Live, love, grieve, laugh…and eat cake

November 29, 2024 Off By nickie.aven

I am in the exhausted afterglow of co-facilitating the loss and grief retreat which I have been promoting here these past weeks. The luxurious barn we occupied was nestled into the side of the moor. Biting cold and clear winter sunshine alternated with deluging rainfall and howling winds.

Snug and warm in our hideout, 13 women gathered for the very sad and serious matter of exploring our grief.

Women, especially women of a certain age, cackle. We cackled until our tummies ached and knickers needed changing! And then we wept… ate cake…slept…walked, danced, wrote, sang, talked (a lot) and ate more cake.


Nourish and nurture

Isn’t it interesting, our capacity to laugh even while we grieve? For those few days we became a community, each woman bringing their unique gifts with open hearted generosity, and taking from each other’s wisdom store what they needed in the moment. I love men – I’ve written often enough in these pages, about how much I grieve the beautiful man who was my husband, and the few male friends I have I treasure. But women, together….we feel like a sisterhood. I’m not starry eyed: over time there would be issues and irritations, I know, but this potential to nourish and nurture one another with food, understanding and humour is precious. And I miss it, not least as I traverse this unpredictable and often arduous path of grief.

For the last few centuries in this country, there seems to have been an agreed silence surrounding grief. Either your beloved one is “in a better place”, so you shouldn’t be sad about them; or someone else is worse off; or you shouldn’t embarrass other people by weeping; or “least said soonest mended”. Cultivate a stiff upper lip and return to the status quo, let the space they occupied cover over and move on. Except it’s a lie. You, you who grieve, know that the fabric of your life is torn and that no amount of covering over is going to change the reality of your loss.

All too often we stumble on feeling isolated and alone, somehow gagged from speaking the names of our dead or telling our story. After the first few weeks and months, surely nobody wants to hear us? Other people’s lives continue in relative normality, the ripples caused by our beloved’s death in their individual ponds, gradually moving further and further away, until the surface shows no evidence of disruption.

Holding a candle

It doesn’t have to be this way. More, in my opinion, it shouldn’t be this way. Grief is a common human experience. Share it and the combined wisdom and compassion we have available to us is massive.

If you have just been flung into the dark and frightening landscape of loss, can I, having been navigating this territory for a few more years, hold a candle for you? If you know how to dance emotions through your body, can you show me how to dance mine? Can we bring each other food that comforts and songs that soothe? If we see each other’s love and resilience in the face of the unthinkable, can that not give us hope?
 

We were never meant to be independent – babies die without touch – and I am at a loss to understand why it is deemed to be a superior state. I am sure “survival of the fittest” does not mean “best wins”, so much as “those most suited to their environment thrive”. Human beings thrive when we share, when we collaborate, when we pool our knowledge, when we weep and when we laugh together, when we care too much to forsake one another. And so, as we grieve, life grows around us, connections deepen, we mature, we grow wise and we hold aloft the light of hope we now carry, for the next person who enters this land of shadows.

Have we not been doing this forever, honouring our dead and supporting our bereaved? Until now. How can such fundamental human needs go ‘out of fashion’? Scratch the surface, put 13 women in a snug, barn-shaped crucible, add a little heat and holding, and there it is, our shared humanity, our wisdom and knowing remembered.

To any of the women I met who are reading this, thank you. To everyone reading this, thank you too. I hope that one day soon, we will reclaim our stories, our wisdom and our understanding, and risk breaking the silence to share generously and authentically, our love and compassion, our humanity and humour.

With my love

Nickie

PS This beautiful poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer just arrived in my inbox.

What if..
instead of grief
we call it pollination,
a process through which we realise
the gold of our hearts must spill out
and if we are to survive as a species,
it requires we somehow exchange
this gold with each other- all our hearts
splayed open, all our hearts needing
what the other hearts have.
It's messy. Vulnerable.
And this is how we go on.
Your grief. My grief.
The quiet buzz of conversation.
This splitting open. This spilling.
This sharing with each other.

Yes, oh yes…N


CONTACTING ME

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