More on language changing our relationship to feelings.
Why only A- seems to be living his grief in an embodied way
CW death.
When people ask me how I’m doing I say fine. And it’s true! I am fine!! My thinking brain is doing fine.
When I’m in music therapy (I have a music therapist - not A-s) and I sing Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell I sound like a howling cat and am also crying the whole time I’m singing. And that’s also how I am. I’m not not fine though. The feeling isn’t sad or grief or anger or whatever. The feeling is Both Sides Now.
And maybe I’m fine because of language or maybe because of the way my dad died. In his control. With his choice. With the support of everyone around him.
When everyone, including him, embraced his death and wanted it to be peaceful and painless everything became beautiful. It went from isolation and fighting to ….. my mom saying we need a big party to show him how loved and support he is. To my brother making it a karaoke party because my dad made everyone feel comfortable exactly as they are and what better way to lean into discomfort than karaoke. And because my dad loves music. It went from trying to create a different outcome to playing Harry Belafonte and Roberta Flack and Hindi and Tamil and Malayalam favorites to drinking scotch and Guinness and eating the best Briyani. All in a week. To people coming over and celebrating, screaming at him, crying, bargaining, loving, dancing, eating. To the day of when 15 people sat chanting in the next room and 5 of us gathered around his bed and the funny doctor came and said “you’ll sleep, snore, and then be dead”.
And then we ate sandwiches and I told my cousin some of the funny things from that day and people grieved and ate and joyed and sat with him and sat away from him.
They say there’s no beautiful death but I think what his nurse said that morning was so right - she said my mom was giving him a gift by supporting his choice. And I think he gave us such a big gift by making this choice.
There is loss. But there was choice, power, and joy and beauty.
In some mindfulness techniques you don’t label your feelings with anything other than pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. Because, I think, to put more words on it takes you away from the feeling and into a second, third, fourth arrow.
I think it also changes your feelings.
Grief is a word that means something but also nothing. I thought I knew what it meant but I was totally wrong because I think it just means the Dirty Dancing soundtrack and Both Sides Now.
But what does this have to do with A-? We haven’t tried to teach A- to put words to his feelings (although we model mad and sad and stuff…). His relationship to language seems like poetry. And it seems like A- is the only person in our house right now who’s always living their feelings in an embodied way.