Alan D. Wolfelt - The Paradoxes of Mourning: Healing Your Grief with Three Forgotten Truths

ALSO BY DR. ALAN WOLFELT

Healing Your Grieving Heart:

100 Practical Ideas

Loving from the Outside In, Mourning from the Inside Out

The Journey Through Grief:

Reflections on Healing

The Mourners Book of Hope: 30 Days of Inspiration

Understanding Your Grief:

Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope
and Healing Your Heart

Companion Press is dedicated to the education and support of both the bereaved and bereavement caregivers. We believe that those who companion the bereaved by walking with them as they journey in grief have a wondrous opportunity: to help others embrace and grow through griefand to lead fuller, more deeply-lived lives themselves because of this important ministry.

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Companion Press

The Center for Loss and Life Transition

3735 Broken Bow Road, Fort Collins, CO 80526

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www.centerforloss.com

2015 by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

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Companion Press is an imprint of the Center for Loss and Life Transition,

3735 Broken Bow Road, Fort Collins, Colorado 80526.

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I SBN: 978-1-617222-22-1

To the children, teens, adults, and families who have invited me to walk with them through the wilderness of their grief. Thank you for teaching me about the wisdom of the three Truths explored in these pages. You helped me be a responsible rebel and question the medical model of grief care. I am forever grateful to you for enlightening me as you entrusted me with your sacred stories of love and loss.

The more we know, the more we may be humbled by our ignorance to the point of illumination.

Thomas Moore

WELCOME TO THIS EXPLORATION OF THE PARADOXES OF MOURNING. As you know, a paradox is a seemingly self-contradictory statement or situation that is in fact often true. The three paradoxes of mourning we will consider together in this book might, at first glance, seem self-contradictory, but as I will reveal, they are actually three forgotten Truths with a capital T. Theyre Truths we must rediscover. Digging them out from the cultural basementwhere we in the twenty-first century have stowed them away like Grandmas old furniturethen lovingly dusting them off and learning to appreciate them anew is a task that really cant be put off any longer. Why? Because they are essential to healing in the aftermath of significant loss.

Paradoxes are head scratchers. They often sound like puzzling tricks. The three we will review in the pages that follow have the seesaw of oppositional language: hello/goodbye; darkness/light; and backward/forward. But I hope to share with you the wisdom they containnot playground games or trickery at all but instead good old-fashioned common sense.

Yes, sometimes old-fashioned trumps newfangled. Those who have walked the Earth before us have much to teach us about the best possible future, especially when it comes to the mysteries of life and death. Progress is truly wonderful, but here in the Information Age we too often mistake efficiency for effectiveness, and we are also too quick to write off ancient traditions and customs as archaic nonsense.

Knowledge searches out and is fascinated with the new. Wisdom assumes the connectedness of reality, encouraging mindfulness of the old; it tends to prefer that which has endured the test of time.

Ernest Kurtz

I am calling the three paradoxes in this book forgotten Truths because humankind used to know and honor them. In the many long centuries in which death was ever-present (before the twentieth centurys remarkable medical advances), life was shorter but slower paced, and religious/spiritual health reigned supreme, we understood and lived the paradoxes. In fact, it is only our modern worldview that makes them seem like paradoxes at all. In the past they would simply have been life assumptions, as obvious and self-explanatory as the importance of hand washing or the fact that computers make life easier are to us today.

Before we get started, I want to clarify a couple of other key terms. When we hear the word grief, we tend to think of death. Yes, grief is what we feel after someone we love dies, and many of you reading this book are doing so as a means of support through your bereavement. Im so glad youve found this resource because, as a longtime grief counselor and educator, I truly believe it will help you in your journey through grief. But as you read, I also invite you to consider that we experience grief after all significant losses. Grief is what we think and feel whenever something we value is harmed or taken away. And so, we grieve after divorce. We grieve when we are diagnosed with cancer. We grieve when our children grow up and move away. We grieve all the time, because life is replete with transitions and losses.

Mourning, on the other hand, is expressing our grief. Its grief gone public. Grief is internal, while mourning is external. The paradoxes we will explore in this book affect both grief and mourning. But mourning, as you will see, is the key to healing.

No matter which loss(es) you may have suffered, no matter how recent or how distant your significant losses, no matter your age or background or experience, if you are grieving, this book is for you. I feel honored to pull back the curtains and reveal the three paradoxical Truths of mourning to you, and I thank you for entrusting me with your time and attention. Godspeed.

May 2015