Description:

I have been deeply exploring grief for the past few years as a brother of mine took his own life at the age of 58 two years ago and then a year and a half later, my 36 year old son was poisoned with fentanyl and died suddenly last September. There is nothing you can do to prepare for these kind of losses in your life, but you can move through the grief process much easier if you are allowed to grieve in the way that best suits your personal needs and beliefs without being shamed or blamed. Our culture in America does not know how to grieve. We have not been taught how to grieve. I have spent time in India, and in Varanasi, where families have a joyous procession to the Ganges River to burn their family member on pyres and release the beloved departed’s soul to the afterlife and back into the birth-death-rebirth cycle after a short grieving process. They have been taught from birth that grieving happens in a shot period of time and they accept this as a rite of passage. In the United States, we are shamed by death. We hide our beloveds who have died, we either immediately beautify them by embalming their bodies and dress them up in their favorite outfit for the rest of the family to view or we freeze them until the crematorium can arrange for the necessary paperwork from the local appointed authorities, or after the Coroner has unceremoniously dissected their bodies to determine the cause of death, if it is unknown. This is a devastating period for the family to go through who has just lost a loved one. The mind cannot even process what has happened and then the Governmental authority is intervening in a process too gruesome to fathom. What follows after this, is the period of time that all the friends and family try to console the grieving family members, mostly without success. They don’t know the right thing to say, or what to do, even though they are well meaning, and those that are in grief, are going through a gambit of emotions that they themselves with d