We want joy in our life and we fear grief. How do we come to terms with loss and remain joyful as we age?
Two Side of a Coin
When did you last feel a sense of joy? It can be a mysterious and quixotic sensation so perhaps you can’t quite put your finger on the last time you felt pure joy. It’s a sense of being fully alive in the present moment. It may be triggered by a piece of music, by a friend’s arrival or even a passing cloud. Joy transcends the small individual self and reconnects the greater you to the inter-dependent universe. It is the most precious of treasures because moments of joy add up to more than the sum of their parts. So, as we grow older the moments of joy give a deep sense of appreciation for life and an inner peace. But the excitment and joy of every beautiful relationship contains the seed of grief, so it's a rare privilege to be in the presence of a person who has fully experienced not only the joy but also the grief of living and become truly themselves in old age. Of course we all want the joy, but who in their right mind would want the grief! In my seventy five years I’ve only recently come to see how grief and joy are so very connected. They are not just opposites – they are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other.
A Call to Adventure
From our early days we learn how to function and how to find our place in the world. Through early adulthood and into middle age we become familiar of what works and how best to survive. We start to understand the rules of the game. And then in the second half of life, some major event happens to nearly all of us. It’s like an earthquake. It may be retirement. The menopause. An empty nest. A separation. A serious health issue. The death of someone you love. Any one of these challenges may make us question our existence. Who are we? And what’s the point of it all? And it’s not just a one-off catastrophe; there is the on-going physical losses such as skin elasticity, hair, teeth and physical flexibility (despite all the yoga). As our mortality comes more into focus, it can feel like someone has changed the rules of the game. How we respond to these fundamental challenges now is key to our wellbeing in later life. Some may see this as a call to a new adventure, but many people just carry on regardless. They are stoic. They manage to keep the plates spinning and the balls in the air. It’s a wonder how they do it! No personal catastrophe will change them. Stiff upper lip? Strength of Character? A sense of duty? The show must go on just as before. Other people may take a more pragmatic approach. They absorb the shock and make some adjustments to life to accommodate their new reality. They adapt to circumstances. They find new interests. Perhaps they start volunteering or join a new activity group.
The Palace of Grief
But for many of us the challenges in the second half of life take a toll. As we grow older it is easy to become lost, hurt, and isolated as we lose friends, relatives and our place in the fabric of society. Life moves on relentlessly as you realise that you can no longer do what you once did. That your value and usefulness is diminishing along with your physical and mental capacity. You may focus on staying busy and connected but there are many losses and the older you get, the more losses accumulate. Some (the author included) become overwhelmed by the many losses. I have found that while others manage to keep busy and make adjustments to their life, it was not enough to prevent some dark shadows emerging that were not there in my younger days. Sometimes I felt dysfunctional. I felt shame because I thought I should not feel like this. I tried pretending and putting a brave face on things, but eventually I was invited into the palace of grief. It’s a place that most of us dread. Beyond therapy. Beyond rationality. A place where we cease to function for a while. Where we are no longer trying to fit in. Where we are no longer pretending. Where we try to catch our breath in the rawness of life and death. Not surprisingly most people don’t want to take up the invitation to enter the palace of grief for they don’t know what they will find there. They have no sense of how deep the well of tears might be. They can’t be certain if they will ever emerge from the depths. So most people decline life’s invitation to grieve so they make some small adjustments or find distractions.
Denial
Grief is the natural response to loss. I studied various theories of grief on an End-of-Life Doula course, but there is no way to understand grief with the logical mind. There are no easy answers. It feels connected to a deeper part of us that some may call the soul. Perhaps with many of our losses, the grief has been covered up. When we were young, we were encouraged to grow out of shedding tears as it showed a vulnerability that was not welcomed. To grieve for something small or to grieve for too long was seen as self-indulgent. In a culture based on independence and materialism, grief is seen as unproductive. It is something that needs to be fixed as quickly as possible so that we can return to fully functioning 'normality’. As Frances Weller says “When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.”
Over thirty years ago when Diana Spencer died, many people said that ‘the outpouring of grief’ was for much more than the death of the Princess. Psychologists suggested the event connected the mourners with their many personal losses that had remained unexpressed. Since then there have been an endless stream of disasters, wars, tragedies and injustices that have affected us but about which we are seemingly powerless. So we have found coping mechanisms, distractions, habits and addictions so that we don’t feel the raw pain of suffering.
On a visit to a care home recently, I was shocked to see so such human misery. Some of the residents were my age. A few were a little younger than me. In the dining room I had an overwhelming sense of people who had given up hope. I saw some resentment and anger in their faces but most looked lost. Perhaps everyone was just having a bad day, but it felt like entering Dante’s Inferno. I wondered how much of the suffering could have been prevented if the residents had had the opportunity to process their many losses. I went into the lounge where the residents sat in front of a large TV screen with a game-show playing with the volume on full. The canned laughter from the TV seemed to be cruelly mocking the hopeless residents.
Joy of Deep Connection
With indigenous cultures it is a very different story. Grief is not hidden away or shameful, for the wise elders know that by suppressing grief, they cannot fully experience the joy of living. Grief is a feeling that is shared communally and is given full expression. It is seen as key to the wellbeing of the tribe. Some of these traditional practices such as the grief rituals from the Dagara people in Burkino Faso, have been introduced into the west by Sobonfu and Malidoma Somé. Perhaps we are slowly learning that the stiff upper lip will no longer serve us and that our grief is a valid feeling. Surely we know by now that all that we love will die and that everything is transient? By embracing the pain of our grief we can open up to being truly alive. We need to experience our grief to connect with others in a more heart-centred way. Processing our grief can make us whole. It rid us of vanity and pretence and bring us authenticity. Our vulnerability can empower us and this can bring us the joy of being fully alive in the present moment. We do not have to move at a breathless pace. We can stop, if only for a few moments, and become conscious of our breath. Perhaps we are afraid that our grief will overwhelm us, but if we stay conscious of the inhalation and exhalation, we can find a way to connect with the grief and the joy of the present moment.
We need not carry the burden of unexpressed grief into later life.
You may disagree. You may have thoughts to add to it. You may hate the writing style but please share if you have any feelings about the above.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
How can we be present to our grief without trying to fix it?
How can we be present to the grief of others without trying to fix them?
How do we share our losses without sounding as though we complaining?
Is grief more than just sadness?
How do you experience both grief and joy?
Adam Duncan is a Director of Life-Stage which run regular on-line and venues based sessions on The Power in Ageing.
THE POWER IN AGEING - Finding Yourself in the Second Half of Life
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