There really is no such thing as closure, like you’re just closing up shop and done with ever thinking about the person, dog, or other beloved.
And at the same time, it does change – not just through time, but through mourning. There is a sense of peace that comes from fully accepting that the past is not changeable from where we sit. What is changeable is how we access the past, how we think about it now, and what we learn from the experience, and how it’s integrated into our current existence.
When you lose a loved one, there is still a relationship, it’s just a radically different one. Whether you believe the other being still interacts with you or not is your own spiritual belief. But there continues to be a sort of interaction with them in your own mind, ways you think about them. We will talk about ancestors in the grief ritual, whether you consider them to be still present some way or just woven into the fibers of your heart. Grief is an offering to those ancestors and also to ourselves.
Here’s a practice that that helped me a lot with my husband Brice’s death in 2018. It met my need to process the grief and also to continue to get emotional support from our relationship. When he first passed, I did this a lot. Now it’s very infrequent, but still helpful.
When I have a question of what to do, especially one related to him, I write a letter. I have a notebook just for those letters. I spell out my issue and I end with a question for him. I sign it. Then I clear my head and write a letter back from him to me, answering the question. I try to write quickly and not overthink it.
Do I believe it’s really him? Not necessarily, but I’m not ruling it out; my spirituality is still evolving. Whatever is happening on a more-than-human realm, it’s also a way to tap into my own wisdom.
Our minds develop a ‘construct’ of other people, “what would so and so do in this situation?” So I have this construct of him in my mind and I have ideas of how he might respond to the current situation. The letter exchange allows me to basically project my highest self onto this construct of him, so I can pull out my own truths from what I write. Or maybe he’s helping from the spirit world. Or both.
It’s a technique that I borrowed from the book “Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia,” where she gets inspiration writing letters back and forth to “God.”
One thing that I found extremely helpful from reading the Grief Recovery Handbook (and the live in-person course I took along with it) is the idea of writing a letter to the person in a specific way. So in addition to the letter exchange, I also wrote a few letters using their structure. The letter starts off with my apologies (for whatever I regret), then things I forgive (events, behaviors that I accept as having happened), and then anything left unsaid – any remaining significant emotional statements that we wish we had told our beloved. The letter concludes with goodbye.
Then, and this is the important bit, the letter gets read to a living person, a person who knows how to be a Heart with Ears (see the previous section on Mindful Listening). I think having someone who is alive to witness the words is really important. It can be in person or in Zoom.
Even though it’s not the actual person, something about the process helps us feel heard, and the coulda-woulda-shoulda statements can be put to rest. I had people do this as part of a funeral ceremony for my husband and I think it was really helpful.
At the one-year anniversary of his death, I wrote a second letter and read it, along with the first letter, to a couple of different friends. Reading the letters, especially more than once, smoothed out some of the more painful pieces and has helped me more easily accept the finality of his death. Because a real human was listening, something in my brain felt like the discussions we needed to have had happened, that I had been forgiven, had forgiven him, and expressed all of the love I have for him. It helped me move on from rehashing things and just enjoy having him live on in my heart.
The Grief Recovery book points out that we can do this with people who are still alive, too. We often have many things that we grieve with our parents or other people among the living. They warn against reading the full letter to them directly, however, because it might just bring up conflict. So still they had us read the letters to neutral parties. I imagine SOME of the items from the letters could also be brought up using Compassionate/Nonviolent Communication.
I also worked through this process when my father was passing away, using the 3 items for the letters as a way to know that I was saying what needed saying. I gently told him all the things I forgave him for, wanted to apologize for, and whatever else needed saying. Without enmity, but also without needing to hide any of my truths. Some of it I said to him while he was still responsive. Others didn’t feel safe until he was very close to transitioning.
It’s important to keep talking about or otherwise expressing your grief and truly feel the feels*. If you get a chance to cry, that’s a good thing. The more you feel it, the more grief can work through you and on you. In doing so, you allow the relationship with your loved one to update, and the current reality to become accepted, so love can freely flow again.
*That’s what community grief ritual is for, a somatic, full-on emotional experience of crying, raging, keening, or being numb, whatever happens for you. I recommend finding one near you. The monthly grief experiences in Zoom are Stellar Village are also quite helpful. We usually meet on fourth Saturdays, 10 to noon. Join the Village to attend.