Rabbi Brian's Notes About Mourning

We closed the meeting with Rabbi Brian’s Notes About Mourning, a collection he wrote, as he puts it, to help normalize the feelings of loss. It is short, frank, occasionally funny, and not at all precious. Each note is a few lines long, and most of them can be read in the time it takes to make a cup of tea.

It is written for people in the thick of grief, but it is also worth reading from where many of us are now, still caregiving. Not as a way to get ready, since as this week’s conversation made clear, that is not really possible. More as a way to know, ahead of time, that whatever you end up feeling has been felt before.

A Few That Spoke to This Week

A handful of the notes felt especially close to what the room talked about:

• Simple definitions. “Grief is the final stage of love. It is love with no place left to go.”
• Idiosyncratic. Grief shows up in its own way, on its own schedule, and it doesn’t follow a checklist.
• Time and attention. Healing takes both. “You can put off the pain, but you cannot not experience it. Deferred pain gains interest.”
• Waves. Emotions and memories arrive like ocean waves, on their own course, heavier now and lighter later. “For today, you do not need to be anywhere but where you are.”
• Witness lost. When our beloved dies, we lose someone with whom we shared memories, and we are left holding them alone.
• New chapter. A major loss starts a new chapter, and nobody knows yet how it will go.
• Decisions. No major life decisions until the death is no longer the biggest focus of your life.
• Mind and body. Loss can show up in the body: appetite, sleep, memory, attention, even feeling cold. This is normal, even when it is scary, and equilibrium does return. Just not yet.
• Comfort in, dump out. Those closest to the loss lean on the people further out, and not the other way around.

There is more in it than this, including a few notes that will probably make you laugh, which Rabbi Brian clearly intended. He ends with a line that could serve for caregiving as well as for mourning: “Do as much as you can, as well as you can, with love.”

The notes are free to read and share, and Rabbi Brian asks that they be passed along to anyone who might need them.

Resources

Notes About Mourning: Rabbi Brian’s collection of short notes on grief and mourning, from Religion Outside the Box. Free to read, download, and share.