My Journey With Grief

I’ve been fairly well acquainted with being a griever during my life. It started with a phone call from my mom during my freshman year of college to tell me my father had developed a brain tumor. We watched him deteriorate over the following year while enduring radiation, a little chemo and surgery. He died young, just 44 years old. I was the second oldest of eight children, six of them still at home as dependents. My mom was immediately consumed with learning to make a living and raising the younger children alone. My Dad had a big, dynamic personality in my world, so there was a black hole felt in my life on many levels. It felt like a dismantling of the family to me. I wandered on through college, fairly depressed and married a couple years later, happy to have found love and to be starting a new life.

Shortly after my marriage, while both my husband and I were in graduate school together, we received another unthinkable phone call. My brother Spencer had disappeared and was discovered dead at the bottom of a cliff after going out hiking alone late in the day in an unfamiliar canyon. He was just 21 years old, newly in love and had just embarked on his dream to attend violin-making school. We suspect he was affected while climbing by a heart murmer he had. I felt so heartbroken that there was so much he was never to experience in life. I struggled through my 2nd year of grad school and went on as best as I knew how.

Ten years later my youngest brother Drew died from an undetected heart condition while living with me, my husband and three daughters in 2006. I can’t even explain how shocked I was to be facing death again. It was just a few days shy of his 24th birthday and he was preparing to go to graduate school in environmental sciences. In a way I felt like a 2nd mother to Drew due to the gap in our ages and nature of our relationship. Each morning when I woke up and re-remembered he was gone, my heart just sank in my chest.

They were all deep losses in my life but there was a teaching I saw clearly in my experience with Drew’s death that I did not see or embrace with the others. His death became a catalyst for waking me up to living life fully, with purpose. I had already recognized that my life was not what I wanted before he died. I had taken up a new spiritual path by leaving my traditional religious upbringing. I quit my job after building a 10-year career in the corporate world and I went back to school to study Spiritual Psychology. So it wasn’t as if I wasn’t trying. Nevertheless, somewhere in the deep grief I felt over his death and all that I wished had been different between us or what I’d wished we’d had more of — I felt this recognition that I was not being fully true to myself.

Someday, my life was going to end, perhaps even abruptly like Drew’s, and I knew I had not yet released all my fears and given life my greatest dreams and passions. Life was still passing me by in a reduced form of what it could be. This recognition turned out to be a gift, a huge one. It was the beginning of truly acknowledging that I was the only one that was responsible, and I was the only one in the way. But, that is the beautiful thing about taking full responsibility for your life – it means you can change it.