A journey through grief, with suffering, is life-long. We can pretend, or run, or deny all we want, but it will continue to ask for our attention. To give our presence to suffering takes courage, but it is in that courage that we find our humanity. We stop pretending, giving up the facade of trying to have a perfect life, and participate in something sacred. Facing suffering shows us something real about who we are.
I’ve offered a few moments from my experience of grieving my brother’s death to express the range of how this happens: it is not a linear process, it is often complex. Some things repeat themselves, lessons we have to go through to recognize more of ourselves. We may encounter the unbearable, looking at what can feel impossible to gaze upon. We will be made different: but what that difference looks like is up to us.
I often think about the moment when I decided to go back to school, just two weeks after Fischer died. When I returned, totally unprepared and surrounded by people fresh off beach vacations or a few weeks in Europe, I essentially had two options. One would be to ignore my pain, to shut it up and drown in avoiding it. There was plenty of excess on tap in college for me to do that: I was only one semester in and had nothing to lose. I could choose oblivion, and there would have been no one to stop me.
The other choice was seemingly impossible, with no guarantees: not to run away, to face my suffering head-on. To sit with it, to learn from it, to know it as if I were getting to know someone else. I could learn from what suffering had to say, rather than live in fear of what it was. I didn’t know it at the time, but choosing this was a decision that probably saved my life.
Facing my suffering meant, in some ways, accepting my own death. There was a Me who died the day Fischer died, the someone who had shared 16 years of life with him. I had to grieve that as much as grieving Fischer himself. Perhaps, it was grieving the loss of innocence, of the naive belief that I could move through the world always on my own terms. That I could always be in control, that things would not break, that I could shape the world around me so that nothing unexpected would happen. I had to grieve that life that I had imagined with Fischer, the life that was now gone.
In learning acceptance, I felt a lot of fear around getting closer to my own suffering. There was no manual for this, and I didn’t know what would happen. Suffering and grief can make for odd companions. The world tells us that they’re life’s outcasts, which can make you feel alone too. Everyone seems so much happier avoiding these things, don’t they? We make a compelling case for ignorance, for pretending that we’re fine and that the world can’t hurt us. Choosing not to pretend, to get closer to my own pain, was terrifying. I didn’t know what I was doing-but I knew that there was something important to learn by not running away. Something was moving in me, and I needed to listen.
This was not easy-in fact, it was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It was painful, heartbreaking, intensely lonely at times. It was so tempting to avoid my suffering: to lose myself in partying, in numbing myself, in whatever distractions happened to be around at that time. It is incredible to stand upon the edge of your own life, to see the possibility of giving in and know how easy it would be to do so. There were days where that choice felt closer than my own breath. To choose the harder thing every day, to not give in, was excruciating. Yet even if I wasn’t fully aware at the time, there was a part of me that sensed there was some kind of life that included my suffering. There was a life through and beyond this: somewhere, somehow.
Trying to discover what this was meant that I began to pour myself into my classes and meditation. I began to study suffering itself. Each morning I would sit with my grief, learning its sensations and textures. In the afternoons, I would study my experience through my psychology courses: learning about trauma, depression, resilience, the ins and outs of the human mind. I began to make a map for myself: of where I was and where I could go.
The practice of staying with it-to be shaped by grief and be moved by the presence of suffering-began to take me towards life, instead of away from it. I started to understand that suffering wasn’t opposed to life-it was a part of it. In fact, it was going towards suffering that I began to find myself: the self that could embrace everything, that could be whole.
As I went towards life, I became more aware of the suffering in others. Similar to that moment I had in the parking lot outside the hospital, I saw that this was something everyone around me would go through. Perhaps not the same exact circumstances, but some kind of suffering nonetheless. No one around me was untouched by it, no matter how much they might pretend otherwise. Through this awareness, I realized that I cared about others’ pain as much as my own-and that none of us needed to suffer by ourselves. I discovered how qualities of awareness, kindness, and compassion could carry my own suffering and found a desire to share that kindness and compassion with others. In this way, my suffering was no longer life-denying: it began to affirm, and to give.
