Grief can be medicine for the soul!
A health of a community can be measured in our ability to grieve. Death, suicide offers us a chance to be human, to break out of our numbness or our heads in order to feel and emote; to remember we have hearts. We move from an ‘opinion’ of suicide and what he or she did; to emote and feel. Death and suicide can be a community building event and that way the one who has died has died for us…to help us remember who we are. Blocking our grief can lead to illness, depression or the spiritual and emotional condition of numbness or our own emotional death.
Some say that to grieve is a responsibility or an obligation for the health of a community. Some communities or families would hire professional mourners who would follow the families or communities death march and it was their job to wail and make a big show of their grief to help the family find their humanity and grief.
Grief can take many forms and may have many different layers….tears and sadness, rage and anger, compassion and sorrow interspersed with periods of numbness. It’s commons for us to be fluid and move through layers over time.
Home took his life a few weeks ago leaving a family and community in shock. We all have our responses to this event and your truth is your truth.
Yesterday, an old client contacted me that her boyfriend who I met once shot himself. I remember him as brittle and rigid and angry…and a man I could not reach or connect with as his walls were so thick.
In this short ceremony, we offer an opportunity to speak your truth in a couple of sentences; or in your silence. You will be witnessed as having a witness offers you an opportunity to go inside to discover deeper truths; and your truth is a gift to the witnesses. It builds community.
The water of life represents the replacement of the tears of our own grief; over Home or another who has died or left their body; or it may hold some magic that will allow you, if you are blocked to discover and experience your own grief now or in the future; it may be a stimulant to find yourself.
‘I drink this water to ‘replace the tears’ I’ve shed for the many suicides and losses I’ve had in my life….can name them. To speak of your spoken or unspoken love for the one who has died.
Or I drink this water of life with a prayer that it teach me or us to grieve so that I and my community may thrive.
Please…just one or two potent sentences that express your truth, turn and be seen by the community and then sit and be a witness for others. This is not a time for long speeches or to expand on your theories of death or suicide. Please, just one or two sentences.