Although Michelle no longer walks on this planet, we still have a relationship.  Although that’s my truth, I also grieve the loss of her. It’s complex. Her energy exists and I relate with her in that way, and she does not have a physical body and I miss that – I miss her. That’s part of the complexity of life and death – of grief – of Spirit – of love.   

Those who study human energetic systems say that the emotional heart lives in the chest, near the lungs and the physical heart.  When I’m extraordinarily tired or sad, my chest and heart physically hurt. A ‘grief wave’ (sometimes described as a Mac truck crashing into you from the side) takes my breath away; it’s hard to breathe. The feeling of grief is the feeling of my heart stretching…far beyond its limits – tearing – and then, breaking. Grief is the emotional heart breaking open – farther and wider and deeper than it was.

If, to any degree, you have loved, this [person, animal, thing] affected you in a way that blew through your doors and blocks and defenses, dropped you full immersion into your center, catalyzed an explosion of Light, or opened you to Joy. The experience left you feeling gratitude. Your emotional heart stretched and broke open, and what filled the new, bigger space – we call Love. Love is what fills the heart-space.

‘Falling in love’ is like that.  Sick to your stomach, insecure, fighting to keep autonomy… until the surrender. When sexual intimacy is involved, we call the participants ‘Lovers’, their sexual act ‘making love’, and often, the culmination is ‘orgasm’. There’s an afterglow – a sense of release, peace, freedom – a sense that the world is alive. The French use the term la petite mort, or the little death.  I liken the experience to metamorphosis – a caterpillar dissolves into goop; the cellular structure that it had existed as rearranges itself; and now: a butterfly. Everything has changed.

Giving birth is like that: stretching, tearing, and then – a brand new person – a miracle – your infant. Raising a child is like that – watching her rolling over, crawling, walking, growing, reinventing herself every step and skip and leap of the way. Releasing your child back to Spirit is like that.

Michelle left her body on spring equinox: the time of rebirth. She was being reborn into Spirit as Earth was being reborn here in New England. On the outside, the soil was warm and soft, birthing tender crocuses. Inside, grief was raw. “Look” my friends would say, “the flowers are coming up”. I knew they thought that if I saw beauty, new life, felt hope… I would feel connected, less loss, better.  It infuriated me. “Fuck that.” Michelle died and life continued, and it just felt wrong. I have heard different descriptions of what initial, raw grief feels like. One friend, whose husband died, said that color was gone. Another friend, whose daughter died a year after mine, said that the heart-space (that had been filled with love) became empty. Initial, raw grief is like a black hole, sucking all of existence into it.

Simple logic tells me that to feel emptiness, a person must believe that the [person, animal, thing] that died created the love; that they were love; that when they left, they took love with them; and that the heart-space they had inhabited is now void of love, empty.  More complex logic tells me otherwise.

Once love is realized, it remains where it has always lived – in the heart-space. We don’t always recognize love, because love is difficult to define. As it grows, love can feel like freedom, or joy, or gratitude, or loss, or longing – an empty container to be filled, or sadness. Love is so multi-faceted. I have experienced an empty space inside, that when touched by beauty, fills with gratitude and tears. After Michelle died, I had an experience while dancing. It was my first time being social. The band played Bob Marley’s Is this Love?  Is this love, is this love, is this love, is this love that I’m feeling? I felt my community. I felt appreciation. I felt extraordinary joy. And then, I was on the ground sobbing, immersed in excruciating sadness. Raw emotions inhabit a deep, common space in the emotional heart. I call it ‘the grieving well’ because accessing the heart-space involves letting go – loss. Growing love – tearing the heart open to a greater depth – is grief’s work.  I have come to know Grief well.

When Michelle died, a tsunami tore through me. I had no control of it. Nature is much more powerful than humans. The ‘grief wave’ (as I called it) would start as a sense of impending doom. Something was creeping up from behind. It had increasing power. I felt uncomfortable. I mistakenly thought the source of the discomfort was coming from outside of me – from cars – from people. I sensed an unknown enemy. My defenses became activated.  My brain went into fight-flight-freeze survival mode. Sometimes I’d get angry; sometimes I wanted to leave, be alone, hide; sometimes I’d go numb. And then, seemingly out-of-the-blue, I’d be crying – pouring tears searing hot and salty, snot running – and would realize a tsunami had just crashed over me, and that the tsunami was grief.  I was reminded over and over again that I was grieving. This happened for a period of about six years, at which time the emotional scale of ‘mostly sad’ tipped to ‘mostly accepting’. Accepting that Michelle died. Accepting that life continued without her.  As my schedule became more and more full, something felt more and more empty. Was it my heart? My life?

Eight years later, in a Psychosynthesis training, being guided into a transpersonal heart meditation, I opened the doors into my heart-space and stepped in. My heart, I found, was far from empty.  To the contrary, what I entered was a salty, endless ocean.  It did not surprise me that my heart was watery. I relate to mermaids; my astrological chart is fishy; I’m affected by the pull of the moon and the tides. It did surprise me that the body of water in my heart was salty like tears, and endless. I had thought I was done with the bulk of grief. A new thought emerged: my heart broke open and an ocean filled it.

There was another aspect of the meditation that surprised and transformed me. The two doors to my heart-space were shaped like two sides of a broken heart, the jagged edges in the middle fitting perfectly together.  While inside – in the endless ocean – an entity called Wisdom gave me a gift: a shoelace. It struck me as odd, but I brought the gift with me, anyhow, when our guide moved us toward the heart’s opening. When it was time to leave the heart-space, gift in hand, I closed the doors behind me. But this time, the shoe lace, now woven between the two doors, caused the broken, jagged crack to remain slightly open, allowing a steady, gentle stream to flow out of the heart-space and into my life.

Michelle’s dad once said to me: a broken heart is an open heart.  Grief broke my heart open and my heart-space filled with an endless ocean of tears and joy and all the complexities of love. From that ocean, a gentle and steady river flows into my life. I now embrace grief, love, complexity, Michelle.  My life is full.