The Great Grieving

The Great Grief is the thing we are not talking about. And I do not see us participating in the Great Grieving in any conscious manner. It is seeping out in many unconscious behavior patterns: the person waving their hands in rage because there is a long line in front of them, the car that cuts you in traffic, the stomping around, the demands for attention, the lack of respect and temper tantrums happening around us. Anger, depression, blaming, denial, bargaining…all five stages and more, acted out in daily life.

I find myself saying, on a daily basis, “so many of us have lost so many”. Mostly it is spoken to clients who have an animal that has reached the last stage of its life, which is many of my clients right now.

I have dealt with loss all of my life. Most of us have. My profession, as a veterinarian, and as a holistic vet that people reach out to as a last resort, has trained me to be a Death Dhoula. If I am honest, that has been the driving force on my spiritual path: to understand death and dying, to delve into assisted death, what happens before, during and after death. Is their reincarnation? Where do we go? Exploring past lives and “inbetween Bardo lives”.

Decades ago, when I overheard someone saying that the Tibetan Buddhists and Mongolian shamen could remember the Other side and had it mapped out, I dove headlong into Vajrayana Buddhism. Within a week I had my first Buddha from a garage sale. I spent hours scraping the ugly brown paint off it with dental tools and covered it in gold leaf copying a picture I had seen in a magazine. I met my first Tibetan lama, Rinpoche, within a year and was hooked by his compassion.

I have sat with the dead, held vigil with the dying, stared corpses, human and animal, in the face and the eyes. I loaded crematories, day after day, at animal shelters. I’ve gone home with the smell of death on my hands and clothes, the smell of crematory smoke in my freshly washed hair, there is no mistaking that smell.

Death subsumes Life, and Life has a bargain with Death. There is no way out of it or around it.

Recently, I have been in the duldrums, isolating, sleeping more, feeling drained by all those around me. My appetite has been off. Everything has been “off”.

I sat down the other day to take stock of the past couple years.

I worked my way through the lockdown. I continued treating animals and escorting animals to the Veil, the threshold between life and death. I never really slowed down. It is my job and my path of service. It is also a defense mechanism to keep busy.

A few days ago I escorted a seeing-eye dog to the threshold. She told me, with the look in her eyes, that it was time, right there, right now, it was time to go. When an animal gives me that look I know. Then it’s my job to communicate the message to their human counterpart.

See, I made a vow a long time ago, that if an animal was ready to cross over to the Otherworld, I would not walk away from them without helping them. That’s a pretty hefty vow to make. I’m sure there is some past-life thing in there somewhere. The tough part of the job is getting the message across clearly to the humans involved. The animal’s closest human always knows the truth in their heart. The heart never lies.

The death of this seeing-eye dog was a breaking point for me.

It brought up every death I had attended, assisted, advised, human or animal. Every euthanasia room, in every animal shelter I had worked in, with the stench of urine, blood, and feces mixed with the sickly sweetness of euthanasia solution. Wrapping up the bodies to carry out. Piling the bodies in the crematory. Pulverizing the intact bones into ash that came out of the crematory. It was like one of those old-time flipbooks suddenly started flipping its pages inside my head.

I realize, as I write this, that I did not need to go to Tibet and live on the charnal grounds in order to be initiated by Death, I did it right here in the United States of America. And I eventually did receive my initiation into Chod practice, the practice done by lamas, in the charnal grounds.

Compassion in the Charnel Grounds

And that seeing-eye dog gave me the gift of connecting all of these dots.

I sat down and decided to do an inventory of all the deaths that have occurred these past few years in my personal life. I highly recommend this to everyone. It may surprise you. These are my close personal ones, not including friends or clients:

• my mother: she was living in an assisted living and did not die of the virus but of congestive heart failure

• the love of my life, my partner of 10 years: he relapsed and died from fentanyl, not the virus

• my bottle-fed cat who decided to check out peacefully on a Sunday evening, with a full stomach, on a heating blanket

These three beings were extraordinarily close to my heart. My mother was as much my best friend as my mother. I remember grieving her death as a child, trying to imagine my life without her, not knowing how I would survive, a mammalian child’s survival fears and dependence on their mother.

My partner was just that. We communicated telepathically. We flew through the ethers together in bliss. We had known each other for eons. He healed my shame and sexual wounds. And we had a blast, for 8 good years. All along, I knew it would not last and I appreciated and drank up every second he and I were together.

My cat came along as a 10-day-old kitten, eyes barely open, a few days after my feline familiar had died. I swear she sent him down to keep me from falling into the bottomless well of grief while she was gone on her mission. They recognized each other when she showed back up in her next body.

These were major losses, three beings who made up my emotional support system. I love and miss all three of them dearly. I am left with a very dear and close friend of thirty years, and I have even more gratitude for our friendship and companionship than ever before.

We have all had many losses, including the loss of a world and a life that will never be, ever again. I am already hearing the phrases “life before the pandemic” and “life after the pandemic”.

The words of my Rinpoche echo in my head, “life is short and you never know how much time you have, so practice.”

We need to collectively grieve and hold space for one another to collectively grieve.

I realize that compassion fatigue has set in for me. This is not the first time in my life, nor will it be the last. I first learned about it and heard the term while working in animal shelters. It is actual fatigue, where one finds oneself with nothing left to give. For me, it is a signal to give myself time to grieve.

If we can consciously acknowledge our grief, and pain and anger, and have compassion for ourselves, then we can find ways to give ourselves space, to allow the tears to flow, to yell and scream and beat pillows, to let the rage escape. I let loose on a dancefloor this past weekend, to move the emotion through my body. Somatic therapy is all the rage and I can’t think of a better form of it than dancing.

And then we can give others time and space as well, without asking too much of them and knowing when to step away and give them space.

We are all doing the best that we can.

Please remember that if I do not return your call right away, or take a few days off.

Please, take care of yourself. Make that inventory of losses and allow yourself time and space to grieve each and every one of them.

And if you need a place to sit, meditate, contemplate, and grieve, I hold twice-weekly meditation sessions in my private group.