Grief, death and reality: listener question

I wonder if you could say something on the podcast about death. I have just suddenly lost my husband - one second we were sitting chatting, the next he he had a sudden cardiac arrest and was dead before he hit the ground. So, yes I am in shock. But I am also struggling even to believe in death, let alone "understand" it. What is it? How can it be? I know you lost your father when you were younger. Please, where and how does death fit in with everything in this understanding? You said everything is a reflection of our inner reality. You won't upset me whatever you say as I truly want to know how this might work here. I am utterly stunned and bereft and feel quite unreal, but I feel a need to try and get a sense of what death and dying even is, if that doesn't sound too stupid, as it just doesn't even seem believable right now.

Mary Oliver
In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
 
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
 
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
 
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
 
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
 
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
 
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
 
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
 
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go. |