Hi worklifers,

For today’s newsletter, I wanted to share my thoughts around grief. Grief creates a feeling of loss. When someone doesn’t exist in your life – a person, a relationship or an object of significance it creates a deep feeling of loss. When I lost my father I was accelerating on my goal to not buffer with food, wine, or overwork. So, the crutches had come off. The choice ahead was to feel the loss on most days. Not indulge in it but really feel it through and the vibrations and thoughts that it caused. Another circumstance that was taking shape was listening and connecting with friends, family and colleagues, and absorbing deeply moving stories shared by them about how loss felt for them.

I realized, I was in a learning phase about this feeling of loss and the more I allowed it to be, the more instructive it seemed to become. I have found this to be true of every emotion we try to avoid whether it is anger, frustration, anxiety, guilt or shame. If you stay long enough it imparts wisdom to you about yourself or a new perspective or possibility you weren’t thinking of.

Through listening and allowing for the emotion of loss, it allowed me to capture the wisdom it was imparting. This is over the course of nine months. I will be first to admit this is learning in progress and maybe down the line, I will write a part 2 and 3 to this post but today let’s start with part 1.

Grief the instructor

  1. You are exactly where you need to be in the journey – Three weeks after I lost my dad, I burnt my thumb. I went to a burn clinic and the wound was red and pink in color and had all the right shades of what we expect of a burn of that nature at its point in its healing journey. When the specialist examined me he said “It is right where it needs to be”. The words were reflective of my state of mind. I thought just like my burnt thumb my mind was right where it needed to be in the journey of grief. It was close to three weeks and life was filled with dull colors. Everything was slow moving as if I was stuck in slow motion black and white movie. He then examined further and said your new skin will grow, and I have some good news – “I don’t think it would leave a scar”. He went on to add even if it does, “we got you”. We know how to handle scars. Yet again my focus went to myself and my mind. Will my heart heal from this unbearable loss and what if it left a scar? Also, unlike the burn specialist would I then know what to do with the scar? At that moment, I realized, one doesn’t have to know all the answers. One can just accept that you are right where you need to be in your own healing journey. When I look back, my thumb has healed and has left no scars. I am also moving forward as well and exactly where I need to be. You can learn to be exactly where you are is what grief instructs you.
  2. Don’t look for benchmarks, instead find courage to create new ones – When I was leaving the burn clinic the doctor who was offering his wisdom and knew about my loss said “You are going to carry some wounds in your heart and some on your hand.” You are a strong women and life is going to be alright. Somehow that statement stayed with me. My thumb was going to take it owns course to heal and go through different healing stages and so was my life without Baba (my father). As I was walking down the elevator, the wisdom flashed in front me. I do not have a benchmark for the loss of a parent unlike the benchmark that the doctor had for my thumb. He said you need to get it to rotate exactly just like the other thumb and that is the goal to hit. That’s your benchmark. For my right thumb, my left thumb served as a benchmark. I cannot simply do the same in the case of losing a parent and imagining how life would be. I had nothing to compare against as this was the first parent I was losing. The idea was then to think and be willing to make meaning from this new reality. The idea is to be open and have the courage to unlearn and rethink about one’s biases on how benchmarks get established. Greif was instructing me to develop the strength and courage needed to move forward and be willing to establish a new benchmark.
  3. Move forward by borrowing wisdom from others: One of my close friends who had lost her mother (a very dear friend of my dad) when she was young (her early twenties) reached out to me and supported me during the loss. She had two decades more wisdom from feeling her loss. If you think about wisdom from grief as this “jar” then her “jar” was very rich. I was handed a brand new jar. My friend was close to my father and she expressed how fragile she felt losing him. From her point of view she felt like losing a part of her mother yet again. She didn’t have him anymore to narrate her stories that would remind her how she laughed on his jokes. She expressed how loss can result in feeling memories fading and can even result in guilt overtime. That was critical wisdom she was passing along. We are all vulnerable to our fading memories. However, in that moment we were also grateful to have each other to remind us that by sharing and celebrating them we would keep them alive and pass those memories to our children. Two decades later I was sharing the same circumstance (losing a parent) with her. When she opened her wisdom jar so that I could borrow from it, I realized she was helping me move forward. I just had to lean in and scoop generously. Every person I have spoken over the course of nine months have ended up doing the same (opening their wisdom jars so that I could scoop some more). Some like her had decades, others years. I am collecting wisdom with every conversation. So next time you have someone who has reached out to you in grief think of their jars and what you can borrow. Think of your own jar and what you can collect. Also think of the power of the combined jars that could multiply and help others move forward.
  4. Plan ahead for grief to show up on specific time periods: It was the month of June and the first upcoming father’s day without dad. I am used to anticipating the month of June to not be an easy one for me. The deadlines are what make it a stressful. Year-end closing, people and talent discussions, green light product reviews, and school year end. To add to it, father’s day got added to the list this year. I learnt how grief did a great job of mixing with anxiety, overwhelm, stress which usually tend to show up for me with all these deadlines. Now over the years, I have learnt to plan ahead by keeping other aspects simple like meal planning, childcare, self-care etc. However, this time around it felt as if I was feeling giddy. It turns out grief had managed to mix with these other emotions and create this concoction culminating as I got close to Father’s day. Simply realizing this allowed me to navigate through the feeling. What grief instructed me was to plan ahead even more. Planning ahead meant, knowing I was going to need more connection, support, & time for self-care. It was knowing that I needed to be more vulnerable and demonstrate even more self-compassion for myself. It was knowing and learning to be patient, as this too shall pass. Just because all emotions seem to create this concoction doesn’t mean the solution won’t dilute. It was instructing me to plan ahead for future milestones and months that could have similar patterns. It was asking me to keep my silver platter handy on these times.
  5. Like grief learn to be to adjacent with it:  Greif is part of the strand of emotions. Even if you want to choose and remove grief you cannot keep it aside. It is woven into the fabric of the day. It can be part of laughter and it can be there by itself staring at you at 4:00am lying in the bed. It sometimes feels heavy as if a brick placed on your chest and then on other days flows like the ocean bouncing on your chest in ebbs and flows. The quality of grief is that it sinks in and can feel encompassing. I love what I heard Nora Mclnerny say in her beautiful ted talk. She says “everyone is always on the adjacent side of grief”. Like you always witness it for others until you become the center of the it. You take front row seats and it is all yours. It is so real and poignant. However, most days, I notice I can do everything with it. I am awake with it. I can see it. It is on my mind and I can feel it in my senses. As I take my dog for a walk, I can smell it in the cedar trees. As she sniffs everything and walks slowly, I can whiff it in the air. Grief is adjacent to me. It can be next to me when I go into the day and it can also be when I am thinking creatively and critically and making hard decisions. It can hang out while I am whipping a good dinner for the family and also hang out as I read and go to bed. Greif is truly adjacent to us, I can see that just like grief we can stay adjacent to it. This moves both of you forward as you never move on from grief, you only move forward as beautifully described by Nora.

I am grateful to the wisdom it has imparted so far. Hope these thoughts resonate with you as well.

Maithili Vijay Dandige