This is a grief day. I am wandering around my house feeling things and people slipping away from me. I have learned to live with grief days. Ever since my stroke I’ve had a number of them. Days like this just materialize. Sometimes it takes me a long time to identify what is haunting me, sometimes I know. Today is more the latter, though I am sure that this inquiry will show me that I have only identified the tip of the iceberg. I am aching with the grief that always comes with the need to let go.
I am savvy enough by now, age and hardship have alerted me, and the world’s spiritual traditions keep reminding me, that I know I am perpetually having to let go. I don’t think I do it particularly well. I hear there are traditional people, like the Mayans, who have integrated the grief associated with letting go into a wider perspective, which has them using the same word for praise. Apparently, they know that what hurts helps, that loss equals gain, that things go — so other things can come. All of that wisdom lies heavy on my heart this morning.
I have to let go some more. I might as well be dieing, it feels the same, where is the elephant graveyard, the place where I go to lay down my hopes, desires, expectations, attachments and wishes? I don’t like this raw, more sensitive skin I am left with. Yes, I am sometimes lighter, but along the way, I always have periods like this, where I feel heavier, weighed down by grief. The world outside is coated with a kind of thin and pervasive sadness.
Letting go ruptures my life. It punctuates my certainty. I am always being re-worked, every time I think I’ve got it, having to let go lets me know I don’t. Sometimes, like today, I just get too overwhelmed. I just can’t let go of any more friends, identities or present incarnations. They say that hope springs eternal, well it seems to me, that paradoxically, letting go also seems to spring eternal. I am enlivened by one, but don’t seem well equipped for the other. I accumulate hopes relatively easily, but find letting go of them is much more difficult.
You would think that growing older, and entering the period of life where friends, marriages and lifestyles are passing away, would have taught me how to better accept the transience of everything, and maybe it has, but I find that some days, I cannot but be impressed by what passes so quickly beyond my grasp. Does this mean I am a half-empty kind of guy, who primarily sees the cost of life? No, I don’t think so. I do see the cost and it does hurt, but I know today, like everything else, will pass, I just can’t help from time to time feeling it, feeling the incredible poignancy that accompanies what goes out of the world, and sometimes out of myself. At those moments, like when its happening with me today, I am too full, overwhelmed by the room that Life has made for me.
I know that surrendering my attachment to some preferred outcome is the right thing to do. I know I can be that open to the moment. And I do want to be. And sometimes I actually can be. But being open to the moment, being non-attached sometimes leads me to feel this; a sense that death is a part of life, that loss is a part of gain, that Creation seems to thrive on destruction. I don’t know how it is for you, but for me, I often feel so full of regard for what is passing, for what is making room, for me and my changes, for life and it’s changes, that I simply am struck by the beauty and poignancy of such loss.
I can feel the love in it, the longing and heartache, the struggle to create what had never been seen before, or again. I can experience the heartache of parents, the vulnerability of caring, the sheer rigor of giving up. The world revolves daily, and each moment is an arrival and a departure. When these feelings come upon me, I know they are always present, and that I am just feeling them in this moment, that the entire drama is always occurring, making room for my temporary life. I wish I could feel it more. I wish I didn’t ever have to feel it. I wish I could make better sense of what I’m feeling. Sometimes I feel honored, sometimes I feel cursed, but always, like today, I am touched.
I don’t want to let go, to die, to feel things passing away, but what I want doesn’t seem to matter, things are coming to pass anyway. I am having an experience that is so much deeper than I am. If I open, and let go, I create an opening. Through this opening rushes the realization of all that is passing. For some time I am immersed in the feeling of going out of the world. I know that is my destiny. It is the destiny of everything that exists. My breath is taken. I am passing too.
I exist because I am fated to pass. I will be joining the river, the river of Life, the way of passing, this is my fate, the gift that gives me the freedom to be me, to be unique, to be the one and only, to merge and still be me. Today is a grief day. I am hurting with Life, feeling the overwhelming magnificence that both takes me away and gives me the opportunity to be here. I don’t think I can swim in this torrent, yet I don’t drown. I am being washed away and I am becoming a part of the river.
Letting go frees me. It feels like a loss. In fact it is. I can’t hold on! The tide is too strong. Thankfully, it overcomes me. Strangely, I am washed away, and I am delivered, not as a solid being, but as part of the river that rolls around in a wheel chair. Grief days seem to take away my certainty, they deliver me unwillingly to the realization of my transcience, to the very place where I merge with the river and become what I’ve always wanted to be — myself, and an essence of the Mystery behind it all.
Hello, I am an AGNG 200 student at the Erickson School of Aging. I would first like to say that your writing is impeccable. You have an excellent way of making people feel what you feel as you write. I do not feel that I am at the age of being ready to let go of so much. A message that I got repeatedly is that death is inevitable and an integral part of life. As you said, letting go is both a loss and a gain. Letting go is like yin and yang. You cannot lose something without getting something in return in order to maintain the balance of life. You seem to draw from Erik Erikson’s stages of psychological development. The last stage is ego integrity versus despair, where we really think about our mortality and truly apply our wisdom. This is the stage where we either branch towards despair, where if we look back at our lives and are dissatisfied, our lives lead to depression and hopelessness. Being successful in this stage gives wisdom, though, where we can look back on our accomplishments in life and find a sense of closure and completeness. This piece is wisdom in its entirety. You understand the wholeness that life brings in the end and find peace in the inevitable death.
Hi Bernice,
I am 70 and recently retired…. without realizing it, thankfully, due to a life full of undeserved blessings, it seems to me that I am on the path of ego integrity.
I have not experienced a personal loss in many,many years … I do pray for the fortitude to stay on the positive road when I am eventually tested.
It breaks my heart because I feel “Lucky’s” pain…. your words to him and to the likes of myself are very encouraging…
Kind Regards,
Chris
Hello Mr. Goff,
As a student in AGNG 200 at the Erickson School of Aging, we are tasked with learning about the struggles in the acceptance of not only meeting our fate, but the obstacles that lead up to that point and its effect on our perception of it. As you poetically write, the idea that no matter what we want in for our lives, the inevitability of our fate is a part of life. Whether young or old, there is constant fear that we endure as humans that life comes to an end, that death is a part of life. Thinking of Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, the point in life where we consider our mortality is reflective of his last and final stage: integrity vs. despair. You draw heavily on both parts, considering the grief and burden of the death as well the beauty and spiritual nature of it all. I see that this is as a gray area, caught in between two binary aspects of life in the attitudes we push toward death. When you speak of joining the river of Life, it is very reflective of gerotranscendence, or the idea that aging in our latter part of life is enforced by a positive and spiritual outlook on life in part to our inevitable passing. Like people of my age, we are resistant to change and often ignore I think the symbolism behind that is incredibly powerful in our understanding of life, that regardless of the time we spend with our material items or in our dysfunctional society, we will find that everything that exists passes. Our fated time is inevitable, but the path we follow to our final days is the focus we should embrace. We must consider this as an utmost importance because of its strong influence on our attitude towards death, and through this we can ease the troublesome worries that society has stigmatized death to be.
Edit: Thank you very much for sharing your poetic piece with us.
Hello,
I am a AGNG200 student at the Erickson School of Aging. Reading through this article I felt the emotions of the writer that evoked my feelings of empathy. Not being an aging adult, I cannot fully say that I have a complete understanding of that loss or detachment from life, but having had dealt with grief in the form of losing both of my parents, I understand the feeling of feeling some aspects of life slipping away.
Part of aging comes with some decrease of cognitive thinking, and strokes can have a huge impact on this occurrence. In the case of David Goff, he has had a stroke and managed to survive it but the reality of abilities lost due to this incident can cause some days of grieving.
What is good about what he is doing is actively trying to work on these feelings and keeping as active as he can be, because with aging adults, they can become severely depressed if there is no activity after such an incident.
I’ll be chewing on this for a long time. Thank you.
thank you for your insightful article that touches a place within all of us that place of grief and healing
So poignantly and beautifully expressed. I was having a ‘grief day’ too and feeling unsure about what to do to channel the feelings. Thank you. There aren’t too many words that suffice.
You delivered me right into a palpable sense of all that I’ve lost and the depth of the losses. (No more losses, surely, than most folks.) I realize that what comes with aging is a series of losses, and I am, I tell myself, accepting of that. But it means, perhaps, that I don’t adequately grieve those losses. Thanks for your article.
This is one of the most beautiful, poignant and meaningful posts I’ve ever read. I’ve saved it to read whenever I feel like being philosophical or introspective. Letting go…Oh if we all only could…the freedom and peace of mind it would bring. Thank you.
Thank you for the raw honesty of your experience and the beauty of your words. It touches me deeply.
As I read through this poetic article, scrolling back over a time when I had similar feelings, I realize that after all of the reading and writing and “work” I have done over the past few years, I have not let go at all. It saddens me that I still have so much to do to get to a place where I can find peace and freedom.. Thank you for this wonderful post, David. You have renewed my focus on what is most important in life.
Thank you.
Very moving! I’ve use your ‘Arrival’ post as the centering focus for my blog/website. Letting Go has been at the center of my growth also. Thank you!