By Celebrant Steve Game-Blackmoor.
Steve is an Award-Winning Funeral Celebrant and Grief Specialist, a Blogger and Spiritual Advisor working in Staffordshire and the Midlands.
Recently suffering a bereavement, he writes:
After losing someone we love, grief can hit us with a full force almost immediately and make us feel very confused and deeply sad. Its grip can be sometimes overwhelming. Over time these feelings tend to become less intense, and people find a way to live with their loss. Most people find solace in the compassion and empathy of family and friends and those who have experienced similar emotions – I suppose they offer some reassurance that we’re not journeying alone.
Much of the pain we feel when grieving, results from pent-up feelings and emotions that we struggle to articulate; often because we’re feeling too upset to get the words out or fear exposing our vulnerability.
Writing poetry helps me be open and honest about how I’m feeling, and it gives expression to my inner voice. Using pen and paper can be the first step to genuinely expressing ourselves in our grief.
It is a known fact that by acknowledging our innermost thoughts, we allow ourselves to be true to ourselves and so, in turn, help boost our self-esteem. I have found that the best poetry is composed when we are deeply absorbed in our emotions and find it difficult to gain clarity. In so doing, we engage in a cathartic release of emotions, which may enable us to move forward in our grief.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– W.H. Auden
The use of poetry continues to grow as a recognised form of therapy within the medical profession. Increasingly, psychotherapists across the UK use poetry therapy as part of their practice. The Poetry Practice, overseen by Victoria Field, who works as a writer and poetry therapist (https://thepoetrypractice.co.uk/) offers courses, training, and consultancy in writing to promote health and wellbeing.
After recently losing my father, I found writing and reading poetry immensely helpful. As someone who professionally attempts to express the loss of others, I was taken aback by how incredibly ill-prepared I was to describe and find clarity in my own. By reading the innermost thoughts of others and by attempting to give expression to my own by putting pen to paper, I eventually found clarity amidst the murk and obscurity of my grief. I discovered that my father was not there, but here…
Keep Close
Dad?
Have you really gone?
The pictures are still rich and vibrant you see –
And in the warmth of my memories,
I can still sense you all around me.
I can hear you.
Your words of wisdom.
I can still see your gifts every time I close my eyes.
You must be living in the ever new.
Close by, where no-one really ever dies.
Fasten yourself to my heart…and breathe.
Live here, not there.
In this all-pervading space we share,
I can still hear your heart beating here,
I can feel it.
Live on in me and me in you.
Nothing need alter.
Everything can stay exactly as it was.
No ending or passing falter.
Keep close.
Keep warm.
Live on.
Something I wrote a couple of days after losing dad. Allow me to explain it.
I felt an overwhelming feeling of ‘disbelief’ and an urge to ‘hold on’ at the time. I looked for every potential sign that some essence of dad remained. Perhaps it was all a bad dream, but of course, the lurid early morning memories brought the reality home. In the stillness – I heard the archenemy called ‘Death’ prevail, but the signs were there, nevertheless.
Through poetry, I found a little solace in the realisation that love doesn’t die, and that love is a unique space owned by only those who participate; an expanse where not even death can separate us. In our culture, ‘love’ is understood to be just a feeling. Love is something that happens to us – or as Elvis Presley would have us believe, we ‘can’t help falling in love,’ or out of it. Our culture would have us believe that love is a feeling over which we have little control. Dad would disagree.
You see, Dad was not an emotional person at all. He demonstrated his love through his generosity and in his own unique and practical ways.
St. Thomas Aquinas defined this kind of love as “seeking the good of the other.” In his philosophy, feelings and emotions were secondary to the human will. Dad would agree. In other words, “love is a choice, and true love is a conscious, deliberate choice to make a gift of ourselves to another.” In this kind of love, we voluntarily choose to give ourselves to each other, thus creating a space of its own between the lover and the beloved, and this space is vast and timeless. Nothing can touch it. It’s unique, and it’s special, and it’s ever so close.
As the poet Henry Scott Holland suggests, ‘there is absolute and unbroken continuity’ between life and death, and he reassures us that in the end, ‘all is well.’
I encourage you to find your signs. They will be there.
My sign was in the giving. And the gifts were for me to keep.
