Meeting Grief
I know the numbing pain of grief and how it made my world stand still while everything else kept moving. I could not imagine how I could go on and felt partially pulled into a different dimension…somewhere between life and death. This affected me most profoundly when someone I loved dearly died suddenly in an accident. I have also lost dear friends to cancer over the past fifteen years.
Grief makes the heart ache. When I am grieving, my body refuses many different foods and only wants water and what is simple. I need to listen to this. The body knows. Sobonfu Somé, who grew up in the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso, describes unexpressed grief as being like toxins that build up in the body. The longer they accumulate, the more they damage not only our own wellbeing but our capacity to connect with others.
When the waves of loss hit us, they are powerful and the pain is excruciating. At times they crash through us with such force that we wonder how we will survive them. As time passes, they become less intense. The pain of the loss reveals just how much we loved.
Grief is Love Continuing After Loss
Francis Weller, in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, writes that grief and love are not opposites but inseparable. The depth of our grief reflects the depth of our connection. The more we love, whether people, places, animals, or the Earth itself, the more we will grieve. Rather than something to overcome, grief is love continuing after loss. When it is honored rather than suppressed, the heart becomes more compassionate, more tender, and more capable of genuine connection. Weller describes grief work as a natural deepening of the soul. It also makes us more compassionate towards others who have suffered or lost someone they loved deeply.
A Grief-Avoidant Society
Weller notes that our modern Western society is profoundly grief-avoidant. We rush people toward recovery, pathologize sadness, and fill the silence with productivity and distraction. The result is that unexpressed grief accumulates and eventually surfaces as anxiety, numbness, depression, or rage. What begins as a personal wound becomes, over time, a collective one.
Grief Belongs to the Community
Sobonfu Somé witnessed this directly when she came to the United States from West Africa. In her community, grief was never carried alone. When someone was in pain, the people around them gathered and grieved together, taking turns supporting one another as they each broke down. She describes this with simple clarity: pain is never only personal. It belongs in a community which holds it together so that no individual has to bear the full weight alone. This is something we have largely lost.
The Native American and indigenous traditions have long understood the need for community when grieving. Somé’s people, the Dagara, use grief rituals not only to heal individual wounds but also to keep the whole community spiritually alive and connected. Grief is healthy and keeps us connected to our love for the world.
When Grief Is Witnessed
This idea is at the heart of Francis Weller’s work: the purpose of grief is to keep the heart connected to what we love. When grief is witnessed, when tears are allowed, when the body is permitted to express its sorrow and others sit with us without trying to fix anything, something heals that cannot heal any other way.
Each of us has or will experience grief. Somé carries the indigenous wisdom that communal grieving offers a powerful healing that grieving alone cannot. Through sharing the pain in our hearts and witnessing each other’s feelings, profound healing becomes possible. Weller reminds us that grief has always belonged to the community. When grief is expressed and witnessed, joy becomes possible again. In my experience, being with my sorrow and allowing it space, I have discovered that the love I thought I lost always returns in a new form.