Grief as a call to Soul
“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night”
Nancy MacMillan
The stars are brilliant these cool nights. When I go out for my goodnight gaze, they shine down insistently. The immensity often too much. Forcing me to be with the limits of my understanding. Such is the mood that can come when grappling with the death of someone we know. Where are you? So here, and now… where?
I’m in this mood, of course, with the recent death of my friend “Alex.” Not being a close family member, I’m spared the all-encompassing shock and grief. Yet grief has its way, its own imperative. Must be tended to as a holy friend. Given space for, in order to feel the absence that is now a presence. As the author of Die Wise, Stephen Jenkinson, says, “Grief is a way of loving what has slipped from view.”
I don’t think anything else conjures up what soul means quite so well. To grieve means a call to be soul fully. As hard as this may be, when embraced there’s something so compelling about it that it can actually make us feel more alive.
That’s what being in touch with death does: attunes us to what is precious in our life.
Mourning seems to be about our own deep loss. The word itself, when sounded out, is like a long, aching, low moan, conveying a resonance to the emotion. Mourning is a rightful companion to grief, but not grief itself.
Grief, as I experience it, is more of a sharp pain, like being pierced by something. Personal, yet going beyond the personal. With its distinct animal intelligence, grief has a life of its own, liking best to roam down the slow, deep, meandering pathways that are the way of our soul, with the occasional pounce upon the unsuspecting.
The complex reality is that we often have a lot of emotions, including regret, guilt, and shame, that mix in with and color our mourning and grief. And this can complicate and confound things, especially if we just want to quickly get back to “normal,” to return unchanged to our usual daily routine.
As I note in my book, The Call to the Far Shore: Carrying Our Loved Ones through Dying, Death and Beyond, I was surprised by my own nagging feelings of guilt and listlessness weeks after my Mum’s death. Surprised because I believed I had done as much as possible to tend my mother’s death, and yet … a hole appeared. I wrote about this in verse:
Where are you, mother?
After the festival of bringing you to the doorway of death,
and blessing your way with flowers and prayers and tender holding,
I am surprised by a hole, that seeks to be filled,
then I watch as the hole starts filling in with remorse, inadequacy, guilt . . .
Better still to cry, filling hollow spaces with tears that light the dark warmly.
Tears of praise and grief, that softly sculpt an inner chamber,
—A cup, for my mother’s essence to fill, now a distilled stubborn spark of love that carries on.
We do seem hard-wired to find a hole where what we did or did not do was not good enough. Sometimes, this kind of suffering leads us to needed insights. But it can also drive us down old pathways of just feeling inadequate. Healing takes place when we don’t push feelings of any kind away but let them live with us, as raw and uncomfortable as this may be. And to then come back to our center.
Being undone by grief once came more naturally—when community instinctively came together in the immediacy of a death. Now, often alone in our private little rooms, it’s much harder. Harder, but still possible. Still necessary for our own health and perhaps also for the well-being of the newly dead. For it can be a long journey to get to the far shore, and the river of tears, it is said, is a means by which they travel. 
When we do make space for grieving, another dimension can come to reveal itself—the very real dimension our beloved now inhabits. We may even get hints of their presence and the deep consolation they wish to bring.
Grief, then, is a call to soul, and, in the stillness that comes after tears, an uprising may also be experienced: the agony and brilliance of a new star being born.
Alex sent us the following verse that he loved so well. It will be sung at his service.
Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. —from “The Old Astronomer” by Sarah William, 1868
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About the Author: Nancy MacMillan is a registered psychotherapist and retired certified spiritual care practitioner with master’s degrees in education and theology and experience working in palliative care, intensive care, geriatrics, and bereavement. She lives outside of Kingston, Ontario.
https://www.innertraditions.com/the-call-to-the-far-shore