The following is a preview of my forthcoming book: Sacred Tears: A Witch’s Guide To Grief. Pre-order here.
Western culture tries to streamline and box-check the wild, raw, and unpredictable process of grieving.
We call it stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Grieving people may feel they need to check the boxes…getting the ugly “job” of grieving “done.”
But these stages aren’t real. Grief is not a check-list.
If grief has any shape at all, it might be a spiral.
Let me tell you my story on the spiral, and maybe it will help you with yours.
But first….
Cauldron Calling Members At Paid Tiers Attend For Free.
On Sunday, May 19, I am hosting a VIRTUAL conversation with Sorita d’Este (author of Circle for Hekate and Hekate: Her Sacred Fires, among others!) on the Goddess Hekate and her relationship with healing, as well as a discussion on how modern Witches, Hekate-devotees, or other Magickally-minded people can embrace Hekate as a patroness and guide on their personal journeys of healing.
Virtual Event. Closed captioning provided.
Event WILL be recorded and sent to all ticket-holders after the event.
(Can’t join us live? Purchase a ticket at this link and check it out, later!)
There will also be giveaways and other exciting announcements.
Would love to see you there. <3
Grief doesn’t come in stages. Grief is more like points on a spiral.
Sometimes, we’ll hit these points in rapid succession. Sometimes, we’ll feel them all at once. We’ll revisit them as we loop around the spiral, sometimes numerous times. Time may pass and we don’t experience any of them. We begin to think the experience of grief is behind us, only to run into them again.
When I was 17, I lost two friends in a car accident.
For me, the “shock” point of my grief over my friends’ deaths manifested in something akin to wonder. I was in awe of the pure simplicity of death. One day, Vanessa sat next to me in World History class. The next day, her chair was empty. One day, Robert’s black hat hung on a rack in the hall. The next day, it didn’t. That was it. Loss, as it turned out, was terrifyingly simple.
The “Despair” arrived on the tenth anniversary of their deaths, as I listened to a friend play a song on his guitar in a bar at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday night/Monday morning. I was suddenly awash in sorrow over the fact that my friends hadn’t lived long enough to stay up too late on a work night and set themselves up for a bad next day at the job.
If there was “Anger” of this loss, it manifested as jealousy when I was deep into my thirties. A colleague’s teenaged daughter lost a friend to a tragedy and my colleague took time off work to be with her instead of attending an important conference with the rest of our work team. I was disturbed at how jealous I was of this girl, remembering how many parents did not even attend our friends’ funerals, let alone take time off work.
If there was any sort of “Bargaining,” it was not a single point on the spiral but an ever-present companion. Shaken by the cold inevitability of death, I spent much of my adult life squeezing in as many life experiences as possible. This has meant extreme choices, and more extreme mistakes, made in the name of life being terribly short.
And these points return again and again. Sure, it’s been over twenty years, but a certain song, or anniversary, or coming across their permanently young faces in an old photo album find me hitting shock or despair or anger or some else all over again
Grief is a spiral because grief is messy, unpredictable, disorienting, and dizzying.
We don’t experience the reactions once and then done, but many times over, sometimes unexpectedly.
Viewing grief as a sacred, Magickal spiral may be helpful when (not if…when) you find that certain points in your grief process repeat themselves.
Ultimately, we don’t we leave the spiral. But in time, the points on the spiral become less disruptive. Greater time passes between them. We may be on the spiral of grief for a specific loss for our whole lives, but the grief eventually will not rule every moment.
To Try A Ritual For Your Space on the Spiral, Join The Cauldron Calling At This Link!
