"It is the grief that I never really processed. I have been grieving my whole life." - from a local support group member, BAYADA Hospice
Voices of Grief jumps right into the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is listening to, sitting with, and making sacred the stories people have to tell about their loved ones and their losses. What we have to offer from our heart is not only story, but it is medicine as well. That is the deep mystery of the emotion of our grief. When we allow that which is within us to come out, we are on the path of mending. We won’t get over loss – nor should we. We mend amid the loss and learn how our lives will now be different. This mystery is at the core of this film.
The collection of sages supporting and affirming the content of the personal stories of loss in the movie, make the film deeply grounding. These wisdom-keepers punctuate the film, making it a safe space to dig into sharing some of the difficulties of grief. Difficulties like the way people may recoil from us when we grieve, or have expectations that we should be over our loss. And, these difficulties are exactly what are shared here in this film; shared in a way that helps normalize them and set them into the context of our interior growth and development. These are needful things.
Marianne Williamson, David Kessler, Paula D’Arcy, Alan Wolfelt, PHD, Thomas Lynch, Rabbi Harold Kushner have all been names in the end-of-life community for decades. Their dedication to the continuity of the work and wrestling with the difficult issues gives the film a broad base.
The first time I met Alan was in the late nineties when I had begun my career in hospice. He held the room spellbound because the stories he shared helped us affirm the stories we knew and heard on a daily basis. He helped us (as have so many others – like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross) find paradigms to understand the consistency of peoples’ processes – how there were great underground themes that we were all responding to and with, in our grief. His work over the years has only deepened what we know about how we feel our way through grief and loss.
Thomas Lynch has inundated the arena of essay and poetry with ample and rich word-smithing for years. As a Funeral Director and poet he walks a very sacred tradition into our daily lives – and does so with dignity and allure. For, who better to set apart a way to look at what we do with our dead and our grief, than one who knows the path oh so well, and has given words to it to make it holy.
I could go on about each of the wisdom-keepers in the film, but want to switch attention to the stories of loss. Stories of young children, infants, fathers, sisters, brothers, parents, and friends all - to someone who is now left without them – are the full weight and measure of this film.
How a husband wants the honor of removing the ring of his beloved from her hand – himself. How a daughter finds her mother’s hands in hers as she plays the piano. How parents yearn to give place to their departed children by numbering them among the names of their living families when asked how many children they have. How awkward moments reveal we do not do loss well as a culture. How things we say can be divisive because we have not been around many who have learned the steps of mercy that must attend the shattering of our lives. How being with people is really so healing; and how hugs are better than theology.
These are the seeds of grief-wisdom that are planted in this film. From Piglet and Pooh, to Kahlil Gibran and the cast of this film, we hear words that are both laconic and lapidary and should be etched into our hearts and journals; quotes that may be our nourishment as we move through a land that feels so unfamiliar. Words that can help us move our grief. Move it from inside to outside. Words that remind us that there are times in life that we must move aside and just simply sit in the boat, allowing another to row us to shore.
If you have ever lost anyone in your life that you love, you need to find a way to see this film. Our hospice team is excited to find countless new ways to invite people into our space and share the wonder that is this film. A film that is really a community of mourners. A sacred space to begin our grief.
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