I’ve been documenting my grief lately, not the depths because I don’t want to scare you, but just some pockets of clarity and wisdom that pour through. The truth is, grief is hard, it’s raw, vulnerable, and deeply humanizing. In many ways, it is the best and worst part of being human all wrapped into one. It is the process that reminds us of how deeply we love, how deeply we hate, how responsible we are at times, and how little control we have in others. It is deeply human, but for me, it is one of the biggest catalysts of my growth.
I have had 18 loved ones die in 2-3 years, 11 in the past year, dealt with the near death of my mother (who survived), and countless breakups and endings of versions of my life that were no longer aligned. I have witnessed the grief of others, how much we try to resist it because most Americans don’t have a ritual or process for grief, we are expected to just push along and move forward.
Grief and death are taboo subjects, I think moreso than sexuality as of late due to the cultural shifts the LGBTQ+ and Gen Z communities have made in normalizing kink, lgbtq+ relationships, and the over-talked about gender politics. There are a great many benefits to these subjects, especially as someone who was an activist for years, nearly 2 decades ago, on said subjects. One of the amazing things about being so intuitive, and moving so quickly, is that I tend to get interested in things, and decades later they become trends. This has happened with everything from Brooklyn, to upcycling, to thrifting and vintage, to veganism, sexuality and gender, digital nomadism and travel, sobriety, and now death. Not that I think death is some groundbreaking topic, considering we all experience it, but the degree to which death has become such an intimate part of my life, the discomfort it clearly brings to so many, and the judgment that arises based in misunderstanding simply because it is not the topic that most people would immediately jump to when you say you lost many friends recently; has led me to believe that we are totally underresourced when it comes to grief and death in our society. I am not sure if this is cross-cultural, I do see that more ritualistic societies have practices around grief and death, even my Jewish side has sitting shiva, where the other parts of my family don’t have those rituals, and I personally noticed the differences in my own grieving process immensley, when there was less time to grieve.
Grief and death also come in the endings of relationships, the breakup of friends, lovers, and death. It comes to remind us how little control we truly have. As an astrologist, I can tend to the ides of fate, noting the eerie connection between the vedic understanding of the planets and our personal and collective lives. However, something I am newly remembering, is the element of free will, and how it surpasses certain fates when we utliize it correctly. To do so, requires a great deal of self awareness, as true anarchy comes from radical responsibility of every word we think, a task many of us would fail at immediately.
So in that, I have chosen to process my thoughts on death and grief, and share with you all. The endings of relationships, when you realize that there are only so many vulnerable bids for connection one can make. When the truth comes out and suddenly you see it all clearly now— remember, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Not because people are frozen in time or by their deepest fears, but because without svadyaya, or self-study, those beliefs run your life— this is how vedic astrology can be so predictive, it is the map of the unconscious. So to truly be anarchist, meaning to have true freedom, requires a degree of self-responsibility where every thought that falls into the white noise of the mind becomes present, and with that we must make choices, moment by moment, and in every micro-moment in between.
When the end is near, you see yourself in those around you, or at least I do. I see the reflections of who I was when I first met them, but I feel differently now. I can love and care for them, but see that they are stuck, frozen in a moment of time, hoping to keep you there too— but we all evolve, we all change, and we only ever show some sides of ourselves to those around us, only the sides that we can see our own reflection in really. This is the true tale of Narcissus, not the pop-psychology version. But the ancient Roman/Greek tale of a man who found his reflection in a body of water while looking at some daffodils, and through getting mesmerized by his own reflection, he ends up perishing, ignoring the pleas of the forest nymph, Echo, warning him of what excess self-absorption could become.
Many of us, I would go so far as to say all of us, connect with others based on the subconscious reflection of ourselves we see in them. Perhaps this is why death and loss are so painful, because we think we lose a part of ourselves in the loss of another. Although I could kindly remind you that you always have that part of you with you, and tons of self-help books might say the same thing, but the truth is, in the perils of loss and death, is an immense suffering. The enlightened part of you might disagree, as someone whos spent years in meditation, living in ashrams, with monks etc, I can attest— we all suffer in grief, some of you just make a reframe, and let your pain squirt out unconsciously, so that it unconsciously runs your life. The suffering is a part of life, that pain is what Siddartha Gautama sat down and thought, alright how the F*** do we move through this, because this hurts and it is clearly happening inside of me. That pain cracks open our hearts, but not without ripping it open first— and if any of you are deeply sensitive like myself, you might find that the ripping feels more like a chainsaw to your nervous system.
I wish I had the answers, but the truth is, life is inherently quite painful. People are inherently violent, that is why “ahimsa” is the practice of non-violence, we must practice to master our minds, our “chitta”, we must practice to regulate ourselves, because we are also inherently loving, empathetic, and altruistic beings (All of us). The bad is often just as common as the good, but somehow, along the way, we believed in the lie that life wasn’t supposed to feel that way. That internal resistance only makes the grief even stronger, because not only do we grieve the loss, but the loss of innocence as well. However, the true growth of character comes from who we become after the grief. We are inherently changed— death changes us, whether it is the loss of the physical body or the loss of a relationship, a role, or something else.
The ancient’s have always known the death equates to transformation, hence Kali, hence the “death” card in the tarot deck, and I’m sure many other traditions have similar understandings as well. The idea of reincarnation soothes our souls that those that pass to the other side will return to us. Mediumship only works through the frequency of love, I don’t know that I have ever had contact with someone for a client that the client did not love. It is through our love that relationships stand, that lives are built. It is through the grief and transformation, by witnessing what remains and who stands beside us, that we understand that we are no longer alone.