Innovations in End-of-Life Care
an international journal of leaders in end-of-life care

[Citation: Browning, D. Saying goodbye, saying hello: A grief sojourn. Innovations in End-of-Life Care, 2001;3(3), www.edc.org/lastacts]

Saying Goodbye, Saying Hello: A Grief Sojourn

David Browning, LICSW, BCD

You say goodbye and I say hello
Hello hello
I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello
Hello hello
I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello.¹

Like many of my generation, I lived my adolescence with a constant stream of Beatles' lyrics flowing through my consciousness. Many years later, this simple goodbye/hello refrain took on real existential bite. But I have gotten ahead of myself. This is the story of my expedition through grief, my own bereavement narrative.

When I was thirteen, busy learning about girls and how to be my own person, my mother lay in the bedroom of our house, dying of lung cancer. She died the gradual death familiar to families in which cancer has paid a visit. There was something cruelly ironic about having to reconcile the experience of living with a decaying Mom while my own body was exploding with teenage desire. I was bursting into view, and she was fading.

There was no room for grief in a household of three boys and a father who, in his own encounter with grief, set the best example he knew: you pull yourself together; you get on with life. I remember little in the way of emotion or consolation, but I do remember the numbness. My mind remembers the numbness; my body remembers the numbness. The physical and emotional memory I carry of the months following the death is one of floating in a cloud of gray gauze: alone, desolate, but fully cushioned from pain.

Fast forward twelve years. I am living on my own, working, socializing, but not really enjoying life. I know something is wrong, but I'm not exactly sure what it is. I contact a therapist, an older man who is known to have a gentle and thoughtful nature. The numbness I had come to know so well gives way to a deep mine of emotions. My new escort conveys with his warmth and presence that he will suffer with me whatever pain is unearthed. As the excavation proceeds, I struggle to re-establish what had been a long-interrupted communication with my Mom. The conversation commences with fury. I write the following on May 9, 1977, my twenty-fifth birthday.

My therapist provided a loving, paternal space in which to discover the many painful parts of myself that had been sequestered outside my consciousness. I began to learn how central the pain was to my identity, yet how marginally I understood it. I also learned the professional language of the day: "grief work," "working through," "closure," "saying good-bye," and "moving on." I learned that grief was a process that one goes through, with a beginning, an end, and stages in between. I gleaned from all of this that my therapeutic assignment was essentially to remember my Mom, feel the pain, say goodbye to her, and move on with my life.

But there was a problem. Not with the remembering part, or the pain part, those parts came along well. It was the notion of saying goodbye that I had trouble with. In the process of connecting to my pain, I felt alive in ways I hadn't experienced in many years. The grief affirmed for me the love I had for Mom. However painful it was, it was simultaneously immensely reassuring and liberating,

Fast forward ten years. I enter counseling for a second time, again with a male therapist, but one that is closer to me in age than the first. By this point I am married, the father of two young daughters, newly graduated from social work school, and engaged in my own practice of psychotherapy. Grief has become a familiar part of my emotional landscape. One looming aspect of the grief is a well of guilt that I do not fully understand. I have a nightmare that I am driving a car, my daughter in the backseat fastened in her seatbelt. I lose control of the car and we are heading for a cliff. I reach frantically for my daughter, but can't save her.

In the midst of the guilt and the distance, I struggle to find a stronger connection to Mom. I keep a journal of personal reflections; sometimes I write letters to her. It dawns on me one day that if I want more of a relationship, I might need to generate some correspondence in return.

Dear David,

I want you to forgive yourself for any wrongs you think you have done. I want you to love again, with all your heart. I want you to feel safe and strong in keeping your heart open as much as you can. I tried to be the best I could in my life, and that meant first, accepting my pain and second, finding the inspiration and support to live through it and beyond it.

By staying away from your grief, you have moved so far from your experience, from living life to its fullest. Open your heart, and I will be with you always. Close your heart, and you will lose your connection to me. I have given you the gift of love. In your grief is that love, and in loving is that grief. But your sorrow is a road that takes you to your joy, and it is a road that welcomes you.

To be on this road, you must give some things up. Foremost, you must give up your guilt, because it is guilt that keeps us apart, and that distances you from all that you love. It keeps you out of the world and inside yourself. You must choose to let go of all the guilt in the interest of life. You are strong enough to face your life without guilt, and to look life square in the eyes and say, "I belong here."

Make better friends with the pain that washes over you when you allow our connection to be. The greater the friendship you can make with your pain, the more natural will be your connection to your own loving nature. Then I will become an emblem for you of love and life, rather than of distance and death.

And remember, I am here when you need me.

Love,
Mom

My therapist helped me to understand how my grief was holding me emotionally in the past, and preventing me from investing myself fully in the present. He helped me to see how my emotional makeup was keeping me detached from the relationships that meant the most to me. I learned that I had internalized a deep sense of guilt from the events surrounding my mother's death, and that I feared on an unconscious level that I could not prevent disaster from occurring to the people I loved. The grief had become my avenue to feeling more alive and connected, yet it was keeping me detached from the circle of people who loved me. It seemed it should be time to "move beyond" the grief. It seemed it must be time for "closure." It seemed to make sense. Nevertheless, I resisted.

Fast forward seven years. My oldest daughter is entering adolescence; my wife and I are inching towards midlife. I am busy counselling, teaching, and consulting in the bereavement field. I am beginning to see my grief as an eminent and powerful visitor, but one who has outstayed his welcome. I contact the therapist I had seen seventeen years prior, and agree to a predetermined number of sessions to work on the specific goal of setting loose this grief that has been such a familiar companion. The therapy is organized around designing, implementing, and processing a ritual involving "letting go."

I carry out the four stages of the ritual over several weeks. First, I write on a piece of paper a list of the many ways that my grief is holding me back in my life, and make a commitment to let it go. Second, I burn the paper. Third, I spread the ashes in the ocean, at a spot that has special emotional meaning for me. Fourth, I find a picture of my Mom and myself, have it enlarged and framed, and set it out in a prominent place in our home. (Prior to this, I did not have any photos of the two of us that were displayed in the open for others to see.) Afterwards, I write:

This third therapy experience helped me to integrate and make meaning of my mother's death at a new level. Inherent in the ritual was an insight that, until that point, had eluded me. By spreading the ashes, I was not "saying goodbye" to Mom; nor was I "reaching closure" in my connection to her. I was making a commitment to no longer be defined by my grief. I was choosing to let go of the pain the best I could, and in so doing to change the shape and texture of the continuing bond with my Mom. In deciding to let go of my grief, I was creating the space for deeper relationships with all the people I love, including my Mom.

There was a pivotal Moment in the last therapy experience, one of those "a-ha!" events that sometimes occur when good psychotherapy is working its magic. At the time this happened I was forty-five, the same age as Mom when she died; my older daughter was thirteen, the age I was when Mom died. We were discussing the days surrounding the death, when a memory came to me that I had previously kept from consciousness. I recalled the occasion, soon before she died, when my Mom stopped talking to my brothers, Dad, and me, and turned her back to face the wall. (I have since learned that this is not an unusual happening. A dying person will often need to detach from loved ones shortly before death, perhaps to summon energy for their next passage.) Four thoughts/feelings occurred almost simultaneously. First, I remembered the anguish I felt when my Mom turned away from us; second, I imagined how my daughter would feel if I were dying, and turning away; third, I imagined how it would be for me to be in that situation with my daughter; and fourth, I imagined how my Mom must have felt, leaving three teenage sons and a husband.

I was overwhelmed with compassion for Mom. It was the first time in thirty years that I was able to set my own grief aside and empathize with hers. It was the first time that loving her could take precedence over my personal experience with grief. It was the point when the frozen bond began to thaw.

What does it mean to love someone after they die? Grief is a reflection of love, but the love I was feeling was a boy's love for his mother. The bond I was hanging on to was a boy's bond with his mother. Mature love is different than a child's love. Mature love requires that you set your own needs aside in caring for another. That day in my therapist's office, I shared for the first time in my mother's pain. The bond that had been so fixed and frail began to feel less clingy, more reciprocal, more flexible, more grownup.

Looking back, I see that learning to grieve was a vital, liberating and cathartic process for me. I was able to connect to life and to my own feelings in whole new ways. When I was grieving, I was feeling the boy's love, and I was feeling alive. Grieving was my avenue to living again. Over time, however, it became clear that the very process that had been fundamental to my growth had become an obstacle to further growth. To connect to myself, I had learned to hold tightly to my grief. To connect to life and to others, I had to learn how to let it go. Grief had become familiar terrain, reliable territory. To let it go meant to move into life as it is, with all its uncertainty and unpredictability, as well as its joy.

In retrospect, I believe concepts like "saying goodbye", "finding closure" and "moving on" became stumbling blocks. All the knowledge I garnered from therapy, from the culture, and from my own professional training, made me feel that "successful" grieving required me to say goodbye to Mom. I knew I needed to say goodbye in one sense, but in a more important sense, what I needed most was help in saying hello. Rather than severing a bond that was frail to begin with, I needed permission to nurture, strengthen, and deepen the connection to my mother. I needed support in constructing a richer and more flexible image of my Mom that could evolve over time, so that the bond could mature accordingly. When I was finally capable of empathizing with my Mom's pain, it became clear that the bond could be transformed. When I could say goodbye to my grief without saying goodbye to Mom, I was free to love more fully in the present.

It is in this context that the Beatles' lyrics take on their special meaning. The hello is much more robust and expansive than the goodbye. I say goodbye to the dominion of grief in my life. I say hello to my friends, my loved ones, and the infinite possibilities. And I say hello, in a new and tender way, to Mom.