The idea of death is for the living. Death has no meaning for the one no longer in form. Death is felt by the ones left behind, or it is glossed over with polite triteness, watchful escapism: It’s okay, she’s gone to a better place, he is flying with the angels, they’ve gone home to God, he’s no longer in pain.

It’s not okay. Loss hurts. Grief is real. Denial doesn’t make it better. It only helps the pain dig a deeper hole in your heart.

While all of those sayings are true in a way, just not true in the way most think, they are ways that we keep from having to feel our experience of loss … but loss is sneaky. What we don’t feel today, will catch up with us sooner or later, so we might as well feel it now. Now it is utterly accessible. We haven’t had time to wrap layers of story around it yet.

Right now, now with the loss exactly as it is, raw and real, it’s fresh. In a beautiful way, it’s quite innocent, empty of meaning, uninhabited by deflection, free of the rat’s nest of well-meaning escape routes.

… and we feel what we feel when and as we can, when and as we are ready. It’s impossible to enter into the pain before our time. Sometimes it takes years before the loss shows its face again. You might not even recognize it as loss, as the pain of grief you couldn’t feel at the time. It materializes out of nowhere, wearing new clothes, a beggar with a begging bowl, will you feel me now? How about if I look like this? Or this?

Sometimes we still aren’t ready, so the pain digs in, adding more layers, crystallizing a bit, waiting for that one crack to open us enough to embrace the whole of ourselves, the one experience that will allow us to see the dark beauty in the pain and agony, in the shame and self-recrimination.

All life is ever doing is opening our hearts, showing us the precious actuality of what we are and have always been. It is infinitely patient, absolutely loving. It is always revealing that it’s okay to feel life, to be fully alive. It’s not just safe, it’s why we’re here.

We are always feeling. What we are is feeling, experiencing, sensing. We either feel life as it is, or we feel our resistance to it. There is no way not to feel. Even numbness is a feeling.

The death I speak of, doesn’t have to be a final curtain, the ultimate healing. Death comes in many shapes and sizes. All trauma is a kind of death, the death of the innocence that came before. Life doesn’t really care how big the blow is. One magnitude of grief is not more important, more difficult, more real, than any other. Pain is pain. Grief is grief, and life is always pointing to the infinite aliveness we are, to the actuality underlying all trauma, all pain.