devastation from the first.

So, despite months of resistance to drop into deep grief (again). Here I am ready to expose and explore the impact of compounding loss. An exercise in honesty, first and foremost with myself, and hopefully a gift to you. The gift of truth, humanity, and heart.

For me, compounding grief has felt like this second wave, testing and shaking the foundations that I spent years rebuilding. It has felt like finding new corners of my heart that I thought had healed, only to pick the scab and watch them bleed from the original source. The loss of a relationship melts into the loss of safety, pours into a longing for comfort, flows into a yearning for unconditional love and cries for the feeling of home. Cumulative grief has asked me to seek solace so deeply within myself, to be my own mother, my own friend, my own home.

The witnessing…

I can already feel my shoulders dropping and my jaw unclenching, as I write the words ‘I am grieving, again’. I laugh at the irony - despite my world of grief work, I was unable (or unwilling) to recognise this experience as grief. Yet as I begin to drink my own medicine, I can already feel the sweet nectar of presence, compassion, honesty and acknowledgement allowing my grief to soften. Because if there is one thing I know for sure, it’s that when we allow our grief to be named and witnessed, it transforms and heals.

So now that I’ve finally admitted this to myself, and to you. I give myself full permission to enter deeply into chrysalis time. The in-between time, the time before a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. The time for being messy, for letting emotion spill over the edges. The time for being in the ‘not-knowing’, in the undefined and utterly unpresentable. I said to a friend recently that this time is the quietest space I’ve ever experienced. I don’t have much to say, I don’t have much to offer. All I can do is compassionately allow the disintegration of (once again) everything I took as solid ground.

The rise…

Everything is constantly changing. This time for cocooning and retreating into my own heart won’t last forever. Without a doubt, some of the most spectacular experiences, gorgeous friendships and moments of deep meaning came out of my previous ‘chrysalis time’. And so I willingly enter again… I trust, I wait, I even allow glimmers of excitement because life is beautiful and if we believe that life is conspiring FOR us then oh wow, I wonder what’s around the corner?

In the meantime, I thank you for being patient with me as I postpone most of my offerings, for staying with me while I’m silent on ‘the gram’ and for reading this letter to the end and witnessing my grief.

I am the butterfly.

I am the phoenix.

But for now, I am the caterpillar.

See you soon.

With love,