Ages of

Grief

This morning I woke up with the theme song to Growing Pains in my head.

As long as we got each other
We got the world spinnin' right in our hands
Baby, you and me
We gotta be
The luckiest dreamers who never quit dreamin'

It followed a dream I endured (enjoyed?) in which I was going through a number of confusing and stressful scenarios which reminded me a lot of previous times in my life.

This psychic replay seemed to be participating in a larger shift in emotion and thought which I’ve been undergoing over the past year.

Grief is one of those hard emotions I’ve really been confronting lately.

There are the intimate relationships — those are on me.

While I can rationalize what happened, and accept their fate while also being honestly accountable for my own fault (let’s face it, they’re gone because I ended them of my own accord and by my own behavior), but that doesn’t change the fact that I still feel their absence shrouded by an aura of remorse, regret, and a strong amount of longing.

What pangs most about these losses is learning how to live alone. I’ve been working on that for five years now, so it in itself is not a terrible problem. The downshift from having a certain person to whom I can talk to daily, with whom I can share meals, experiences and travel, someone who I know and who knows me uniquely — intimacy — has been a great challenge, and an adjustment I’m now being called to enact in other relationships across a field of people in my life, including strangers.

(I’ve always been in therapy, so set that aside.)

And there are the people — grandparents, and a young cousin — who succumbed to mortality, leaving not only an absence in personality, but also a vacuum in the extended family, changing the very social structure in which I was a member.

There have also been divorces which substantially changed the structure.

There are larger social structures which have greatly changed. I’m not going to get into that very much here — but let’s suffice to say that the world itself is greatly different that it was as recently as 2006.

This morning, though, I’m more precisely concerned about the loss of my youth — a fact strongly expressed in my dreams last night.

In a few months, I’ll be turning 45, the first birthday I’ve felt significantly about since I turned 30.

In some ways this fact is simply baffling — how did it get here so quickly? But the more pressing questions are also more difficult to discern.

One can be called the “What Now?” question. I published a book of poetry at 28. Goal: Check. Older goals, like touring the country either solo or with a rock band are no longer on the table. I’m simply no longer interested in them.

Graduating college: Check. Getting Master’s Degree: Check.

Some time ago I reached all of these pinnacles. And, for all of my grief about the loss of the relationships, I still had them, still enjoyed them, still remember them fondly.

Fall in love: Check.

See Paris, New York, and San Francisco. I didn’t even know that these were goals going in but check, check, check.

So a lot of what I’m grieving is the loss of having a calling, of having direction, of having the proverbial reason for Being.

This stage, honestly, is my age of payback. Not in the sense of revenge, but in the sense of getting squared up on my debts — figuratively and literally.

My calling now is more mysterious and more difficult to discern.

It perhaps isn’t surprising that a life full of spiritual seeking has yielded for me a life of more persistent and fruitful faith.

This morning I prayed the version of the Jesus prayer that’s often said during recitation of the Rosary: “lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy.”

I used to put myself in that “most in need of” category — I was always struggling to stop drinking, to thwart suicidal tendencies, to try to avoid some pending homelessness, what have you.

But today, I realized I’m past all that. And I prayed for those who are truly suffering, some with the same things I once struggled with.

Because I’m not suffering in any substantial way. That’s not to say I’m not struggling, that I don’t need help, that “I’ve got this” or any of that.

Just that my perspective has shifted more outwardly.

Which is perhaps another log I added to the fire of the years past — my insufferable focus on myself and my own experience.

“In order to be seen you must learn to see,” Seth Godin wisely writes.

So, as I grieve the losses of time past, I am treated to the opportunity to open to smaller, and more significant experiences shared with others, and I challenge myself to Be in this more fruitful and, frankly, psychedelic world (psyche: soul, delic: to make visible, clear).

I can’t really do that without being compassionate for myself and recognizing that, yes, I am truly giving something up.

But this sacrifice is in honor of a greater Good, and Beauty and the Truth are the beacons by whose light a new world is being revealed.

May I be steadfast in my progress, and as I share, may I be of some beneficence to you.

Ardently,

Aaron