Your loss: (not) getting over it

Barbara was 50 years old and a mother of two. A year ago, she lost her husband of 27 years and was still raw with the pain of her loss. She looked at me, tears of agony welling up; she felt consumed by her pain, swallowed up not just by its intensity but by its longevity and another layer of suffering she had applied to her loss, that of shame, guilt and self-loathing at not “getting over it”.

As she sobbed I thought about this. It was if I could feel a deep and physical connection to her pain, but I wondered where she might have got the notion from that she should “get over” the loss of her husband.

For some time, I have been questioning what seems to be the current vogue that suggests great loss, trauma, hurt and pain are “things” we can “get over”. I’m not so sure. All those messages we hear, such as “you’ll turn a corner” or “there’s always light at the end of the tunnel” or “time is a wonderful healer” might be constructed more to console the person you bump into in the street rather than have any great meaning for you. Pain is yours, it’s your reality and it is perhaps calling on you, asking you to pay attention to its meaning.

What meaning?

Perhaps the pain and suffering of great loss do not ever go away because they are not meant to go away; perhaps we are better served by meeting our suffering, bit by bit and letting it enrich us and seeking out its meaning, instead of feeling guilty and ashamed for feeling human, desperate, dreadful and a mess. Human living is mostly around being a mess-my mindfulness teacher Rob Nairn suggests that we accept ourselves as a “compassionate mess”-which for me suggests that we might recognise a deeper connection and meaning. The connection and meaning I am suggesting here we often find difficulty in describing positively, for who in their right mind would ever encourage a person to feel pain?

The feeling that I mean here is akin, I think to an immersion, but a mindful, compassionate immersion that builds soul. Now soul is a tricky little word, and the soul I mean in this context is not the essence of us that lives on after death, but rather soul as character, depth, heart, a recognition that after great loss, trauma or pain something almost alchemical has happened inside us at a bodily depth and we now possess a gravity of thoughtfulness, empathy and even seriousness that grants us an ability to see the world quite differently.

How might we see the world? We might recognise the invertibility of pain and suffering as not negative events that have to be “got over” but our humanity as a result of our suffering, not in spite of it and therefore a thing to be ashamed of, suppressed or banished.

In the hurly-burly-skimming-over-the-surface-grinning-all-the-time world that social media presents, perhaps in our pain and suffering we can leave a mindful, compassionate space to contact and let enrich in us the soulful nobility within our suffering, and allow this to deepen our character and wisdom, leading us to experience what it is to be human after all.