Contributed by Don Pogue

I am writing this on September 14, 2001. As I write, I remember Tuesday morning. It seems to me appropriate to try to write about the lessons I have learned working with people who are experiencing loss.

I want to start by saying something about my personal experience of grief.
My mother took her own life when I was twenty-two. I was in England on a fellowship. My father told me not to come home. It was foreign to him - and to me - that we might have some need to talk about my mother's death, or to understand our family's experience with manic-depression, or to have some way to honor the depth of the impact this experience had on us. Rather, for us, suicide was a black mark, a private horror to be shut away. My experience--except for a slight feeling of relief--was not of grieving, but rather--to the extent I was aware of any feelings at all--that I felt bitter, believing that there was no support in my family, its community or its church. Good people did bad things. That's life. I moved on. I put it away. I got over it.

Even now, I often live the basic lessons of survival as I learned them in my family. The safest place for me is to shut down. I resist recognizing that I loved my mother. I do not want to experience the pain of the feeling that I did not make a difference in her life.

Nonetheless, I have experiences that bring up my unresolved grief. Only recently, at a family reunion thirty years after my mother's death, we gathered for Sunday service--in a simple format evocative of Sunday mornings in my youth. My tears came involuntarily - feelings of loss - memories of my mother's agony at her own loss of faith. I began to feel the grief locked inside. At the same time, I can still feel detached from my own powerful emotional experiences.

On Tuesday morning this week, I was sitting on a train on my way to work in New York. The conductor announced that the train would be stopped because of a terrorist attack in the City. As I learned of the events of the day, I felt oddly detached. Life did not feel real; rather it seemed unbelievable, surreal. On day two, I shared my experiences with friends. I felt my life return. I felt the warmth of their concern. On day three, yesterday, I felt faithless and hopeless. Faced with the loss of life as I know it now, I dropped into my old experience of grief, as I lived it at the time of my mother's death, as an experience of faithless hopelessness, rather than, as it can be, a powerful reminder of the importance of life itself.

I understand now that this is about needing support for denial. It does not mean that I do not have grief. Rather it is about how I learned to live with my grief.

It is a very new learning for me that I do not have to shut down my emotional experience, but rather that I can say what I feel and take in support. And as I experience support for my own experience--in the program at HFI--gradually, I recognize more of my own emotional experience, and I begin to understand its meaning in my life.

I recognize my mother's obsession in my need to clean the kitchen before I sit down to a meal. I recognize her loss of faith in my own.

Over the last two years, at the hospice in Branford, I have been working with people experiencing grief. Often I am touched as people get support for their grief. I am touched by their stories. Sometimes, I feel my own tears for the support I wanted but believed I could not have.

For me there is a lesson in this. From my own experience, and from working with people who are bereaved it is clear to me that people matter to other people. Grief is. Grief happens when we lose someone who is important to us. Grief is proof that our loved ones matter to us.

It is also clear that people heal. People recover. We have in us the power to heal from our emotional pain. How do we do this?

The hospice invites people who are bereaved to come and share with each other-in a support group-in a place of safety and support-how we actually feel. People express what they feel, without the mask of everyday life, without the need to put up a front. We express our emotional experience and take in support. Or we don't. In fact, we often resist exactly the behavior that will help. We may feel that expressing our grief and taking in support will make it worse-leaving us mired in difficult feelings-in pain. So how does expressing our pain help?

Somehow the gift of compassionate hearts matters. That is, people matter. We discover that sharing our pain helps it move. We feel the support of other people, the bond of common experience, the caring; we let go-and we heal.

Or we don't.

We may discover that we do not take in the support of other people, that we do not let them matter to us, that we hold back or hold in or hold against our grief. We may learn that our actual ability to give and get love is restricted. So even in our resistance and denial, we may discover something important about ourselves and our emotional history.
This is important. It is at least possible that this is learned behavior. We may have learned-in our families, in our culture-resistance to precisely the behavior that will help us heal. This discovery matters.

Why would we do this? At any moment when we are still alive, why would we make choices that do not lead to connection and hope? Why would we resist sharing, connecting, caring? Why would we choose to stay stuck?

This is what I have learned to explore. As I become more aware of my own emotional experience, and as I am with people who are experiencing grief, it seems to me that when we stay stuck, it is because we have not yet discovered how to come unstuck. We have not found the friendships, behaviors and institutions that support us in affirming meaning in our lives, so we continue with the friendships, behaviors and institutions that do not affirm meaning in our lives. Why would we do this? Because people matter; because we remain attached to what we have known; we remain attached to people, behaviors and institutions even if they have led us down a self-destructive path.

So this is another lesson grief teaches. Our choices make a difference. We can choose how we live our grief.

I can resist feeling the pain of losing my old attachments. I can hold on to my old ways. I can decide to stay stuck. I can make choices that do not lead me to connection and hope. I can remain bonded to a refusal to accept myself.

Or I can accept my resistance. I can share my experience. When I make this choice, I can feel that my choice makes a difference in my life. My emotional experience, when shared, affirms that life matters, that people matter. I get support. I feel connected. I open myself, exploring which of my behaviors bring satisfaction, growth and meaning.
And this matters. It affirms that people matter to us. Every moment life presents its choice.

When we share our emotional experience, our attachments, our loyalties, our feelings, we open the door again. We can feel the pain of losing these attachments. We can let go.

And we can heal.

-Don Pogue

Don Pogue is a trainee in the Professional Training Program at HFI.