The Unexpected Guests of Grief

This being human is a guest house. 

Every morning a new arrival.

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A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

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Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

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The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

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Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

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– Rumi

How I Came to Know the Unexpected Guests of Grief

My daughter passed away unexpectedly in 2016. The pain was so intense that for a time, it eclipsed everything else. Where there once had been life, relationships, work, home, struggle, hope, a sense of myself as a person, now there was only pain. It left no room for other considerations. I couldn’t distinguish any boundaries between myself and my suffering. I was my pain. 

As the weeks passed, the flurry of family subsided, the wake and funeral over, the silver urn, in the shape of a crescent moon, placed lovingly on the shelf. Life thoughtlessly fumbled forward, as if all had not been lost. I began to arrive at the realization of my loss with a sense of sobriety and alertness. It became a burden I carried around through waking life – to the store, greeting the neighbors, numbly trudging through the days. There was some notion of social propriety, an expectation that I should be recovering, getting better, moving on. I returned to school, renovated my home, hosted family and friends, cooked dinner, and wondered with alarm what in the world this state of existence was. 

I became overwhelmed easily. I lost my car keys, my phone, the jacket I was wearing even while I was wearing it — several times a day. I turned on the TV but found I could not concentrate, so I turned it off. Instead, I played my daughter’s funeral playlist on repeat. I missed meetings. I found myself walking into the cool blast of the grocery store and felt astonished to find that it was summertime. I had no recollection of driving to the store, nor did I know why I had come. 

The hours of the day were mysterious and shifting. Some days were many weeks long. Others, I went to get dressed for the day, only to find that the sun was setting, the day already done. Friends reached out often to invite me over, or, rather, insist that I come. And, when I didn’t show, they turned up at my house. 

I found it such work to be around other people, with their concerned faces and uncharacteristic gentleness. It seemed nothing could be normal when I was present. It seemed nothing would ever be normal or okay ever again.

This, it turns out, was grief.

The early days after loss, what is known as the “acute loss” period, have the quality of an emergency. Everything is abnormal and it is expectedly so. Vacillations between shock and adrenaline, pitches of uncontrollable sorrow, and exhausted, dreamless sleep. It is often crowded with people, the phone ringing unendingly, and strange moments imbued with finality. There’s the last time I touch her, see her, box her things, the final trip to the funeral home to collect her ashes, and then, a kind of silence falls over everything. The end of loss. And the beginning of grief.

I’m not sure what I expected from grief. I think I expected something one-dimensional. Something like sadness. Whatever it was I expected, I found grief to be surprisingly different. I didn’t know about the anger, the way I would feel angry not just at myself, God, the doctors, but at my daughter, for leaving me. I didn’t know about the shame, the way I would feel that I had somehow caused what had happened, that my child dying was proof that I was somehow unfit, less than, and unworthy of love. 

I didn’t know about the exquisite way that joy and gratitude would suddenly flood in with high resolution between bouts of heartbreak. I would stand in the backyard, peering up at the towering trees, see the sunlight shimmering through and think that I had never known such beauty before. But most of all, I was unprepared for the loneliness of grief.

Grief is as solitary a human experience as death itself. 

Grief is a chamber you enter alone, even if another person shares your loss. My husband shared the loss of our daughter, yet I was astonished to realize that we had been banished to separate islands, his grief and mine worlds apart, each with its own quality. 

His grief smiled, went to work, laughed earnestly at jokes, made others try to feel better, replaced intimacy with kind formality. Mine was ragged, obliterating, erupting, unyielding, angry. My grief made me feel ravaged for meaning, for honesty, for a chance to be valiant, to right the wrong of my own failure. If only I had been big enough to save her. I swore to stop being small. I became all fight and no yield. I became a hurricane.

Unreachable in my pain, I remained a sole survivor on grief island after it seemed everyone else had swum back to the mainland. I moved from sadness to anger to shame to gratitude to loneliness and back again. I didn’t yet understand that these “guests” of grief had something to show me, that one day they would lead me to forgiveness, and that forgiveness would bring me home to myself.

I believed I needed my daughter back in order to heal and live again. I was stuck in the intractability of that need. But I learned what many grief sojourners before me have discovered, that grief seeks a reconciliation not with the one we have lost, but with ourselves.

It is natural that we look outside of ourselves for the relief of the pain of bereavement. And especially natural that we focus on the person we lost as the necessary source for our unmet need. I was in freefall for a long time, traveling countless revolutions in resistance before I began softening to the quiet voice within, prompting me to turn my love and attention inward. 

It was scary, approaching ground zero of my own pain and bereavement. 

The pain I found within myself seemed endless, beyond my scope, unredeemable. But then I recalled how I loved my daughter with an infinite wellspring of love that came to me instinctively, intuitively. Even in my shipwrecked state, I knew how to love. 

I yearned for a second chance to love my daughter, but yielded instead to loving myself as a proxy. I took every tender, loving, courageous impulse I had and directed it towards the place within myself that was so bitterly condemned, isolated, and heartbroken. 

As I did so, I started to feel the messages carried in these emotions, these “guests” of grief:

Anger said: “This is not okay.” And it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t okay that she died, just as her life was beginning. I needed to acknowledge this for myself. As I felt the truth of it – “this is not okay, this is not okay, this is not okay” – something started to soften and ease up inside of me.

Shame said: “I need you to forgive me.” “I won’t!” I snapped, tension and pain flaring inside of me. Shame said again: “I need you to forgive me. This was not my fault.” I took a deep breath. I tried those words on for size, saying over and over to myself, “this was not my fault, I forgive myself, this was not my fault, I forgive,” until the words were choked out by my sobs. I needed forgiveness so desperately, pain left my body like an electrical current. I felt a friendly peace within for the first time in a long time.

Gratitude spoke up next: “All is not lost. I am still here. I am still living. Can you feel me? Can’t you feel that life still courses through me?” I had to admit to gratitude that I had noticed that my body still craved movement, food, touch. That the sun kept rising, casting its light, and there was beauty all around me. But I felt guilty for noticing it. Why should I get life, when she didn’t? Gratitude asked me to lay that down, to not co-opt my imagined experience of my daughter. “You are alive and embodied. Allow for what is.” So I got up and ate. I walked outside and turned my face toward the sun, closing my eyes and feeling warmth move through me. My body seemed to sizzle, to come alive, and with it a host of sweet memories–her little kicks in utero, the weight of her in my arms. I realized that my best memories lived in my body, and that, if I alienated myself from my own physical reality, from all good feelings, so much was lost.

Sadness, who I thought would be the first to speak, finally raised a weak voice now, tired from the relentless work, and said simply: “I love and I am loved. Don’t you remember?” I recalled then, the love between us, how purely and unconditionally she loved me, that I would do it all over again even knowing how it would end, to share that love with her. I placed my hand over my heart and whispered, “I love and I am loved, I love and I am loved,” and from some ancient and faraway part of myself I felt a rumbling response.

Loneliness, the last to speak, said: “I need you. I have not died. I am still here. And I need you. Show up for me the way you showed up for her.” By this time, there was quietude inside of me, so the ache of my loneliness was stark and sharp. “I am here,” I breathed. And I knew that this hadn’t been true for a long time. “I am here, I am here, I am here.” And I began to feel the presence of my own companionship, my own love.

Coming home through grief is a gradual process, maybe even a lifelong one. 

I am engaged in it to this day. But as I practice redirecting towards myself all the love and presence and care that felt thwarted by my loss, an amazing thing happens. I come back into connection. Not only with myself and my living loved ones, but with my lost love, too. She has never felt nearer to me than she does now. I like to imagine that she stays close, because she loves being around someone who loves her momma so well.

Conclusion

If you find yourself in the loneliness of loss, open your door to the unexpected guests of grief. Give a voice to those emotions and offer yourself the grace to respond honestly. There isn’t one way to grieve, nor is there a right way, but if you can extend a little care and love to yourself, you may be a step closer to finding healing. 

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For more personal stories and practical guides, check out our full library of bereavement resources.

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