Hearts Weep & Spirits Smile

I just learned that my dear friend Joe lost his daughter Nicole to cancer on Easter Sunday. Last fall, on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, he lost Cynthia, Nicole’s sister, to cancer. Both were in their late thirties with families and children of their own. How unbearable it must be to be the parent of two inwardly and outwardly beautiful young women cut down in their prime by cancer.

However, Joe’s awareness of the spiritual dimension of life has helped him with his heart-ripping grief. An hour after Nicole died, Joe and other family members were startled by what they saw; Nicole had a smile on her lips. It was not there the moment of her death and did not appear until the funeral director arrived. It was as if her spirit were communicating through her body. “I love you all and I’m glad to be released.” Nicole and Cynthia had suffered hard and long. Both endured the pain of the cancer intensified by all the surgeries, radiation, and painful side effects of the chemotherapy. (In the next posting, I’ll share my experience with a medical doctor that illustrates how the deceased communicate joy at being released, especially when it is from a body wracked with pain.)

“Was there a symbolic message about death here? Thanksgiving? Easter?” I wondered if an aspect of the legacies of these remarkable young women is to teach us all how gratitude, the essence of Thanksgiving, and joy, the essence of Easter, can also be experienced at the loss of a loved one. Then, as so often happens in the daily dialogue with the Divine, I received an answer to my question. “Yes, they can,” I thought as the following passages from 8 Steps to Love came to mind.

Grief, Gratitude & Joy

On a cold and gray autumn afternoon, I was walking in the graveyard of an old country church. The air was especially chilly as the church stood only a few miles from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The winds coming off the Chesapeake bay cut right through my overcoat. Suddenly, I was struck by the following words inscribed on a gravestone.

All that’s bright must fade
All that’s fair, decay
All we loved was made
To bloom and pass away.
[And yet, "our love is here to stay."]
Thank you for those inspiring lyrics, Mr. Gershwin.]

At first, the message seemed depressing, like the coldness and grayness of the day. Then, it was like a ray of sunshine, shooting through those gray clouds as I saw the comfort and significance in these words. When we come to accept the truth of these words then we discover our capacity to love freely. It hit me that there is a primary and a secondary source of human suffering. I now knew what one of my mentors meant when he said, “According to Freud, in order to be emotionally healthy, we must replace neurotic suffering with real suffering.” I thought to myself:

We suffer because we love. This is unavoidable. We suffer
more because we deny the reality of love. This is avoidable.

Repression and denial of the reality of our love and of our essential identity as the enduring energy of love cause us more pain. The emptiness we initially feel when a loved one is lost stems from our holding back our love out of a wish to avoid the pain of our loss. Our restraint is based on a denial and repression of our essence, of that which makes life worth living, namely, our capacity to love.
To ease our suffering, we need to come to terms with how the bodies or the concrete material forms of the people, pets, places and things we love in our lives eventually “fade, decay or bloom and pass away.” Then we can learn to love who or what is in our life while it is in our life with an attitude of gratitude. Rather than grabbing on tightly and possessively to what we love as though our life and internal security, peace of mind and well-being depended on it, we learn to love freely. We joyfully recognize the transitory nature of concrete material reality. As William Blake wrote:

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise…

We transcend the primary source of our suffering when we realize that the important thing, that which lasts, is the process of loving. In remembering that the essence of our heart, the treasure of love in our heart, is the capacity to care and love, we remain in touch with our inner fullness. It is having the courage to love, knowing full well the concrete form will inevitably be lost to us. Hence, we can learn to love freely, without grasping or clinging for dear life to that which we love. We transcend our suffering as we discover the joy of loving freely.

The secondary source of our suffering comes from the fact that our body depends on the external world, on air, food and water to survive. Our spirit, however, can transcend the physical circumstances we find ourselves in as prisoners of war survivors and near-death experience survivors have done. It is when we identify with our body only, that the loss of our loved one leads to aching emptiness. We long for the physical presence of our loved one in order to feel our own fullness again. However, when we identify with our spirit, the treasure of love that we are, we feel a fullness. In reliving our love for our lost loved one, we can forever feel and bring back the joy we felt before we lost our loved one. We can transform our suffering into joy.

Therefore, even though the losses we experience in life may cause us great suffering, it is through the losses that we discover we are not simply our bodies.

• Today, remember, "The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble (or, is it the other way around? Rockies tumble? Oh, well, it works either way.) They're only made of clay. But, our love is here to stay." Now, consider the following Sufi saying. It succinctly describes the joy that comes from loving freely despite the heartache and gnawing pain of loss:

When the heart weeps for what it has lost,
the spirit laughs [smiles, in Nicole's case] for what it has found.