‘I hate him so much it hurts’

This was a headline in my local paper some years ago. It was a quote from a mother whose son had been killed by a hit and run driver (male). Whenever I think about this, I still remember the thought that ran through my mind at the time.: “It’s the other way round!”

Here was a mother hurting so much at the loss of her son, almost certainly experiencing rage and upset at the injustice of life or whoever, taking a loved one from (her) life before his time, feeling fury at the thoughtlessness & carelessness of the driver. It was, without doubt, a truly deep wound.
Yet what she was experiencing were none of these feelings, or not that we’d know from the quote. She didn’t seem able to feel the dreadful, awful pain of loss but instead sought to vilify the driver with her hate and possibly her desire for revenge.

How must those people in Christchurch be feeling today or the friends and relatives of the latest Boeing 737 Max crash and those left alive after the cyclone in Mozambique?
Loss, grief and grieving are a natural part of life but it’s that part that we’re rarely keen to talk or even think about: death.
In some ways, it’s always seemed strange to me not to consider it as it’s the one certainty in life: that at some point our life will come to an end and it’s not entirely our choice about when that happens. Maybe it’s never our choice at all, we just like to think it is.
One way to acknowledge loss and grief is to pull out ritual and ceremony from the past when the more natural elements of life, including death, were celebrated and honoured. Like this:

A typical comment about this topic is that it’s a morbid subject and most people don’t want to think or talk about it. To me, the risk with that attitude is that any avoidance of a subject is likely to ensure it lurks below the surface, emerges when we least expect it or when it’s too late because death has come to make its inevitable claim.
So shall we live in dread and fear, waiting for the inevitable? Or shall we take African shaman Malidoma Some’s advice?
‘When Death comes knocking, better make sure you’re alive!’