Grief/Loss/Feelings Tag

20 Apr The Red of My Blood

Posted at 13:28h in Book Reviews by admin 0 Comments

‘The Red of My Blood: A Death and Life Story’ tells the story of the first year of grief. Clover Stroud writes about mourning the death of her sister. She captures the paradox of being both with deep feelings and the continuation of everyday family life; where children need feeding and attending to.

Clover Stroud writes her loss from the inside out. With metaphor and through her senses, we are invited into her inner world. She shows us glimpses of the pain of losing a sibling in middle age.

It is easy to misconstrue Kubler-Ross’s 5 Stages of Grief (plus Kessler’s = 6) as following each in neat order, but Stroud reminds us: “The path alongside death is crooked, remember. There are no consequential stages which happen one after the other, neatly, like dominoes falling.”

I love the permission that Stroud’s memoir gives to recognise the depth of love that mirrors the loss, in relationship with her sister. The death of a partner or child is seen as very significant, but grief follows in the wake of the death of anyone we love, as well as an infinite range of other life situations. “The truth is that the death and therefore loss of someone you love deeply is so awful you have to rearrange your brain dramatically to survive it.”

Writing during 2020, the pandemic adds an additional layer, as Stroud describes collective loss through lens of home schooling and changes in meeting with friends.

Describing grief as an “active verb”, Clover allows us into her own process. She sometimes faces towards the inevitability of death, and also the desire to escape from the reality that “none of us are getting out of here alive,” (to quote Nanea Hoffman via Stroud).

For me, through reading and feeling alongside the hurt of grief allows me to practice stretching my heart muscles. If you are currently inside your own experience of deep grief, Clover Stroud’s beautiful words may be able to reach out to tenderly hold your hand in recognition. She tells of her rituals and strategies, that allow her to begin to alchemise pain when it feels impossible. “The shrine of hard little objects were things to clasp, when the caverns of loss opened up and life felt as if it was sliding out of reach.”

Follow link for next Grief Tending events.

Sarah Pletts is a Grief Tender and Artist who offers workshops in London and online, sharing rituals where grief on all themes is welcome. For more information about Grief Tending events see here.

08 Mar Grief Tending is a Way to Care for Our Broken Hearts

Posted at 12:20h in Articles by admin 0 Comments

‘Grief Tending is a Way to Care for Our Broken Hearts’ was originally published as an article for FOYHT.

Why do we need Grief Tending?

Leaning into how we feel, giving time and attention to our emotions, can be a helpful way to process loss. In Grief Tending we do this by sharing with and witnessing others.

In many contemporary cultures, youth is prized. Social media tempts us to show only our best selves, and people often try to think positively in the face of difficulty. It’s easy to forget that our lives are part of a natural cycle, that has limits. There are beginnings and endings, as well as challenges and triumphs in between. Celebrating the ups with friends and family is welcome, but allowing space for our lows with others is more uncommon. Our expressions of grief are often hidden away in private.

Who would benefit from Grief Tending?

A Grief Tending event can offer us the space to be seen and heard without any pressure to solve or mend how we feel.

People often think that grief is reserved for the bereaved. But life brings us many curved balls and transitions, as well as the deaths of people you love. Every loss is significant, and may make us feel tender.

While some people come to a Grief Tending workshop with a broken heart, others may be dealing with depression, or be dealing with layers of disappointment, regret, absence, overwhelm or fear. It isn’t necessary to bring a specific loss to benefit from having time, in a supportive group workshop.

Grief and trauma recovery

Grief is a whole landscape of feelings that may include anxiety, anger, guilt, relief and numbness, amongst many other responses. It is an individual journey that doesn’t necessarily follow a neat route through the Stages of Grief originally proposed by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross.

Many cultures have had ways to be with grief, but others have lost the elders and knowledge to show us ways to digest our pain. Grief Tending is one kind of grief work, that brings together wisdom from different traditions and teachers including Sobonfu Somé , Francis Weller, Joanna Macy, and Martin Prechtel.

Current research and theories about trauma recovery provide a new understanding of what happens when we don’t have mechanisms to deal with trauma and grief. Gabor Maté sums this up in his recent film ‘The Wisdom of Trauma’,

“Trauma involves a lifelong pushing down, a tremendous expenditure of energy, and to not feeling the pain. As we heal, that same energy is liberated for life and for being in the present. So, the energy of trauma can be transformed into the energy of life.”

Gabor Maté

What does Grief Tending involve?

Grief Tending events happen both online and in person. A short 4 Hour event will allow someone to dip into the experience, whereas in a longer event there is more time to unfold complex stories. A ‘trauma-sensitive’ group will allow participants to work with the exercises in their own way. Groups include guided practices to connect and soothe, as well as a central part where feelings might come forward.

A workshop can be a powerful shared experience, that can help us to bear our suffering. In a group we may learn how to be with others’ losses too. Participants witness one another, and may find more kindness for themselves and others. This approach to working with grief works well along-side other therapeutic approaches.

Finding the balance between grief and support

When we are settled enough, with some support in place, it is possible to begin to explore grief. Finding support is necessary in order to work with our difficult edges. But we need to have balance in life, to spend time doing the things that we love, remember the people who inspire us, and the places that nourish us too.

In Grief Tending, we encourage connecting with support before and after gently approaching grief. In this way, some of our ‘energy of life’, may resurface. When we dare to face our feelings, it can reconnect us with ourselves, and those around us.

More about Grief Tending and upcoming workshops.

Sarah Pletts is a Grief Tender and Artist who offers workshops in London and online, sharing rituals where grief on all themes is welcome. For more information about Grief Tending see www.griefsupport.org.uk .

05 Jan Belonging

Posted at 11:52h in Sarah's Journal by admin 0 Comments

When I have experience deep personal grief, it feels as though there is a sheet of glass between me and the rest of the world. When life is presenting us with challenges, it’s easy to feel shut out of everyday life. Especially when everyone else seems to be having fun, this can feel alienating. Communal times of celebration like seasonal festivals amplify absence, and can add stress from other people’s expectations of jollity, social or family pressures.

In her explorations into Healthy Human Culture, Sophy Banks describes the “conditions for health as being: empowered, resourced, valued, safe and connected.” For me, the yearning for belonging is a hunger for these needs to be met.

Feeling like an outsider can be especially painful, especially if your authentic expression is not welcome in a particular group. If you are involuntarily alone, or without enough support, or part of a marginalised group, this can add an additional layer of grief at these times.

For a variety of reasons which include social restrictions, scarcity/cost of venues, reduced income/higher costs of living, lack of volunteers, many of the community groups where I used to feel a sense of belonging have not been able to meet in person. Ongoing groups of people who share values or activities are a much-needed part of the social net which holds us. The waning of community groups may return after the current wave of pandemic infections, but we will still have to bridge the divides which have sprung up to between people polarised by different preferences and viewpoints.

Making ourselves vulnerable builds intimacy, holding the capacity to sit with different opinions, where all of us is welcome, and speaking from our own experience including uncomfortable subjects, are ways to bring people together. Grief Tending meets this need, to meet with others, to find belonging.

A Grief Tending group is one place where I can rely on feeling included. So, as we cross the threshold into another year, we wish you well, and may you find places where you feel a sense of belonging, whatever you are dealing with.

For Grief Tending events coming up both online and in person, follow this link.

19 Oct ‘The Day That Went Missing – A Family’s Story’ by Richard Beard.

Posted at 15:30h in Book Reviews by admin 0 Comments

‘The Day That Went Missing: A Family Tragedy’ is a book in which Richard Beard explores of one tragedy in one family. It is also a tale of a very common survival strategy to avoid the pain of trauma. He unpicks threads in the circumstances that surrounded his brother’s death. In particular he begins to unwind linear ‘explicit’ memories of witnesses, and excavate more unpredictable ‘implicit’ memory fragments lodged in his body as “a definite physical memory.”

In examining the defences of his family, he recognises that “our project of denial has been a life time’s work.” In this very introspective enquiry, he shows us how these adaptive parts are gradually formed in the absence of space for the expression of grief. “…children and grandparents formulated a response to a world of unreasonable sorrow. We played Scrabble.” He spirals in towards the central happening where, “I limp and run, and the wounded noise keeps rising and has nothing to do with my leg. The noise is inarticulate pain, grief that doesn’t know how to express itself.”

I felt my heart ache for his younger self, shut down in the face of tragedy, “Snap out of it! In that definingly English phrase, pull yourselves together. We could not accept in 1978 in Swindon, the notion of legitimate emotional trauma. We didn’t respect emotion as a useful human response.”

So many who seek out grief tending bring disconnection – which may have served them well as a survival compensation, but may now separate them from self and others.

Richard Beard’s experience speaks to wider themes such as ‘boarding school trauma,’ and the culturally pervasive tendency for disconnection from “any emotional disturbance,” popularised through maintaining a ‘stiff upper lip’.

Splitting off from pain can be problematic, and for those wielding social and economic power others may pay the cost. Beard describes the mechanism by which “we were encouraged to dismiss our feelings for ourselves, and so lost the ability to feel for others.” This is a book that looks under the carpet of privilege and the cost of maintaining a social image at the expense of the people involved.

20 Jun This Grief Thing

Posted at 20:11h in Culture Reviews by admin 0 Comments

Sam Butler and David Harradine of ‘Fevered Sleep’ have devised and produced ‘This Grief Thing’

“This Grief Thing is a project that encourages people to think, talk and learn about grief.”

Their billboard caught my eye last week as I walked along Dalston Lane. They have curated a number of talks on grief themes, as well as other projects that stir people to engage with the theme.

Tony and I visited their market stall in Brick Lane where Julie, Sam and David folded T shirts and sweltered in the heat like all the other market traders. Poised for spontaneous interactions, the presence of the stall caught the eye of people walking past. As people browsed hoodies and T shirts, conversations were encouraged with the curious. I remembered my days on the Narrow Way initiating random conversations with strangers in the Hackney is Friendly project.

The market stall is full of merchandise designed to open conversations with ordinary people to normalise talking about loss. Brilliant and simple, their slogans champion a way to engage with someone who may feel ill-equipped to mourn, or to respond to someone who is grieving.

“Don’t panic if I cry,” printed on a red T-shirt particularly appealed to me. We left with “Let me be sad” badges, and some other swag. I shall wear them, ready to see what communication it provokes, hoping to spread their mission of everyday encounters that unlock the taboo around the subject of grief.

28 Apr Funeral Weather

Posted at 15:16h in Sarah's Journal by admin 0 Comments

There is no stated dress code for this funeral. It is being held for an octogenarian, so perhaps formal is best. But it was a life lived well and long, so perhaps a flourish of colour to acknowledge their well-played ‘innings’.

I settle for my mother’s home-made in the 1950’s black velvet coat, and a bright shawl. The coat has no buttons – I wonder to myself whether it is because button-holes were and still are a chore to make, even with my clever sewing machine. Instead I clutch it closed over my winter dress, which conceals thermal underwear, and step into the misty morning. Today I eschew pink fur hat, dog paraphernalia and hiking boots.

Our car has stayed put on our street over winter. On opening, I discover it is cultivating a spread of green mould. Despite the cold, we drive with open windows hoping to dry out the atmosphere. We skirt around the metropolis to what seems another world, way beyond the reaches of my lockdown-beaten-bounds.

I notice fresher air, fewer people, and struggle to use the car park payment system. I perch in the cold to eat my sandwich lunch, made at breakfast time in my familiar kitchen. I regret that the carefully prepared thermos, is still sitting on the kitchen worktop.

Outside the church, selected representatives from different strands of the well-loved deceased’s life negotiate greeting. Do we bump elbows or wave? Coming together for this rite of passage without the rituals of touch adds another layer of discomfort. My expressions of warmth and care are lost beneath my mask. I try a twitching eyebrow to make connection. My words feel lame. I wince overhearing another grapple with a genuinely offered “Sorry for your loss.”

We stumble through new rituals of sanitising hands, registering our contact details for ‘Track and Trace’. Alternate pews are blocked off with red tape. We sit in isolated pods, at least a pew away from backs hunched in sorrow. The choir of three sing hums at a distance while we stay mute. An inspiring eulogy and readings are given in the traditional British manner – words regimented over emotions that sometimes crack through.

But to my delight, in lavish and beautiful gestures, the British Sign Language interpreter brings real poetry with their embodied expression of the solemn words spoken. My tears roll in response to this direct communication of all that this event means, in this time.

Outside again, rain hammers down and draws our distanced conversations to a close. I miss my usual rain-proof jacket, return to the car with hair, coat and shawl soaked. The car steams. I sense the mould perk up, quietly continuing its life cycle.

11 Oct Post Sobbing Face

Posted at 10:22h in Sarah's Journal by admin 0 Comments

It’s late, and I’ve been crying. Tears have run down my face in waves, great sobs of joy and sadness have expelled salt water, snot, and howls. Now my face, which is swollen with features adrift, has red-ringed eyes. This is not a ‘perfect face’ selfie.

Do you know that feeling, when something just touches you, moves you with unexpected intensity? There are certain themes, which I know can evoke this response in me: equanimity in the face of injustice, false accusations of the innocent, triumph against the odds, the acceptance of animals to their fate, watching death come slowly, and coming together to make change happen.

‘My Octopus Teacher’, an extraordinary documentary about Craig Foster caught me unawares, and precipitated this flood. It’s a fascinating and brilliant exploration of the healing potential of the natural world and examines the boundaries with wild creatures.

Nina Simone’s songs can sometimes evoke this emotional reaction in me, but more often it’s a film, or story. If you’re in need of catharsis, I can also recommend ‘The March of the Penguins’ and ‘Toy Story 3’. But I don’t want to prescribe, maybe other things move you to tears.

17 Aug Concussed Goldfinch

Posted at 18:14h in Sarah's Journal by admin 0 Comments

I have a jolt of recognition as grief comes to visit. “Oh, hello again, I know you.” It feels like a small bird trapped in my chest. Anxiety sets in, with a fluttering of wings, with fear of what is to come. Speaking of it gives my heart an unexpected squeeze, which elicits tears. It feels as though the little bird is being crushed inside my chest when this happens. Thinking about the cause of my sorrow hurts, as though the little bird has smacked against the cage of my chest. If I observe closely, I notice this emotional pain can cause physical sensations along my arms to the tips of my fingers, and fill my stomach.

Then distracted, or numb, there may be a brief respite of quietude as I forget. Regaining consciousness again, the little bird takes to battering itself against confinement. I dip in and out of feelings, sometimes immersed, as though this captive air-borne creature is being held under water. Sometimes I am with a tender quality of beauty for all that is in the world, slowing down to feel gratitude alongside sadness.

I know over the coming days that this little bird will be squeezed, and bruised as grief mauls it like a predator inside my rib cage. I know too that every grief will mark me in some way, and ripen my understanding.

11 Aug Dead Duck

Posted at 14:49h in Culture Reviews by admin 0 Comments

Like a crime scene, the victims of accident or predator sometimes lie in my path. I imagine each feather marked with an exhibit number, a chalk line around the body. The path that meets the road is closed off one day this week, with real police tape. “There has been a shooting,” word passes between dog walkers. Accident or not, a tragedy will probably be playing out in two households, as a consequence.

On this theme, there are a couple of gems available to hear on BBC Radio 4, which unfold some of the consequences for everyone involved after a crime has been committed. ‘This Thing of Darkness’ is a 8 part drama, written by Anita Vettesse and Eileen Horne. It follows a forensic psychiatrist’s conversations with an accused man, and members of his family, in an attempt to unravel what happened. Told from the psychiatrist’s point of view, it reveals her thought processes as she listens for glimmers of truth among the facts. It also includes characters inside a therapy group process within a prison. It allows us to see the nuanced and complex causes of what happened, and the feelings of everyone touched by the incident.

‘The Punch’ is a 5 part documentary series following the impact after one young man was convicted of manslaughter, for killing another with a single punch. We hear about the impact of the death both on the person convicted, and the family of the victim. It gives an inspiring insight into the process of restorative justice. The outcome of the meetings between the convicted, and the parents of the victim is remarkable, but does not diminish the morass of difficult feelings on both sides.

09 Jun Gold Wings

Posted at 15:11h in Sarah's Journal by admin 0 Comments

“Grief and joy balance each other like the two wings of a bird,” says Sophy, making wings with her arms, then folding her hands together, palm to palm. She acknowledges Jeremy Thres for the analogy, which came from Martin Prechtel, who learned it from the Tsujitsil people of Guatamala. She holds each grief tending ceremony with natural, grounded lightness of touch. At each event she invites me to assist on, I feel grateful for the honour. Under her wing, I am stretching mine. Pendulating between the wings of grief and joy, the group dips into both. This is how we deepen together, risk being vulnerable, discover unexpected moments of pleasure. I tumble into the beauty of the altar I have assembled to guide my journey. It is a portal into the mystery of this process. Rumi’s words share the metaphor to express the experience perfectly: “Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings.
Sophy Banks holds on-line grief tending events, and I may be on the team.