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Loss & Healing
Thus began an amazing odyssey through my grief into a new and more complete way of being. And through it all, Brian's influence continued. It was as if he had left a trail of breadcrumbs for me to follow through the emptiness, which now became a portal to mysterious and wonderful new realms of understanding. And what I discovered there gave me a better understanding of how loss affects us all, in grief as well as in our everyday lives. Few people go through "stages" of grief, I discovered. Instead, they use preferred "roles" of challenge. I learned that the characters in the Wizard of Oz are archetypes of these roles, and that they reveal many important aspects of the healing process. Then I describe how all of our challenges begin with emptiness (grief), and how we can use this emptiness to heal—a process that goes beyond the limits of our reasonable mind.
“Nothing you love is lost. Not really. Things, people—they always go
away, sooner or later. —Bruce Coville, Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher (One of Brian’s favorite books) Share Your Stories
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What
you do when your own experiences should be impossible according to
everything you were taught? How do you grieve a loss that clearly was
supposed to happen? These were questions that haunted me over many years
as I tried to understand the meaning of the mysteries surrounding
Brian's death. So, as someone trained as a scientist, I studied
everything I could find about death and dying, paranormal experiences,
and grief. But, what I found did not really describe what was happening
to me. The stages of grief, for example, just did not happen: I was not
denying my son's death, I was not angry and no more depressed than I had
always been, and I felt no desire to bargain (with whom?). And yet,
something was clearly trying to come from my great emptiness, but what?