Note: Names have been changed to protect the privacy of those mentioned.
Eight months after meeting my husband Michael I sustained a traumatic brain injury in a car accident, resulting in temporary left-side paralysis, severe short-term memory loss and other cognitive deficits. The moment my head hit the car windshield, I went from being someone for whom most things came easily – college, athletic endeavors, artistic expression – to someone whose brain no longer remembered how to remember. Through three years of intense physical, occupational and speech rehabilitative therapies, I recovered the ability to walk, talk, read and write again. When I was released from treatment, my neurologist and medical team designated me as 30% permanently disabled and unlikely to ever function beyond a 6th grade level again; for almost 10 years their assessment seemed to be true.
Michael and I had begun dating eight months before my car accident when we were both in our mid-twenties. During the years of my recovery, he took me to and from rehabilitation therapies, offered financial support when my money ran out, and patiently helped me reclaim skills such as cooking and driving a car. When we married a few weeks after I concluded rehabilitation therapies I asked Michael why he had stayed with me when it would have been so much easier to leave. “Why not?” he said. “You were still the same person. The same soul.”
Michael is not a religious man, but a deeply spiritual one – although I doubt he would describe himself as such. He says his ability to see my essence – me as “the same soul” - when so many others could not was due to witnessing the seven-year dying process and then death of his mother from brain cancer a few years before we met. The experience of being his mother’s caregiver the last year of her life revealed to Michael that he had two choices before him: “to grow and see a bigger picture, or to try and go back in time. I chose to grow.”To Michael growing meant trying to see below the surface of whatever was before him, and approaching life, people and experiences from a mindset/heartset of appreciation, and acceptance and compassion for what is as it is. This new way of seeing and being didn’t happen overnight but rather evolved overtime as Michael processed and healed the pain and trauma of his unique loss. It was this mindset/heartset revealed to him by loss that allowed him to see me as “the same soul.”
Grief Can Be a Path to Personal Growth
At the beginning of any grief journey the thought that we can or will grow due to the loss of someone we wish hadn’t died may seem unacceptable. But as Michael’s experience shows, while we may not have a choice about loss, we do have a choice regarding how we respond to loss. Making choices that overtime move us away from “This shouldn’t have happened” or “I can’t get over this loss” and toward “I will carry forward lessons of loss that will lead to a richer and more meaningful life” is the bedrock of personal growth. Such choices most honor our unique loss, the life of our loved one, and the life we have yet to live.
Loss can pave a path to personal growth by:
Awakening, Deepening or Clarifying Your Spirituality or Faith
As a spiritual counselor I have seen how profound loss can serve as a catalyst for spiritual struggle, questioning, exploration and renewal. Witnessing the death of his mother led Michael away from an “observant but non-feeling” connection to his practiced faith, to a more expansive understanding of what he saw as the interconnectedness of all things and God as all and in everything. On the other hand, many of my clients have found profound comfort in delving deeper into religious practices first learned in childhood.
The way loss is observed is unique to each griever, including the way loss affects faith and spirituality. When clients find that their current faith practices deter rather than enhance grief processing I often recommend the book, “God and Grief” by chaplain and grief educator Dr. Terri Daniel, as a way to find greater understanding of the role religion can play in how we approach loss.
Redefining Your Values and Purpose
Loss can be a catalyst for examining values and reevaluating life goals and priorities.
My client Susan had “everything I always wanted”: a “successful husband”; a “nice big house in the ‘burbs”; “lots of play money to go on vacations”; “really smart, talented, well behaved kids.”
She told me at our first meeting, “These things were important to me; they let me know who I was and where I belonged.” Then her son died and “It all fell away.”
Her son’s death led Susan to question all the effort she put into “making my house and the life others could see look like something worth envying.” Two-years after her son’s death, Susan and her husband began a nonprofit organization to help fund research on the rare disease that had taken their son’s life.
It is not unusual for people to question what they value and then reevaluate priorities and life goals after the death of a loved one. Both Susan and her husband believe life after their son’s death has “more depth” of purpose, they only wish that depth had come about in a different way.
Deepening Your Sense of Appreciation and Life Meaning
The death of a loved one can lead us to slow down and contemplate the meaning of our lives.
For over 30 years, my client Donna had a high-profile public job she “loved everything about, including all the stress. It all went by so fast. Until everything changed I never realized that I never really felt or saw my own life.”
When her mother and sister died within the same year, Donna didn’t slow down to fully feel or process her losses; instead she continued on as always “pedal to the metal.”
Two years later, Donna became seriously ill and was forced to quit her job. Now that she was “a boat without the anchor of work” Donna began experiencing overwhelming waves of grief about the loss of her mother and sister; she felt the waves in her body and “it was frightening,” said Donna, “like being continuously hit in the head with a boomerang I thought I had avoided by running away. It was like the boomerang was following me forcing me to grieve.”
Although Donna had “never been able to sit and be,” at our first meeting I encouraged her to learn inner stillness enhancing skills. Over time Donna found that self-compassion, and heart-centered and meditation practices enhanced her enjoyment of the present moment whatever that moment might hold; when those moments held sorrow, the practices also provided Donna with a “safe container to process all that I had lost.” Donna found that the more she felt her grief the more able she was to appreciate the simple, pared-down life she now led.
There is so much more to life than work, Donna recently told me. “I have a great husband, get to spend time holding my new grandbaby, and I’m closer to my girls. That old saying ‘at the end of life no one ever says I wish I had worked more’ - I see now that it’s true.”
Enhancing Your Empathy, Compassion and Self-compassion
Loss can help us connect in greater understanding to what others experience.
My friend Rose had always been very matter-of-fact about other people’s losses. For example, when my sister died she said, “Well it is only your sister. It’s not as if you lost a child.” I wasn’t hurt or offended by her words; my work in grief support has often shown me that many people don’t truly understand the deep pain caused by profound loss until they experience it themselves.
Two-years-ago Rose’s father died; it was Rose’s first time losing a family member. And now she has great empathy and compassion for the losses I and others she knows have suffered. Rose recently told me she wishes her heart had “been cracked open to what others feel” before her father’s death, but she acknowledges that without a personal experience of loss she just couldn’t figure out how to connect with the experience of others.
Revealing Your Resilience and Fostering New Coping Skills
The death of a loved one can reveal to us both our strengths – strengths we never knew we had – and what new coping skills may be needed to navigate life after loss.
When my client Toni became a young widow, she suddenly found herself the sole proprietor of the family business. Throughout their marriage Toni had been content to let her husband handle the financial details of the business while she concentrated on “helping to execute our business plan.”
Toni found trying to grieve – something she said she “wasn’t sure how to do” - while continuing to run the family business overwhelming. Together we explored grief-processing modalities such as Continuing Bonds, the Four Tasks of Mourning and the Grief Recovery Method; our work together also included learning resilience-building skills such as self-compassion.
Recently Toni told me, “I never really realized how strong I am! And I never thought I could run our business by myself and feel like I know what I’m doing! The other day I had to deal with a difficult vendor and I was able to state what I wanted without my voice shaking or being afraid of his response. I had to laugh at myself after he left. I thought ‘Who is this woman who isn’t afraid of speaking-up and asking for what she needs?’ I think this is the new me!”
Helping You Construct a New Reality
Loss can be an impetus for examining the beliefs you hold about yourself and your world.
After college, Rick did what was expected and joined his father – a “self-made man” - in the family business. Although Rick had a degree in business, “Dad was boss, and I did what he said,” Rick told me.
Throughout his childhood Rick’s father had let Rick know that Rick wasn’t “the sharpest knife in the drawer.” Rick believed his father because “Why would he say it if it weren’t true?”
When his father died suddenly, Rick was consumed by fears that he was somehow incompetent and the family business he had inherited would now fail. After looking at “the books” Rick was shocked to learn the business was “underwater” and the father he had thought knew everything was in reality not much of a businessman. This revelation put Rick on a path of questioning everything he thought to be true about himself, his father and life.
In our work together, Rick was able to identify his strengths and what he really wanted from “the short life we’re given.” Rick eventually closed the business, paid off debts, and then found a job “in work that truly interests me and where what I know and can do are appreciated.”
The grieving process revealed to Rick his greatest sense of loss in regards to his father’s passing: “He never saw me for who and what I truly am. I’m so much more than he said.”
Helping You Embrace the Reality of Impermanence
What we learn from loss and how we grow in its wake is unique to every grief and every griever. What most often illuminates loss as a path to growth is the often sudden realization that earthly life is short – impermanent - prompting a sense of urgency in making the most of the here and now. Processing grief allows for growth to unfold as a last gift and lasting legacy imparted to you by the loved one you lost.
