The Gifts of Grief
If you’d have told me that I’d look upon my dads death as a gift one day, I’d likely have reacted with a silent stream of curse words while I glared and invisibly karate kicked you away from my heart.
Because during the months after my dad’s death in 2013, I’d resolved to a new normal, a new emotional baseline of emptiness and despair, with the occasional visit from anger and abandonment. I’d check in with myself, and google on occasion, to see where I landed on the grief stages spectrum to see if I’d headed in the right direction, believing healing and time to be linear at the time. I wanted to feel better, but I couldn’t seem to motivate myself to do anything, stuck in a cyclical pattern of eating, Netflix, and sleeping.
Guilt mounted from my summer of binge watching TV in bed. Feeling true, lasting joy again seemed impossible. I’d come to terms with the notion that I’d never feel the exuberance again in a life without my dad. An excellent pretender to any friends or family interested in my well-being, I wore a facade and kept my emotions together for other people, a behavior my dad had always modeled. Oh, yea, California is going great. I love living by the beach. Time of my life. Land of dreams.
I understand now how attention directs our energy. What we place our attention on is magnified back to us. Life amplifies and reflects our inner world. By feeding the energy of loss and not honoring my emotions, my existence felt hollow and disconnected. That existence of emptiness radiated back to me with each click of the Apple TV remote with panic arising every time I lost the silver remote of solace in my tussled white sheets.
Sleep provided such a sweet, sweet relief. Every morning offered a fleeting second of peace to greet the new day, a millisecond of a moment before hit with the fact that my dad was indeed gone from my life. My higher-self must’ve wanted to heal one way or another because I began processing the loss with repeated lucid dreams. Dreams where we’d hug and I’d wake up sobbing and clutching my pillow. Or dreams where he was tickling my feet, and then I’d wake up because my body felt like someone was physically rubbing their fingers along my bare soles.
While sleeping, with a conscious awareness when he’d meet me in a dream, I would tell him, “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Shhh, don’t tell anyone,” he’d say with a playful smile, like he was in on a secret.
I desperately wanted to be in on the secret, but I chalked my dreams up as my handling grief in a unique way that didn’t truly seem possible. Yet, the healing penetrated my day-to-day life after one special visit.
In the middle of one summer evening, hours after I’d missed Netflix asking, Are you still watching?, I jolted awake in my apartment. My eyes opened wide and the hair all over my body stood at attention. Every muscle tensed as my heart thudded with an awareness that someone else was in the room with me. Without moving my body, an effort to not alert the intruder, I slid my gaze to the area where the slender hallway met the gas fireplace. My eyes met a 6’5” golden, shimmering apparition that eased back into an unseen ether, erasing its visibility from my naked eye.
I squished my eyes a few times and stared at the smooth ceiling. No doubt the energetic presence was my dad. I’d traded pills and booze for binge watching TV with my bare stomach acting as a resting spot for snacks. I may have been numbing my emotions with new methods, but I was the most sober I’d been in my life. Well rested. Hydrated. Even vegan at the time. Despite the overwhelming grief, I felt sane. Yet, I no doubt sensed a palpable presence in my studio that evening. I couldn’t deny its existence or discredit the experience. But, how was that possible?
Looking back, I feel as if he wanted me to have a physical, visual cognition and understanding of the fact that he never abandoned me, that he just wasn’t in the physical form that had once brought immense comfort. He’d found a way to communicate the message that he was okay. The visit helped me get out of bed and press play on life.
Around the same time, a friend reminded me of the knowledge seed of energy transference that my stepfather had once placed into my mind as a teenager and one that still brings me much peace. “If energy can’t be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another, and we come from another world, a womb… maybe we transfer to another realm upon death.”
The mountain of healing ahead seemed insurmountable. But like when I ride a bike, a hill appears more daunting from a distance. The space between can build intimidation to the point where I almost want to turn around before trying. But, if I place one pedal down and then the other, no matter how slow I go, I know I’ll make it to the top and ride on the other side. The golden apparition was the match to my spiritual fire and gave me the resolve to get back on my healing bike and start pedaling.
My inner question shifted from seeking the answers to desperate pleas of why me, why did my dad leave me so early, closer to an understanding that maybe I was experiencing this pain because I was strong enough to handle it. Closer to what was this trying to teach me? Maybe I could mold the grief into something beautiful, a transference of energy similar to what happened with death and give myself a new life, a life of my own.
Four years later, after a partner’s mom passed away, I experienced a profound level of empathy and an intuitive message. Ah, this… this is why. I can show up and hold space for others with deeper compassion… this is a gift.
And after more reflection, countless books, and a few plant medicine journeys, I realized the contrast and discomfort in my life illuminated the areas I craved a change – activated the awareness that we could use moments of discontent or pain as a guide. If I approached my experiences, even the most difficult ones, with a curious and grateful heart, the lessons were gifts of redirection or insight. If the lesson from the painful experience was a gift, then the experience itself was a gift – making all of life a gift.
I understand now the grief served as a catalyst, propelled me on a spiritual search for meaning and healing, where I eventually arrived at an awakening, at a knowing of the story I needed to share to help others on their own path of seeking. So in a sense, through the expression of me, in the sharing of my story to help people find their way home to peace, to that inner liberation, my dad’s death gifted the world with more freedom.
Towards the end of completing the first draft of my memoir, I discovered another gift of grief may be the healing of shared wounds across lineages. I read a book, Heal Your Wounds & Find Your True Self by Lise Bourbeau, which spoke of soul agreements and shared wounding with our parents. Might healing my abandonment wounds help heal those on my dad’s timeline since he experienced similar wounding after the sudden death of his own father at a young age?
As a light-worker, I believe I chose to incarnate at this time and do such, to fully feel the deep loss and to transmute the energy of its pain, a pain I don’t believe he ever fully processed. The experience of the debilitating grief led to not only the sharing of my story for others, but the healing of my wounds and those I shared with him, like a pre-arranged soul agreement for the highest expression of myself and the highest healing of all. For it seems now that within this healing journey, I gift my dad’s soul with freedom, the same freedom he lovingly agreed to help give the world.