What Might You Make of Your Brokenness?

Five years ago, two major threads ran through my life: grief counseling and writing.

My “career” as a grief counselor happened because my son died. I tried a lot of things to memorialize him. Turns out, walking the path with other shattered parents was the only way I could find that felt big enough to honor his life and make sense of his death—to the degree you can ever make sense of losing a 20-year-old.

The other thread was my writing, and specifically, spiritual autobiography. I discovered this form of creative self exploration about 15 years ago. My friend Beth, herself a gifted writer and teacher, taught the practice to me and others at our Unitarian Church. We write monthly, in a group, on a topic designed to tap imagination and memory. We listen deeply to each other's work and offer feedback --- not to improve the writing but to deepen the author's exploration. (Why did you choose that story about your father? What was in your mind when you wrote about that day by the lake?) Over time, we've covered a lot of ground, tiny to transcendent; silly to sublime: families, failure, career, childhood candy, art, music, best meal ever, gifts and lessons, passion, solace, road not taken, beginnings & endings, regret, secret fear, guilty pleasure, wilderness, reboot. We have shared, risked, revealed. At this point, it’s hard to imagine what I would hold back from these people.

These two threads—counseling and writing---seemed intertwined in their power to heal. I wondered if I could knit them together. Could spiritual autobiography help my grief clients? And: can you ask bereaved people to do this? Sometimes grieving people can’t get out of bed. They can’t shower, get dressed, eat. Could you ask them to write each week, reveal themselves, step outside their own suffering long enough to minister to others?

I pitched the idea to our director at Kara, the bereavement services organization where I trained and now volunteer. After some iterations and pandemic hiccups, Writing through Grief was born. We do this writing group about twice a year and it turns out that yes, you can ask this of grieving people. We grievers are broken. But we're not finished. Not yet. What I have learned from my brave, beautiful writers takes my breath away.

I have one writing prompt I really like to use in this course, if I can:

What might you make of your brokenness? Do you think it’s possible that you might grow as a person through this experience of grieving your loved one? Are there ways you might live life more deeply, more fully, more compassionately, in the wake of your loss?

I have to be careful when I assign this. Done too early, before the group starts to trust and gel, it can anger people: How dare you ask me that? There are no silver linings to this! You obviously don’t know what it feels like!

But I persist. I remind my writers that over the past weeks, they have shared, risked, revealed, helped each other, and created a body of work that they will always have to mark this time.

If you can do this now, I ask, while you are this diminished by your loss, what else might you be capable of?

Last week, we had the “brokenness” session. Here’s a sampling of what got said.

I have become a kinder, better, more compassionate person since my wife died. It’s like I know a secret language I could never speak before, and I am called upon to use it. Especially with people in pain.

I am hyperaware of how I live each day, after losing my brother. I no longer dwell on small, stupid stuff. I am living on a much deeper level.

I know I can survive anything. I have lived through the worst, losing my daughter. I am no longer afraid.

Now that I know what really matters, I have re-drawn my boundaries—let go of people and things that don’t feed me, and re-defined limits with others. And the really crazy thing? ALL my relationships are better now because of it.

I used to be a really critical person. Now, rather than “what’s wrong with you?” I am a lot more likely to say “what happened to you?” My son—in life and in death --- taught me this. My newfound compassion is my living tribute to him.

This last, delivered by one inspiring, broken father, caused the group to fall silent for several moments. Then, after a long beat, in a whisper he added:

Oh, how I wish I had been able to get here without losing him.

And boy-oh-boy, is that ever the takeaway. We all wish so fervently that we didn’t have to join this sad, sad club in order to find our own deeper humanity. In a heartbeat, I would take being stupider, shallower, less insightful, less compassionate—if I could have just one more day with my son.

But that’s not how it works. And every griever knows it.

You don’t have to be a bereaved person to be a broken one. Life brings us to our knees, so many times and in so many ways. But that possibility of transformation through trauma exists for all of us, I think. Whatever our pain. Whatever our loss.

There’s a quote about this. It’s a good one, so naturally, it’s been attributed to everyone from Rumi to Ernest Hemingway to Leonard Cohen:

We are all broken. It’s where the light gets in.

As we ponder where our light might get in, let’s be really clear about one thing. The cloud of death has no silver lining. Please don’t ever suggest that---to yourself, or anybody else.

But there might be another possibility. Instead of a silver lining, maybe there’s rain inside that cloud. A stream of life-giving water that sluices out of it, and soaks a tiny little seed of something inside you. Something you didn’t even know was there. Slowly—so slowly that you don’t even notice it—the soaked seed finds the dirt at your feet. And there, nourished by the water, something starts to take root.

Maybe, it is only when we are on our knees, driven there by life, that we are able to see it. A little seed of something, ready to grow. Ready to bloom.