I want to venture down a slightly different path of dementia care. Along this path of dementia, mutual recognition remains the lynchpin of care for ourselves and others in a way that empowers us to transform our lives for the better. This means recognition we journey along this path with more ease and joy when we clearly perceive who we are and who journeys with us. And as important as it is to imagine our path as going somewhere, we aim in a direction as we care for ourselves and others, it is just as important to realize that we are really approaching our path and our journey with a greater emphasis on being where we are at any given moment. We accept our current conditions as perhaps the most important step of this spiritual path of the caregiver.
A critical resource for accepting our current conditions is understanding grief. I recently had the opportunity to learn more about the work of Alan Wolfelt, and I realized the immense power of his framework to organize how working with grief might be structured. Wolfelt describes grief as a unique process for each person in terms of ten touchstones, which he explains in great detail. His framework is not based in mindfulness practice per se, but it is very friendly to the fourfold way that my Chan teacher Guo Gu talks about mindfulness practice. Mindfulness exposes experiencing in the body, provides the basis for embracing this experiencing, allows one to work through and let go of feelings, and then invites us to transform experience.
Wolfelt indicates in touchstone four entitled, “Explore Your Feelings of Loss,” that, “as strange as your emotions might seem, they are a true expression of where you are in your grief journey at any give moment.” That is to say, your feelings are the information your body is providing your mind, speaking through your heart, about what you need and have to express about the griefs you face. This means that we need to expose these feelings for what they are, have clarity about what they are and what we might do with them, and then allow them to have a shaping influence on our considered actions. Mindfulness emphasizes that we can claim our power to choose how to respond to emotions once we become aware of them and how the relate to our social conditions. This is the heart of mutual recognition, clearly identifying how we feel as an expression of who we are and using this to create a world of meaning in a vulnerable and courageous way.
In the reflections that follow, I will be referring to Wolfelt’s work and putting it into dialogue with other authors who write about grief and mourning. As always, I will be drawing on my own personal experience working in the hospice setting to integrate the concepts and practices these authors mention with my own story and my unique expressions of grief. My hope is that by sharing my story, we can all begin sharing in ways that express our unique grief stories and highlight and appreciate the diversity of varieties of grief and mourning. And this will create a more compassionate and loving world, a world based in the ethic of responsibility and love.
The photo above is a place where I go to physically walk out my grief. I have found a natural space in the last four homes I have had to walk in nature and reflect on my feelings and sensations in my body. In this place, I create a sense of reverence and awe, and I use these feelings to open me up to the bitterness, sorrow, anger, fear, nostalgia, and heartache of my loss. The most intense loss that I have had relates to my divorce, which makes having the kind of relationship I want with my children harder. I miss them when they are at their mother’s house, and I feel a sense of regret and pain that will likely never completely diminish. I can learn to savor these feelings as an expression of what I most value and lean into using even the painful feelings for good purposes. That is how we create safe spaces (physical spaces and even more importantly metaphorical spaces) where we can expose, embrace, work through, and transform our grief by properly mourning it.
