A few days ago, it was 13th April. Thirty years since I married Mike (13th April 1996), and nine years since we held his funeral (13th April 2017). Both momentous experiences occurring on that same date.
We had been together for just under 30 years, and we were married for just under twenty-one years. And then, in a way that will no doubt always feel equally poetic and brutal, we gathered on our wedding anniversary to say goodbye to him. Those days forever intertwined — celebration and devastation, beginning and ending, love and loss, all held within the same twenty-four hour date.
For years now, this terrain of the both-ands, multiplicity, coexistence, irreconcilables — is where I reside. What I might once have called “contradiction” now feels closer to “whole truth”. We are taught, implicitly and explicitly, to resolve things, to move towards clarity, coherence, and closure, as though the work of grief is to tidy up the pain, metabolise it into something that resolves.
But look more closely and it’s clear that my life is awash with polarities and paradoxes and forever will be. Polarities are tensions to navigate over time. Paradoxes are seemingly opposite truths that somehow need to be held concurrently.
A few examples: I can feel such anger and frustration, horror and despair, at the wastefulness of my brother James’s death, and in the same moment, feel such deep love and compassion for how he came to his decision to end his life. Similarly, I can feel sharp-edged, righteous judgement around how my brother’s wife behaved in the days and weeks preceding his death, and, in the same breath, recognise her own suffering and lack of capacity to hold extreme tension and discomfort.
For a long time, I thought the work of transformation was to move along a spectrum of healing — from anger to compassion and forgiveness, from judgement to understanding and acceptance. Now it feels less like a spectrum and more like a great big messy-beautiful mosaic or tapestry — one in which all of these states are simultaneously present. The question is not how to magic myself from one state to another, but how to remain with the messiness — and beauty — of what is, without collapsing it into something more palatable.
This terrain of grief is not only the terrain of my life, but I would argue, the terrain of all of our lives — perhaps to a greater or lesser degree. It is the terrain of the world at large, politics, business, environment, social justice. And it is the terrain of nature and life.
About 18 months ago I wrote a piece about living and embracing paradoxes and polarities. They had appeared in significant clarity during a psychedelic journey. I had some profound flashes of understanding and an almost playful engagement with these tensions:
Loving and letting go
Releasing and relishing
Grief, gifts and gratitude
Nowhere and now here…
But 18 months on I find that I am not just able to better see the paradoxes, I am better able to live them. And even (mostly!) manage to do so in an intentional, conscious and embodied way. I have become particularly curious not just about how I see that these polarities and paradoxes are always present, but how I invite them into my body, senses, heart and mind — allowing the full flavour of them to unfold in my being.
I am working with a coach-therapist, Sheila, who is helping me flip less quickly into understanding and compassion, perspective-taking and zooming out (which I am wont to do, particularly when things are uncomfortable), and stay with the immediacy of my experience. It happens almost before I have time to notice it — a flare of hot anger, a contraction in my belly, a tightening of my jaw, and my mind and heart step in with perspective, context and compassion. I can feel it happen so fast — a tightening through my front, a kind of inner vice, like being gripped — and then, poof! — it is gone, replaced by a more coherent, more reasonable, more compassionate, more “mature” narrative.
That capacity to quickly put things in perspective has served me well. It is part of how I have lived, survived, and thrived. But I see how it can also be a form of dissociating — or at least not quite staying with myself. The work now feels less about understanding and making meaning (always important but not enough) and more about allowing. Staying present to my sensations and feelings for longer. Letting anger take up space (again), allowing sadness to unfurl its full weight (again), without so quickly explaining, moving to compassion or understanding or even forgiveness.
As a fellow learner in my Psychedelics Assisted Therapy training said to me soon after my brother’s death, “Just because you know that forgiveness is the path doesn’t mean you need to skip to forgiveness yet”.
It is not necessarily difficult, but it does ask of me a willingness to remain in contact with what is uncomfortable, unfinished, unresolved. My own RUGGS – regrets, unfinished business, grief and guilt, and shame. And in that loving presence, something eventually shifts. Not resolution or clarity, but an increased capacity to hold all of what is, without needing to change anything.
I noticed this again a couple of days ago, in a coaching session with a client who has known deep and profound loss. As she spoke, I could hear her holding her own paradoxes: a deep, luminous gratitude for the love she got to experience, alongside the simply heart-breaking knowing that “we were so not done”. She spoke of an expanded sense of being, a renewed and much welcomed capacity to “contain the whole world”, and also of just how fragile that state can feel. Like many Grieflings, she has known both the desire to live fully and the sense, at times, of not wanting to continue at all.
These are not states that cancel one another out. There is no erasing of anything, no smoothing into simpler shapes. Everything is there, present, at the same time. More than ever, rather than “working” or “processing” grief in the way it is often described, we are asked to develop the capacity to live inside these tensions without trying to resolve them.
Something similar can happen in the altered states work I explore, where what might seem impossible or incompatible in ordinary consciousness simply coexists without friction. What these spaces teach me is that I need not feel any urgency to solve anything, nor even to understand it. I can hold a range of truths all at once.
Perhaps this is what Keats is pointing to with his notion of “negative capability”, this capacity to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” (See a recent blog piece on this topic).
I recognise in myself that desire to reach after reason, the impulse to organise and bring coherence. It is part of how I have navigated these past years. But I am learning, oh so slowly, that there is another way of being alongside it, one that does not rush to tidy things up.
There are times when it feels as though those I love are nowhere — gone, unreachable — and at the very same time, now here, woven into everything. I no longer try to resolve that. It is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be lived.
None of this fits with the sanitised narratives of grief that we usually encounter, even in professional settings, where there is an implicit preference for forward movement, for progress, for something that looks like resolution. My experience is that the real work is not about moving on, nor even about processing, but about increasing our capacity to be with what will never resolve. To stay in relationship with complexity and unknowing without wishing it to be otherwise.
I know that I am not the only one trying to hold irreconcilable truths. I received messages from Mike’s sisters, one of whom wrote simply:
“I was there the day Mike was born, the day he married, and almost there the day he died. It’s hard to fathom being at them all for my little brother. I miss him.”
The span of a rich life held in a couple of simple sentences. Beginnings and endings, birth and death, wedding and funeral, joy and grief, all witnessed, held, and carried forward. Not reconciled or resolved. Just held.
At the end of the day on Tuesday 13th, as Medjool and I were meditating before going to sleep, I had the strongest sense of Mike casting a beautiful light — to the right of me and just a little behind — past where Medjool was sitting by my side. After we finished, I told Medjool that I’d had a strong sense of Mike being there, and Medjool exclaimed, “Me too! Mike was there”. I asked him to point to where he’d felt him, and it was exactly where I had sensed him.
Yet another polarity to hold: presence and absence.
So the 13th April is a day full of precious memories. Some so gloriously beautiful and joyous, some so painfully brutal. A day I would never have chosen, yet also a day I would never trade.
Both true.
Another both-and.
