The Ambiguous Nature of Grief

Some of you may know that for the past 9 months, I had been embarked on and completed some studies with the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care in their Foundations in Contemplative Care program. Foundations is a transformational 9-month training for integrating spiritual practice with care. “The program has supported people from around the world in bringing a contemplative approach to care into their intrapersonal, interpersonal, and professional lives.” Something we all need more of.

More so, it has taught me personally, how to hold more deeply, a compassionate way of living for myself and also for others in my life, my care partners.

Being in community these past months has truly brought up so many different thoughts and feelings for me. Especially feelings around grief. I am no stranger to loss and sometimes I wonder if that’s what this life is about for me. About needing to learn to kindle a deeper and kinder relationship with grief and becoming better friends with it, Instead of making it my enemy.

At the end of the program we were called to present something to the cohort, our mentors and our guiding teachers, a final project expressing just how the program moved us and to share something we learned from it that deepened us as individuals. My project is about grief and its ambiguous nature. It’s about grieving not just the people or things that have physically gone from my life but more so about the losses that are still living in it, in all their weird and mysterious little ways.

So, the central theme of my project speaks to my relationship with my 16-year-old daughter, whom many of you already know. As I have watched so many small pieces of her die away as she has transitioned from childhood, into adolescence and, soon into adulthood. Reminding me, a person does not need to die in order to feel a loss.

Many of you also know, writing and photography are an umbilical cord to some of my deepest thoughts and feelings. So, what better way to express it than through that? So, I created a video using some of my poetry, prose, and photographic art to tell you the story of me and the loss of my living daughter. With love and deep gratitude…